Post-American Presidency (8 page)

Barack Obama appointed Peter Geithner’s son, Timothy Geithner, secretary of the Treasury.

Once in Hawaii, Obama’s radical associations continued. He went
to Sunday school at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, a highly politicized church that aligned during the 1970s with the radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—a group in which a future Obama comrade played a significant role: Bill Ayers.
¹³

FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS

In
Dreams from My Father
, Obama writes affectionately about “Frank,” whose full name he never gives.
¹⁴
During the 2008 campaign, the Obama camp acknowledged that “Frank” was poet, journalist, and activist Frank Marshall Davis.
¹⁵

Davis was yet another communist—indeed, a Communist Party member.
¹⁶
According to Gerald Horne, a contributing editor of the Communist Party, USA magazine
Political Affairs
, Davis lived in the same places as Obama and his family, but not always at the same time: he “was born in Kansas and spent a good deal of his adult life in Chicago, before decamping to Honolulu in 1948 at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson.”
¹⁷
(Robeson, of course, was another communist.) Once in Hawaii, Horne explained that Davis eventually “befriended another family—a Euro-American family—that had migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago.”
¹⁸
Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s half sister, recalled that their grandfather, Stanley Dunham, encouraged Davis and Obama to form a bond, regarding Davis as “a point of connection, a bridge if you will, to the larger African-American experience for my brother.”
¹⁹

Davis was hardly a wholesome acquaintance. He wrote a pseudonymous pornographic book,
Sex Rebel: Black
in which he stated in an introduction that “all incidents I have described have been taken
from actual experiences.” He said that “under certain circumstances I am bisexual,” as well as being a “voyeur and an exhibitionist” with an interest in “sado-masochism.” He mused: “I have often wished I had two penises to enjoy simultaneously the double—but different—sensations of oral and genital copulation.” In the book Davis describes how he and his wife bedded a thirteen-year-old girl named Anne. He portrayed this as a favor to the girl.
²⁰

And this pedophile and child rapist was an overwhelming and warmly remembered influence on the future post-American president.

But for Obama, of course, Davis was not an instructor in unconventional sexual practices. He seems to have instructed young Barack Obama in leftism and racial grievance mongering. Horne recalled that in
Dreams from My Father
, Obama “speaks warmly of an older black poet, he identifies simply as ‘Frank’ as being a decisive influence in helping him to find his present identity as an African-American, a people who have been the least anticommunist and the most left-leaning of any constituency in this nation.”
²¹

From the looks of his portrayal in
Dreams from My Father
, Frank Marshall Davis was a principal influence on the race-baiting and polarization that Barack Obama would make a centerpiece of his presidency. This is no surprise:
Dreams from My Father
is itself a political manifesto cast as a first-person narrative in order to make the ideologies of internationalism, socialism, and race hate palatable to left-leaning Americans.

OBAMA AND ISLAM

One of the most peculiar lessons of the presidential campaign of 2008 was that you could disparage someone merely by saying his name. During the campaign of 2008, to speak of Barack Obama’s Muslim
roots and ties suddenly became akin to disparaging and insulting him, and engaging in bigotry and innuendo. I had written about these links early on and for doing so was called bigot, racist, and Islamophobe.

Obama went to extraordinary measures to obfuscate his Muslim background. The more proof that bloggers like me produced, the more we were marginalized. So secretive was Obama that he refused to release his long-form birth certificate, his school records, his thesis, his school records, his passport on which he traveled as a teen… the list itself was a looming red flag.

And then suddenly, after the election, in 2009, it was no longer “racism” to point out Obama’s Muslim roots. They became a point of pride for him and a centerpiece of his outreach to the Muslim world. It was a curious turnabout, and one with important implications.

ISLAMIC LAW OR A CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC?

In 2008, Obama’s evident embarrassment over his early Muslim connections was a tacit acknowledgment of the legitimacy of many Americans’ concerns about Islam’s supremacist and violent elements. But his turnabout made clear that he had no such concerns himself, and would do little or nothing as president to address them.

Yet those concerns were of immense import. Islamic law and democracy, Islamic law and a free constitutional republic, are incompatible. Every precious freedom that is protected by the American rule of law is prohibited in Islam. And Islam traditionally allows for no competition. The influential twentieth-century Pakistani jihad theorist Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi (1903–1979) explained it forthrightly: “Islam wishes to destroy all States and Governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam regardless of the country or the Nation which rules it.”

According to Maududi, at that point Sharia law will be put in their
place: “The purpose of Islam is to set up a State on the basis of its own ideology and programme, regardless of which Nation assumes the role of the standard-bearer of Islam or the rule of which nation is undermined in the process of the establishment of an ideological Islamic State.”
²²

The First Amendment to the Constitution stipulates that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This was one of the most masterful achievements of the Founding Fathers: providing the foundation for a society in which people may differ from one another in conscience but live together as equals without one group trying to gain hegemony over the other.

