Mentors of Barack Hussein Obama

Barack Hussein Obama's Mentors

Obama Taught 'Destroy Middle Class'

By Sharon Sebastian
October 12, 2012

Barack Obama is desperate to make people believe that he really cares about "the middle class." After four years, his actions speak louder than words. Some 85% of the middle class say they are worse off today than they were ten years ago. According to the Wall Street Journal, from the time Obama took office in 2009, "The Obama years have been brutal on middle-class incomes" wiping out "$4019 in real income" for families. The report goes on to say, "The last time incomes fell this fast was during the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, and it's no coincidence that economic policies then and now are so similar. If Mr. Obama succeeds in convincing voters that he really is the tribune of the middle class, it will be the political conjurer's trick of the century."

The financial loss and burden imposed by Obama will be greater on all workers, including Black, Hispanic, Asian and White, when looming tax hikes go into effect January 2013 along with Obamacare's vast array of hidden taxes set to further rip family budgets apart. The question is -- why has the middle class been hit so hard by Obama? Is it an ideological grudge?

Obama had two doggedly radical mentors that shaped both his ideology and his current policies. One was a committed hardcore Communist and the other was renowned as a hardcore Socialist. Neither man stressed American values, but taught the opposite -- that America with its free enterprise, republic based, God-worshipping system is the enemy of the people. Frank Marshall Davis, a reported pedophile, race mongerer and strident Communist, was Obama's family friend and was recruited by Obama's grandfather to educate young Barry in the ways of the world. It was, however, Obama's educational mentor, that stressed that if "real power" is to be gained, it must be done at the expense of the American people and the economy.

The late Harvard Professor Saul Alinsky wrote that the key to weaken -- then take over America, its economy and its people -- is to "destroy the middle class." Alinsky advocated use of class and race warfare. He believed that "wealth redistribution," taking from those who work and giving it to those who don't, is the catalyst to bring down the U.S. economy and free-market capitalism. After four years in office, Obama is well on his way to doing just that. Alinsky's socialist guidebook is embedded in Obama's record of economic policies that he has visited upon all Americans and their families -- specifically the "middle class."

It should be noted that Alinsky began his book, Rules for Radicals, with a tribute to: "...the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer." Alinsky championed and sought to emulate Lucifer, otherwise known as Satan. Alinsky's game plan was to lie, cheat and steal elections in order to control the American people and bring American commerce to its knees. Excerpt from my April 2010 article: Power At Any Cost: The Training of Barack Obama:

Alinsky clearly recognized that Lucifer or Satan is also the king of deception. It is upon deception that Alinsky built his political strategy. Deception, he taught his followers, is the Trojan horse that gets you inside the gates where you can then access power and retain it by any means available -- no matter the costs to the people, the government or the nation. Again, it is upon deception that Alinsky built his political strategy. It is Alinsky's strategy that Barack Obama wrote on a blackboard and can be seen teaching to ACORN members during his days as a Chicago Community Organizer. Obama's educational-mentor Alinsky also worked as a Chicago Community Organizer before him.

It is true that Saul Alinsky preferred the teachings of Lenin, who murdered millions, to the teachings of Mao, who also murdered millions. Mao advocated obtaining power by the barrel of the gun. Lenin was more subtle by first advocating working the system and obtaining power by the vote, then using the barrel of the gun to keep it. Alinsky had no qualms about stealing the vote as a means to reach his end result -- power. For Saul Alinsky, deception is the key to everything. Say one thing, do another, even change the meanings of words. Pretend to be bi-partisan in order to get the upper hand. For Alinsky, the means don't matter -- destroy whomever or whatever gets in your way. Alinsky made it clear that what his followers want "is power."

