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Authors: Dinesh D'Souza

BOOK: The Roots of Obama's Rage
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Which countries? Mainly they were America’s friends and allies. Conspicuously absent at the summit were North Korea and Iran, the former country in possession of nuclear weapons, the latter energetically engaged in the process of acquiring them. Obama didn’t seem concerned by their absence, and White House officials were even quoted saying they didn’t want the issues of North Korea and Iran to “distract” from what was being accomplished at the summit. Obama treated the world to his impressive vision of how wonderful it would be if we could be rid of nuclear weapons, and then everyone went home.
Predictably, conservative columnists lambasted Obama, with Mark Steyn calling the president “dangerously delusional.” Steyn asked his readers to imagine Britain convening a disarmament conference in 1938 and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia, and Thailand—but not even mentioning Germany or Japan. How likely would it be that then Germany or Japan, wowed by all the allied declarations of arms reductions, would agree to stop their own buildups? Charles Krauthammer, perhaps Obama’s most trenchant critic, seconded these sentiments. Krauthammer scoffed at the U.S.-Russia deal and pointed out that “the number of warheads in Russia’s aging and decaying nuclear stockpile is an irrelevancy now that the existential U.S.-Soviet struggle is over.” Krauthammer also noted that nuclear weapons are not in themselves dangerous; what’s dangerous is when they are in the hands of the bad guys. In this case, the bad guys had gotten off scot free. “The very notion that Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will suddenly abjure nukes because of yet another U.S.-Russian treaty is comical.”
25
This criticism was cogent enough when you consider its underlying assumption about Obama: that his goal was to discourage North Korea from expanding its nuclear arsenal and Iran from building one. If this was indeed Obama’s objective, then the critics are right—the man is an idiot! But here is where our anti-colonial hypothesis pays huge dividends. In fact, it shows that the joke is really on Obama’s critics. Let’s shift the underlying assumption and replace it with this one: Obama’s goal is not to discourage Iran or North Korea but rather to limit the nuclear capability of the United States and its allies. Consider the possibility that Obama views America as the neocolonial titan in the world and its allies as support structures for Pax Americana. Now the summit can be viewed as an ingenious and completely successful effort to reduce American power in the world. In fact, the outcome is all the more brilliant because Obama was able to achieve this while posing as the champion of the worldwide eradication of nuclear weapons, thus enhancing his reputation as a Global Peacemaker.
So let’s see where we are at this point. We have a powerful model—the anti-colonial model—that seems to make sense of many of Obama’s actions. Other theories work like hammers: they have to beat away at Obama’s statements and actions in order to fit them to some preconceived theory. This theory is not preconceived, but supplied to us by Obama himself. And it works like a nifty screwdriver that, with just a little effort and application, immediately gets the job done.
I now want to proceed in two stages: first, to examine how that anti-colonial ideology developed in Obama’s life and mind; and second, to apply it in greater detail to Obama’s policies. I intend to tell the remarkable story of Obama’s life, showing at each stage how his ideas formed, how they progressed into a cohesive ideology, how the ideology found an effective implementation strategy, and finally how that strategy brought Obama into the Oval Office. After that, I intend to systematically examine Obama’s key policies, both domestic and foreign, to expose what this man is doing to America. It’s a riveting story, and told in a way you haven’t heard before, but if you care about America’s prosperity and security, I might as well forewarn you. Be very afraid.
CHAPTER 4
 