This is a far cry from the 1998 statement by Omar Ahmad, the cofounder and longtime board chairman of America’s foremost Islamic pressure group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). “Islam,” said Ahmad, “isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”

After he received unwelcome publicity as a result of this statement, Ahmad denied saying it, several years after the fact. However, the original reporter, Lisa Gardiner of the
Fremont Argus
, stands by her story. Art Moore of
WorldNetDaily
asked Gardiner in December 2006 about Ahmad’s statement, and reported: “Gardiner, who now works for a non-profit group, told WND last week she’s 100-percent sure Ahmad was the speaker and that he made those statements, pointing out nobody challenged the story at the time it was published eight years ago.” In response, Ahmad snapped: “She’s lying. Absolutely, she’s lying. How could you remember something from so long ago? I don’t even remember her in the audience.” But he failed to come up with any explanation of why a reporter for an obscure local paper would fabricate such an egregious falsehood about him. What’s more,
CAIR’s spokesman, the acerbic and combative American convert Ibrahim Hooper, once said in a similar vein: “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.”
²³

In service of this aim, the international Islamic organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood, which operates in the United States under a variety of names and organizational umbrellas, describes its own mission in this country (according to a document captured in a raid and released by law enforcement in 2007) as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
²⁴

The goal of “God’s religion”—Islam—being made “victorious over other religions” was a political, not solely a religious one. The Islamic law that the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to impose was a comprehensive system covering every aspect of society—and restricting many freedoms that Americans cherished. Chief among these was the freedom of speech: while the First Amendment protects not only the freedom of religion but also the freedom of speech and of the press, Islamic law stipulates that non-Muslims are forbidden to say “something impermissible about Allah, the Prophet… or Islam.”
²⁵

In line with this, riots broke out in several Muslim countries in 2006 over cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammad that appeared in a Danish newspaper. That became the impetus for an all-out effort by the fifty-seven-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the largest voting bloc at the United Nations, to try to compel Western nations to restrict the freedom of speech when it came to Islam—including antiterror analyses that discussed the Islamic texts and teachings that jihadists used to make recruits and justify their actions among peaceful Muslims.

Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary-general of the OIC (whom Obama has since had to the White House), made it clear that he was the one dictating terms: “In confronting the Danish cartoons and the Dutch film ‘Fitna’ [a film critical of Islam made by the Dutch politician Geert Wilders], we sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed. As we speak, the official West and its public opinion are all now well-aware of the sensitivities of these issues. They have also started to look seriously into the question of freedom of expression from the perspective of its inherent responsibility, which should not be overlooked.”

The OIC’s influence is considerable. Historian Bat Ye’or explains that the OIC is “one of the largest intergovernmental organizations in the world. It encompasses 56 Muslim states plus the Palestinian Authority. Spread over four continents, it claims to speak in the name of the
Ummah
(the universal Muslim community), which numbers about 1.3 billion. The OIC’s mission is to unite all Muslims worldwide by rooting them in the Koran and the Sunnah—the core of traditional Islamic civilization and values. It aims at strengthening solidarity and cooperation among all its members, in order to protect the interests of Muslims everywhere and to galvanize the ummah into a unified body. The OIC is a unique organization—one that has no equivalent in the world. It unites the religious, economic, military, and political strength of 56 states.”

And it is a sworn enemy of the freedom of speech. “In its efforts to defend the ‘true image’ of Islam and combat its defamation,” Bat Ye’or explains, “the organization has requested the UN and the Western countries to punish ‘Islamophobia’ and blasphemy. Among the manifestations of Islamophobia, in the OIC’s view, are European opposition to illegal immigration, anti-terrorist measures, criticism of multiculturalism, and indeed any efforts to defend Western cultural and national identities.”
²⁶

The OIC had an ally in Barack Hussein Obama. As we shall see later, when he became president, Barack Obama, in a sharp departure from the policy of his predecessor, showed an eagerness not to cross those “red lines.” He even went so far as recommending criminal penalties for those who did.

Strange behavior for a man who swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States—including the freedom of speech.

Islamic law is also incompatible with the ringing words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In Islam, the idea that all are not equal, and do not share unalienable rights, arises from the sharp dichotomy between believer and unbeliever that runs through the Qur’an and the religion as a whole. A manual of Islamic law endorsed by Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, the most respected and prestigious institution in Sunni Islam (which comprises 85 to 90 percent of Muslims worldwide), elaborates a system of blood money payments in restitution for a killing—but the payments are less if the victim was a woman or a non-Muslim: “The indemnity for the death or injury of a woman is one-half the indemnity paid for a man. The indemnity paid for a Jew or Christian is one-third the indemnity paid for a Muslim. The indemnity paid for a Zoroastrian is one-fifteenth that of a Muslim.”
²⁷

Perhaps most importantly of all, the Declaration of Independence asserts that governments derive their “just powers from the consent of the governed.” By contrast, in Islamic law all authority derives from Allah alone—and accordingly, non-Muslims have no right to hold political power, at any time, in any place. The internationally influential Pakistani jihad theorist Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi explained that non-Muslims
have “absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of God’s earth nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines.” If they did this, “the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life.”

THE HUSSEIN WARS

On February 26, 2008, Bill Cunningham, a popular radio host in Cincinnati, spoke at a rally there for Republican candidate John McCain. Cunningham referred at least three times to “Barack Hussein Obama.” McCain repudiated Cunningham and his remarks even before anyone asked him to do so.
²⁸
When asked later if using Obama’s middle name was appropriate, McCain responded, “No, it is not. Any comment that is disparaging of either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama is totally inappropriate.”
²⁹