Though Alinsky died before Obama could make it into his classroom, an Investor Business Daily editorial traces Obama's affair with Alinsky's radical ideology: "Obama first learned Alinsky's rules in the 1980s, when Alinskyite radicals with the Chicago-based Alinsky group Gamaliel Foundation recruited, hired, trained and paid [Obama] as a community organizer in South Side Chicago. ... In 1988, Obama even wrote a chapter for the book 'After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois'.... [He] traveled to Los Angeles for eight days of intense training at Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. In turn, he trained other community organizers in Alinsky agitation tactics. Obama also taught Alinsky's 'Power Analysis' methods at the University of Chicago."  Ed Blumenfeld wrote in The New American: "One of Obama's advisors during his 2008 election campaign was Peter Dreier. ... Stanley Kurtz, in Radical-in-Chief, credits Dreier with formulating the stealth plan to destroy capitalism. His plan is to gradually expand government spending until the country nears fiscal collapse. At that point, a public accustomed to entitlements will presumably turn on its capitalist masters when they propose cutbacks to restore fiscal balance."

The one Alinsky constant learned by the Obama administration is deception. Now, as the election is at hand, it attempts a full-blown cover-up from Benghazi-gate to fake unemployment stats to deflecting its own deceit by accusing its opponent of lying -- a trait that the radical Democrats and their leader have mastered exceedingly well. While professing to "care for the middle class," Obama's answer to lift the middle class out of its current slide into poverty is to deluge Americans with hidden taxes attached to Obamacare, send gasoline and fuel costs soaring by denying drilling permits and clean coal and printing a flood of devalued dollars that create inflated costs on food, clothing and American households. VP Joe Biden is right that the last four years of Obama have "buried" the middle class along with women heads-of-households as concurrent casualties. Obama has left 5.5 million women unemployed putting the poverty rate among women at 16.3% -- the highest in 17 years. In the Socialist power-play, Black-Americans are collateral damage. According to the Chicago Tribune, failed economic policies have led to the "Wiping out of gains made in the last 30 years [by Blacks], with plummets in wealth and high rates of foreclosures." Socialism spares no race, no one is exempt from its hardships.

Foretelling Obama's agenda for the middle class, Tony Adkins of Conservative-Daily reports: "The WARN Act is a federal law requiring that most employers give 60 calendar days' notice before they institute plant closings and mass layoffs. The point is to give workers some time to adapt to their upcoming unemployment by looking for another job, adjusting finances, or entering training for new skills. It's the right thing to do ... and, it's the law. But, that pesky law has a bad timing consequence for our sitting President. … [F]unding cuts signed by President Obama are about to result in an estimated two million jobs being lost; but, layoffs right before an election would be politically toxic, and Obama wants to avoid angry, laid off workers who might tend to vote for Romney. So, he has therefore instructed his Office of Management and Budget to ignore the law and WAIT to send out notices [until after the election]." Again, no race, no one, is spared from this hardship.

"Obama learned his lesson well," said David Alinsky [Saul Alinsky's son]. "I am proud to see that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing." Alinsky taught that the key to destroying the middle class is to create a failed economy that destroys private sector jobs which leads to a powerless, but growing subset of laid-off workers who become reliant on and controlled by the government. It is Alinsky's dream come to life at the destructive hands of Barack Obama, President of the United States.

Sharon Sebastian (www.DarwinsRacists.com) is an author, writer, and contributor to various forms of media including cultural and political broadcasts, print, and online websites. In addition to the heated global debate on creation vs. evolution, her second book, Darwin's Racists - Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, highlights the impact of Social Darwinism's Marxist/Socialist underpinnings on the culture, the faith and current policy out of Washington.

Look at radical roots of Obama's past
September 13, 2012

DON O’NEAL

 PANAMA CITY

 Before the 2008 election, I read both of Barack Obama’s books. His memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” mentions a man in Hawaii called only “Frank” 22 times. He is a black friend of his white grandfather, and Barry in his formative years, between 10 and 18, visits with his grandfather and on his own time as he finds Frank fascinating. No one knew who Frank was as neither Obama nor the media identified him. Obama wrote, “I was intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.”

 Frank was identified in 2010 as Frank Marshall Davis. I just read “The Communist” by Paul Kengor, Ph.D. Dr. Kengor has done extraordinary research on Frank, including newspaper articles, his FBI files and Soviet archives recently available. The information I am disclosing is taken from Dr. Kengor’s book.

 Frank was a committed Communist from the 1940s. His Communist Party USA member number was CP47544. He was editor of the Chicago Star in the 1940s and the Honolulu Record from the 1950s until the Communists went underground. Both papers were owned and financed by Communists, and fellow writers were known Communists.