THE OUTSIDER
 
O
n March 4, 2007, while campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president, Barack Obama stood in the pulpit of Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, Alabama, and staked his claim to the civil rights heritage. “Don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama!” he chanted, as the crowd went wild. “Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama.”
Home? In fact, Obama was raised in Hawaii. Everyone knew that, so he had to make the connection. “Something happened back here in Selma, Alabama. Something happened in Birmingham that sent out what Bobby Kennedy called ripples of hope all around the world. Something happened when a bunch of women decided they were going to walk instead of ride the bus after a long day of doing someone else’s laundry, looking after someone else’s children. When men who had Ph.D.s decided that’s enough and we’re going to stand up for our dignity. That sent a shout across oceans so that my grandfather began to imagine something different for his son.”
Actually Obama’s grandfather had no such imaginings; there is no indication that he had even heard of the American civil rights movement. Obama’s father had studied in a missionary school and was working as a clerk in Nairobi. He was encouraged to come to America for further study by two missionary women, Helen Roberts and Elizabeth Mooney, who were living at the time in Kenya. In Obama’s Selma narrative, this was made possible by the Kennedy family. “What happened in Selma, Alabama, and Birmingham also, stirred the conscience of the nation. It worried folks in the White House,” he said. “The Kennedys decided we’re going to do an airlift. We’re going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is. This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country.” Soon after that Obama got married and “Barack Obama Jr. was born.... So I’m here because somebody marched. I’m here because you all sacrificed for me.”
Except that the Kennedys had nothing to do with Obama’s father coming to America. As Obama’s staff eventually acknowledged, Obama Sr. arrived here in 1959. John F. Kennedy was elected president the following year.
1
The two American teachers who had encouraged Obama Sr. to make the trip paid his travel costs and the bulk of his expenses. There was an airlift, organized by the Kenyan labor leader Tom Mboya with financial support from a number of American philanthropists. It brought several dozen African students to America to study, but Barack Obama Sr. did not come on that plane. Rather, he came on his own and enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
2
Moreover, the march in Selma occurred in March 1965, while Obama Jr. was born in August 1961; Selma had nothing to do with the circumstances of Obama’s birth.
I do not want to make too much of these details. Obama is not the first politician to weave a narrative that is not overly inhibited by the facts. He is, as his supporters might say, after the bigger picture. It is that bigger picture that I want to contest. Obama portrays himself as an African American who shared the transforming experience of racism and then the liberating involvement in the struggles of the civil rights movement. But Hawaii, where Obama grew up, is recognized by residents and scholars of ethnicity as a kind of multiracial paradise. Interracial marriages, for instance, were socially acceptable there long before they were even legal in some states on the mainland. When Obama’s father Barack Sr. graduated from the University of Hawaii in 1962, the Honolulu
Star Bulletin
did a short profile on him. The newspaper reported that Barack Sr. “hasn’t experienced any problems himself” with discrimination; in fact, he “expresses wry amusement at the fact that Caucasians in Hawaii are occasionally on the receiving end of prejudice.”
3
His son’s Hawaii could hardly have been more idyllic; young Obama attended a prestigious private school, Punahou, which boasts a 75-acre campus with posh architecture and lush greenery. Among the distinguished graduates of Punahou are AOL founder Steve Case and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. In Obama’s time, the students at Punahou were a racial smorgasbord: Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Samoan, Portuguese, and Italian, with many combinations in between. Obama was able to skip the long waiting list and gain admission to Punahou through his maternal grandfather’s connections. This was indeed favoritism, but not of the racial kind.
While the issue of race is not a big deal in Hawaii, the issue of colonialism certainly is. I am referring here to the white European settlers who came to Hawaii, displaced the native population, and eventually dominated the political and economic life of the islands. Captain James Cook landed in Hawaii in 1779, an event that set off a hundred-year struggle for the fertile land, plentiful resources, and fabled beauty of the islands. When Queen Liliuokalani proposed a new Hawaiian constitution in 1893 that would restore the power of the Hawaiian monarchy, the planter aristocracy forced her to step down. Five years later, on July 7, 1898, U.S. president William McKinley signed a bill that authorized the annexation of Hawaii. All of this is widely talked about, even today. Remember that Hawaii became a state only two years before Obama’s birth, and resentment over the historical events that led up to that was still raw when Obama was in school.
To envision the August 12, 1898, transfer of power from the local authorities to the American mainland, let’s consider the account by Gavan Daws in his book
Shoal of Time
:
This was the ultimate dispossession.... Two American warships were at Honolulu. Detachments of marines came ashore and were met by the Hawaiian National Guard.... The senior representative of the United States... read the resolution of annexation. . . . The Hawaiian anthem, “Hawaii Ponoi,” was played for the last time as the song of an independent nation, and the Hawaiian flag was hauled down. The Stars and Stripes took its place, and the band played the Star Spangled Banner.... Hawaii was dead, but Hawaii-in-America had taken its first breath.
4
 
How did I find out about Daws’s book? I read about it in a required reading list that Obama was assigned at Punahou. According to journalists who have tracked his curriculum, Obama studied books documenting the white subjugation of native populations such as
Shoal of Time
, and also Dee Brown’s
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
, about the American Indians of the Great Plains; and
Farewell to Manzanar
, an account of Japanese American internment during World War II. I’m not sure if the course was titled “Oppression Studies,” but you get the picture.
We know that this exposure influenced Obama’s thinking. That’s because in his autobiography Obama writes:
Hawaii! To my family, newly arrived in 1959, it must have seemed as if the earth itself, weary of stampeding armies and bitter civilization, had forced up this chain of emerald rock where pioneers from across the globe could populate the land with children bronzed by the sun. The ugly conquest of the native Hawaiians through aborted treaties and crippling disease brought by the missionaries; the carving up of rich volcanic soil by American companies for sugarcane and pineapple plantations; the indenturing system that kept Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino immigrants stooped sunup to sunset in these same fields; the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war—all of this was recent history.
5
 
Yet Obama seeks to integrate these anti-colonial themes into a larger narrative of race, and he does so by conjuring in his memory various racial slights that he suffered. At one point, he reports, a tennis coach at Punahou joked with Obama that he shouldn’t touch the match schedule on the bulletin board because his color might rub off; Obama threatened to report him. Obama also recognized that there were few black heroes on his television at home and “there was nobody like me in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog.” This is pretty tame stuff. One of Obama’s fellow students, Constance Ramos, who is of Filipino background, says she didn’t even know Obama was black. “I never once thought of Barry as black. I still don’t. . . . His skin tone is just about the same as mine, and nobody would call me black.” Even the intense racial conversations that Obama reports having in school are, according to Keith Kakugawa—the student allegedly involved in those conversations—highly exaggerated. “The idea that his biggest struggle was race is bull,” Kakugawa told the
Chicago Tribune
. “His biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment.”
6
Abandonment. Obama confesses to this feeling of existential loneliness, and of being for many of his younger years a divided soul. Once again he seeks to cast the chasm in racial terms, speaking of “the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds.” This is an evocation of the black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois’ famous self-description: “One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
7
Obama wants us to believe that his loneliness and lack of place were caused by being suspended between a white world and a black world, the world of his mom and the world of his dad.
But no! There was a division, but hardly this one. The real division was between the comfortable but empty world that Obama inhabited and the dark, troubled world of the dad who caused that emptiness by being absent his whole life. This other world Obama had to recover through a persistent quest for his African father, and from a very young age his mother cultivated in him the indefatigable desire to pursue that quest. With a kind of photographic recall, Obama remembers multiple occasions where “sitting on the floor with my mother, the smell of dust and mothballs rising from the crumbling album, I would stare at my father’s likeness—the dark, laughing face, the prominent forehead and thick glasses that made him appear older than his years—and listen as the events of his life tumbled into a single narrative.”
8
Obama’s supreme struggle is how to reconcile the two worlds in order to develop a cohesive sense of identity and place.

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