 Frank was pro-Soviet, pro-Red China, anti-Truman, anti-Marshall Plan for Europe, and followed the International Communism proposals verbatim. During Cold War actions by the Soviets and Red Chinese, Frank wrote in these newspapers supporting Soviet takeover of Central and Eastern Europe, and Communist control of Korea and Vietnam. Americans were fighting and dying in Korea during this time.

 Frank was called to testify before the Senate Internal Security Committee on Dec. 5, 1956. He pleaded the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions. From his FBI file, he was retained on the Security Index, which meant he would be arrested in any direct conflict with the Soviet Union.

 President Obama had close relationships with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (pastor for 20 years) and Bill Ayers (unapologetic terrorist), both radical anti-Americans. Dr. Kengor disclosed that Obama was an ardent Marxist at Occidental College. John Drew formed a group known as the “Democratic Student Socialist Alliance.” Obama was a member. Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, Obama’s Pakistani roommate, was also a member and is an underreported friend in New York. Dr. Drew is now a professor of economics and political science at Williams College and has become a conservative.

 President Obama’s radical past has not been disclosed in the media by omission or deliberate distortions. Has Obama changed from this dishonorable past? He joined the socialist “New Party” during the 1990s while in Chicago and denied it. Let’s look at his recent appointees:

 Valerie Jarrett. Closest Obama adviser. Granddaughter of Robert Rochol Taylor, first Chicago Housing Authority Head, investigated by Congress in 1944. Daughter-in-law of Vernon Jarrett, Packinghouse Union friend of Frank’s.

 David Axelrod. Mother Myril worked for daily newspaper, PM, which included Communist writers. Mentor David Cantar edited Packinghouse Union paper, Champion, and pleaded the Fifth when called before Congress.

 Obama’s czars: Van Jones — avowed Communist; later resigned. Donald Berwick — Obamacare czar, supports British medical system, appointed during Congress recess without its support. Anita Dunn —Communications, resigned after expressing she turns to Mao. Carol Browner — Energy, member and commissioner in Socialist International, dumped. Ron Bloom — manufacturing, used Maoist words to describe his socialist plans, resigned. Cass Sunstein — Regulatory Affairs, went back to Harvard Law School after proposing need of U.S. “Progressive” Constitution. You can google “Obama czars” for the rest of them.

 Obama routinely uses “social justice” and “class warfare/envy” — old Communist terms! Obama’s record before he became president is totally undistinguished. He now has a completely undistinguished presidency.

Review: "Barack Obama and the Enemies Within"
Wednesday, 12 September 2012
by William F. Jasper

When Barack Obama burst into the national firmament in 2008, he was virtually unknown, a political phenomenon who had seemingly come out of nowhere. Most of his family background and personal history were shrouded in mystery. There were (and still are) major gaps and discrepancies in the facts regarding his birth, childhood, adolescence, formal education, foreign travel and political associations. And although Obama was running for the most powerful political office on the planet, the press corps of the mainstream media (MSM) was more obsessed with a trumped-up “scandal” concerning GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s wardrobe than, for instance, Obama’s close ties to Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. The Ayers/Dohrn connection was one of the earliest bombshells signaling that the Chicago “community organizer” seeking to occupy the White House might have some serious baggage.

But the star-struck gumshoes of the MSM were not only completely AWOL during the 2008 campaign regarding Obama’s many troubling connections to radical and subversive groups and individuals, they have continued to ignore the steadily mounting, massive evidence of Barack Obama’s lifelong love affair with collectivism and his extensive ties to some of the most notorious activists of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), the Committees of Correspondence (COC, a breakoff group of the CPUSA) the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Students for a Democratic Society (the radical SDS campus revolutionaries of the 1960s and 70s), the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), and the Weather Underground (WU). Worse yet, the corporate MSM commentariat have actively fronted for Obama, viciously attacking any investigators who dare to expose the facts concerning the ultra-left-wing background, agenda, and connections of President Obama and his mentors, appointees, advisers, and associates.

Much of the credit for breaking the media blackout on Barack Obama’s real political identity goes to Trevor Loudon of New Zealand, whose websites KeyWiki.org and Trevorloudon.com have published reams of important information on Barack Obama, key activists in his administration, and the national network of labor unions, think tanks, academics, “community organizations,” and political operations that are crucial to moving his Marxist agenda. Loudon has laboriously unearthed hundreds of documents and thousands of published stories from establishment, communist, and leftist publications to “connect the dots” demonstrating the extensive subversive web of “Progressive” activists that propelled Obama to power. He has done what legions of MSM reporters should have done, but failed to do. However, unlike many of the other “conservatives” who regularly discredit themselves and “the Right” by attacking Obama on talk radio and the blogosphere with insults, invective and profanity-laced bombast, and unsubstantiated charges, Loudon restricts his commentary to facts, solid analysis, logical inference and hard-hitting, but civil, discourse.

Much of this hard-hitting investigative research of the past four years has been compiled into Loudon’s book, Barack Obama and the Enemies Within, a massive 664-page tome that is jam-packed with information every voter needs to know. Obviously, within the confines of this short review, we can barely skim a tiny portion of the evidence Loudon has assembled. The book is well footnoted, indexed, and copiously illustrated with photographs and reproductions of documents, many of which are reproduced in greater detail at KeyWiki.org and Trevorloudon.com. We should note that this is not everyday leisure reading for the typical couch potato. It is a compilation of research pieces Loudon has written over the past several years and is super-dense with names and groups most Americans are not (but should be) familiar with. Which means it will require a bit more mental exertion than reading a novella or watching Dancing With The Stars.

Overwhelming evidence

Where to begin in such a target-rich environment? Frank Marshall Davis is a likely starting point. Davis, a Communist Party USA (CPUSA) activist and propagandist in Chicago and Hawaii, was a mentor to the young Barack Obama. Obama mentions Davis’s influence in his book, Dreams of My Father, although he merely refers to Davis as “Frank.”

The pro-Obama mainstream media have either ignored the Davis-Obama connection altogether or barely mentioned it in passing, and seldom is Davis’ CPUSA activism brought up. Wikipedia says Davis merely “became interested” in communism, and even gives the impression Davis was an anti-communist! Wikipedia says “Davis became interested in the Communist party in 1931 during the famous Scottsboro boys and Angelo Herndon cases,” but that “he warned against blacks accepting the Depression-era remedies being pushed by communists.” Wikipedia does not give a source for Davis’ alleged warning to fellow blacks. Trevor Loudon’s Keywiki entry on Davis, by way of contrast, is loaded with detailed information from Davis’ FBI files, as well as from Communist Party publications. (Side note: Professor Paul Kengor has written an entire book on Davis entitled, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis — The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor.)

Davis did not simply become “interested” in the CPUSA, but became a full fledged, dues-paying member (membership card number 47544) and swore an oath of loyalty to the Soviet Union that included the line, “I pledge myself to remain at all times a vigilant and firm defender of the Leninist line of the Party, the only line that insures the triumph of Soviet Power in the United States.”

If Frank Marshall Davis had been a single, aberrant influence in Barack Obama’s life, the ho-hum, “so what?” attitude of the political chattering classes regarding this fact might be more understandable, though still not acceptable. However, Comrade Davis represents only the tip of a very large iceberg. One of Davis’ Communist Party comrades and close personal friends was black journalist Vernon Jarrett. Davis and Jarrett were both elected officers of the Communist Party in Chicago and both worked together in many communist front groups. Jarrett is the father-in-law of Valerie Jarrett, who is described on the official Obama WhiteHouse.gov website as “a Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama. She is also the Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls.”

Here’s some of the things the official White House bio don’t tell you, but which you can find in Loudon’s book:

In 1991, while Chief of Staff for Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, Valerie Jarrett hired Michelle Robinson. At that time she (Robinson) was engaged to Barack Obama.

Later Valerie Jarrett ran the finances for Obama’s 2004 Senate bid and served as treasurer of Obama’s HOPEFUND.

Jarrett became one of Obama’s closest friends and advisers and sometimes even described as the “other side of Barack’s brain."

It is not Mr. Loudon who came up with the description of Jarrett as the “other side of Barack’s brain.” He is simply reporting how pro-Obama writers for the New York Times, the Huffington Post and other MSM sources have described the Jarrett-Obama relationship, based on comments from those in Obama’s inner circle.

It would seem that Jarrett is something of an Obama equivalent to Woodrow Wilson's advisor Col. Edward Mandell House, whose influence on the president was so significant that Wilson referred to him as his “alter ego.” So, it might be worthwhile to delve into Valerie Jarrett’s background. Loudon has done this. In addition to the Vernon Jarrett communist connection, Valerie’s mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, has a long history of South Side Chicago ultra-left activism, including running the Erikson institute, where she worked alongside Weather Underground terrorist leader Bernardine Dohrn and Tom Ayers, father of terrorist Bill Ayers.

Alice Palmer: Obama Mentor & Soviet Agent “In the mid-1990s,” writes Loudon, “Alice Palmer, an Illinois State Senator, employed Obama as her Chief of Staff when she attempted an ill-fated run for the US Congress.”

He continues:

Obama was part of Friends of Alice Palmer, alongside controversial property developer Tony Rezko and Democratic Socialists of America members US Repersentative Danny K. Davis, Betty Wilhoitte and Timuel Black (also a member of Committees of Corresondence).

Later Palmer introduced Obama as a designated successor to her Illinois State Senate seat in the living room of former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, while Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member, former communist and longtime Obama friend Quentin Young looked on.

So, who was Alice Palmer, besides being an Illinois state senator? She and her husband, Edward “Buzz” Palmer, were longtime agents for the Soviet Union, serving as a key transmission belt for Soviet propaganda aimed especially at black Americans and Third World “people of color.” The Palmers were allowed privileged access to the Soviet Union, Cuba, and other communist countries in order to issue glowing reports on the glories of socialism for their Black Press Review, which Alice Palmer edited. Her reports, columns, and interviews were then spread worldwide via the Soviet propaganda network. She became an executive board member of the Communist Party USA front group, the U.S. Peace Council, which is the U.S. branch of one of the most important Soviet KGB-run operations, the World Peace Council. Alice Palmer was also a vice president of the International Organization of Journalists (IOJ), a Soviet-financed and Soviet-directed communist propaganda fount. The Palmers have also been involved with the Communist Party splinter group Committees of Correspondence, and the New Party, which is a radical Marxist political party launched by veterans of SDS, ACORN, IPS, SEIU, and CPUSA.

The Socialist International

The Socialist International (SI) is the premier and largest organization of socialist and communist parties. The Obama administration has multiple connections to this global socialist group, with two of the most prominent ties being through his former “Climate Czar” Carol Browner and his Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis. Browner, who had served as EPA Administrator in the Clinton administration, went on to be a member of the Socialist International’s International Commission for a Sustainable World Society. Hilda Solis’ SI connections are less direct. She was officially represented at the SI’s Socialist International Migration Committee forum on immigration reform by her staff person, Elena Henry. Solis was a keynote speaker at the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) “21st Century Socialism” conference in Los Angeles in 2005. The DSA is an affiliate of the SI, and leading DSA members have been prominent supporters in all aspects of Obama’s presidential campaigns, as well as promoting his political, social, and economic agendas.

The List Goes On and On

However, Valerie Jarrett, Hilda Solis, Alice Palmer, Carol Browner, and Frank Marshall Davis are but a few of literally hundreds of people close to Obama, or prominent supporters of Obama, who should cause concern in any reasonable American. The most obvious individuals who should elicit alarm are those like Ayers and Dohrn, who were not mere “liberals” but self-described communists, who actually adopted the terrorist path. Now they are professors, unrepentant tenured radicals. Although they are the best-known hardcore radicals in Obama camp, they are far from unique. Other prominent Obamaites from the Weather Underground and the SDS include Jeff Jones, Todd Gitlin, Paul and Heather Booth, Mark Rudd, Tom Hayden, Mike Klonsky, Wade Rathke, Carl Davidson, Marilyn Katz, Thorne Dreyer, Angela Davis, and David Hamilton.

But those entries don’t even scratch the surface. What about top Obama advisers David Axelrod, David Bonior, Cass Sunstein, John Holdren, Ron Bloom, Carol Browner, and Rosa Brooks? And what about Timuel Black, Sam Webb, Evalina Alarcon, Quentin Young, Jose Laluz, Pepe and Rudy Lozano, Andy Stern, Libero Della Piana, Manning Marabel, Cornell West, Frank and Beatrice Lumpkin, Eliseo Medina, Barbara Ehrenreich? And let’s not forget Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Van Jones. What about the huge influence of the Democratic Socialists of America, Progressives for Obama, Peoples Weekly World (the CPUSA newspaper), Movement for a Democratic Society (a revival of the SDS for aging radicals), and radical left unions such as SEIU and AFSCME?

For vital, detailed information on these groups and individuals, you must get and read Barack Obama and the Enemies Within. Even better, get and read the book and then be sure to meet the author and have him sign it, by attending one of Trevor Loudon’s national book tour appearances (currently ongoing through October; see tour details by clicking here.)

What Obama's Mentor Thought About General Motors

By Paul Kengor
Forbes
August 1, 2012

President Barack Obama has confidently told the successful that they wouldn’t be where they are without the help of others. “You didn’t get there on your own,” says the president.

Well, Obama should know. As a young man in the 1970s, he repeatedly sought the counsel of a Hawaiian man named Frank Marshall Davis, whom he first met in 1970 through his maternal grandfather. Obama’s grandfather had sought out Davis as a mentor for his grandson, a black-male role model/father figure that the young Obama was lacking. Obama responded in kind.

“I was intrigued by old Frank,” reports Obama in Dreams from My Father, “with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.” Davis offered Obama advice at several life-changing levels: on race, on college, on women, on his mind, on his attitudes, on life, on the very notion of what Davis himself called “fundamental change.” In his memoirs, Obama features 22 direct references to “Frank” by name. Davis became a part of Obama’s life and mind, by Obama’s own extended recounting, from Hawaii—the site of multiple visits and late evenings together—to Los Angeles to Chicago to Germany to Africa, from adolescence to college to community organizing. When Obama arrived in Chicago to find himself professionally and politically—just as Frank Marshall Davis himself had once done in the 1930s—Obama literally visualized Davis, pictured him. He thought first of “Frank.”

Unfortunately, Obama left out some salient facts about Frank Marshall Davis. Among them, Davis joined Communist Party USA in Chicago during World War II (his Party number was 47544). He became extremely active in Party circles and even wrote for and was the founding editor-in-chief of the Communist Party publication there, the Chicago Star. He left Chicago in 1948 for Hawaii, where he would write for the Party publication there, the Honolulu Record. Those writings reveal a man fully loyal to the Soviet Union and the Communist Party line, and often bare an uncanny resemblance to Obama’s own rhetoric, whether Davis was bashing Wall Street, big oil, big banks, corporate executives and their “excess profits” and “greed” and their “fat contracts,” the wealthy and “millionaires,” GOP tax cuts that “spare the rich,” and on and on.

Particularly interesting, however, and worthy of the attention to readers of this publication, were Frank Marshall Davis’s writings incessantly demonizing General Motors.

In the Chicago Star, Davis and his comrades eviscerated GM every chance they had. The Star, for instance, mocked the claims of Winston Churchill—incidentally, Davis, like Obama, did not like Churchill—that an Iron Curtain was being erected by Stalin in Europe; to the contrary, the Star maintained that the only “Iron Curtains” were those being erected by the likes of General Motors. The problem was not Stalin’s Iron Curtain, scoffed Frank Marshall Davis in his usual incendiary language, but “G.M.’s iron curtain,” being raised by “General Motors’ Hitlers.” The Chicago Star carried headlines claiming that GM itself was a “branch of U.S. imperialism.”

Frank Marshall Davis saw GM as a sinister force, and was unrelenting in his anti-GM crusade for years to come. He was particularly indignant at GM’s profits, which he felt were too high. According to Davis, GM, like America as a whole, was good at manufacturing one thing: “we have manufactured a national horror of socialism.”

In a January 26, 1950 column, titled, “Free Enterprise or Socialism,” Davis framed an America on the verge of another Great Depression, with a “virtual dictatorship of Big Business” being the culprit. Zeroing in on the “tentacles of Big Business,” Davis cut loose on GM:

Alfred Sloan of General Motors announced that his gigantic company made a profit last year of $600,000,000, more than any other corporation in history. Over the years, General Motors has swallowed up or knocked out car manufacturer after car manufacturer so that today less than a handful of competitors remains. Free enterprise, eh?  Obviously, a business that can show a profit in one year of $600,000,000 is in a position to control government. When we remember that the directors and major stockholders of one industry also shape the policies of banks and other huge corporations, it is easy to see that the tentacles of Big Business control just about everything they think they need to insure continued profits…. For many years now we have been living under the virtual dictatorship of Big Business which all but drove us to ruin in 1929….

Government policy is fixed in Wall Street and transmitted through the corporation executives….

Davis was irate that “firms [such] as General Motors could make $600,000,000 profit while unemployment skyrocketed.”

Davis finished this particular shot at GM with a revealing statement, indicative of his far-left view of economic success:

As for free enterprise, it doesn’t live here anymore. At the same time we have manufactured a national horror of socialism. Meanwhile, the dictatorship of the monopolies is driving us down the road to ruin.

And so, with still rising unemployment and a mounting depression, the time draws nearer when we will have to decide to oust the monopolies and restore a competing system of free enterprise, or let the government own and operate our major industries.

Frank Marshall Davis did not bother explaining which option he preferred. Given that he was obviously a man of the far left, a communist, a Party member even, he no doubt favored the option of letting the government own and operate our major industries.

Two weeks later, in a February 9, 1950 piece, Davis again went after GM, asking rhetorically: “With no brink-of-war economy, how could General Motors make $600,000,000 in one year in the face of rising unemployment?”

He would continue to call out these alleged obscene profits by the automaker. He plainly did not like General Motors.

In short, it would be easy to picture Frank Marshall Davis, if he were president of the United States, nationalizing GM. Clearly, Davis would have favored some significant government action to manage and control General Motors. I’m certain he would have been pleased with Barack Obama’s actions with GM.

Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and author of the new book, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor.

Obama Mentor Wanted Americans Put In Re-Education Camps

Weather Underground terrorist planned to eliminate 25 million U.S. citizens in re-education camps.

Paul Joseph Watson 
Infowars.com 
Friday, May 4, 2012

In light of a newly uncovered U.S. Army document that outlines plans for prisoners, including U.S. citizens, to be re-educated in detention camps, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the fact that Barack Obama’s political mentor, Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, once called for precisely the same thing.

According to former FBI agent Larry Grathwohl, who was assigned to infiltrate the Weather Underground’s Central Committee, the organization run by Bill Ayers carried out bombings targeting the Pentagon, the State Department, as well as police stations and federal buildings, in an attempt to cause the collapse of the United States government and open the door for Cuban, North Vietnamese, Chinese and Russian troops to occupy the country.

Grathwohl stated that Ayers and his group planned to deal with Americans who would try to resist this takeover by “establishing re-education centers in the south-west”. Asked what he would do with those who still refused to convert to communism, Ayers said that they would have to be “eliminated,” as in 25 million Americans would be killed in concentration camps.

Grathwohl said the Weathermen told him the camps would be used to “re-educate people into the new way of thinking.”

This provides yet more historical context to underscore the point that using detention centers to “re-educate” prisoners into a new way of political thinking is the hallmark of a tyrannical regime.

The U.S. Army document that we highlighted yesterday targets “political activists” for “indoctrination programs” once they are incarcerated inside the prison camps. The document is a how-to manual on treatment of detainees, including “civilian internees” interned for “security reasons, for protection, or because he or she committed an offense against the detaining power.”

The document makes it clear in numerous instances that the re-education program, designed to “remove antagonistic attitudes” and enforce “understanding and appreciation of U.S. policies and actions,” is not just limited to prisoners in foreign countries like Afghanistan and Iraq.

The rules also apply “within U.S. territory” as part of “civil support operations” in conjunction with FEMA and Homeland Security in the aftermath of “man-made disasters, accidents, terrorist attacks and incidents in the U.S. and its territories.” So long as the President passes an executive order bypassing Posse Comitatus, the manual says the indoctrination program “may be performed as domestic civil support operations.”

The fact that Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground also planned for re-education camps to be used to incarcerate American citizens is alarming given President Barack Obama’s relationship with Ayers, who helped launch Obama’s political career.

“In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn,” reported Politico’s Ben Smith.

Maria Warren, an Obama-supporting liberal who attended the Chicago meeting, also confirmed Ayers’ presence and his role in launching Obama’s political dynasty.

“When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the living room of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. They were launching him–introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread,” wrote Warren.

According to retired Illinois postman Allen Hulton, Ayers’ parents also bragged about how they paid to put a “foreign student,” almost certainly Obama, through school.

The connection between Ayers’ advocacy for re-education camps, his relationship with Barack Obama, and an Army document which clearly states that such “indoctrination programs” can be used against Americans so long as the President passes an executive order, represents a chilling triumvirate.

Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Obama

April 10, 2008
Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

CHICAGO — It was a celebration of Palestinian culture -- a night of music, dancing and a dash of politics. Local Arab Americans were bidding farewell to Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights, who was leaving town for a job in New York.

A special tribute came from Khalidi's friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi's wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking.

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It's for that reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation -- a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid's dinner table," but around "this entire world."

Today, five years later, Obama is a U.S. senator from Illinois who expresses a firmly pro-Israel view of Middle East politics, pleasing many of the Jewish leaders and advocates for Israel whom he is courting in his presidential campaign. The dinner conversations he had envisioned with his Palestinian American friend have ended. He and Khalidi have seen each other only fleetingly in recent years.

And yet the warm embrace Obama gave to Khalidi, and words like those at the professor's going-away party, have left some Palestinian American leaders believing that Obama is more receptive to their viewpoint than he is willing to say.

Their belief is not drawn from Obama's speeches or campaign literature, but from comments that some say Obama made in private and from his association with the Palestinian American community in his hometown of Chicago, including his presence at events where anger at Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy was freely expressed.

At Khalidi's 2003 farewell party, for example, a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, "then you will never see a day of peace."

One speaker likened "Zionist settlers on the West Bank" to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been "blinded by ideology."

Obama adopted a different tone in his comments and called for finding common ground. But his presence at such events, as he worked to build a political base in Chicago, has led some Palestinian leaders to believe that he might deal differently with the Middle East than either of his opponents for the White House.

"I am confident that Barack Obama is more sympathetic to the position of ending the occupation than either of the other candidates," said Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow for the American Task Force on Palestine, referring to the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that began after the 1967 war. More than his rivals for the White House, Ibish said, Obama sees a "moral imperative" in resolving the conflict and is most likely to apply pressure to both sides to make concessions.

"That's my personal opinion," Ibish said, "and I think it for a very large number of circumstantial reasons, and what he's said."

Aides say that Obama's friendships with Palestinian Americans reflect only his ability to interact with a wide diversity of people, and that his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been consistent. Obama has called himself a "stalwart" supporter of the Jewish state and its security needs. He believes in an eventual two-state solution in which Jewish and Palestinian nations exist in peace, which is consistent with current U.S. policy.

Obama also calls for the U.S. to talk to such declared enemies as Iran, Syria and Cuba. But he argues that the Palestinian militant organization Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, is an exception, calling it a terrorist group that should renounce violence and recognize Israel's right to exist before dialogue begins. That viewpoint, which also matches current U.S. policy, clashes with that of many Palestinian advocates who urge the United States and Israel to treat Hamas as a partner in negotiations.

"Barack's belief is that it's important to understand other points of view, even if you can't agree with them," said his longtime political strategist, David Axelrod.

Obama "can disagree without shunning or demonizing those with other views," he said. "That's far different than the suggestion that he somehow tailors his view."

Looking for clues

And both sides, on certain issues, have interpreted Obama's remarks as supporting their point of view.

Last year, for example, Obama was quoted saying that "nobody's suffering more than the Palestinian people." The candidate later said the remark had been taken out of context, and that he meant that the Palestinians were suffering "from the failure of the Palestinian leadership [in Gaza] to recognize Israel" and to renounce violence.

Jewish leaders were satisfied with Obama's explanation, but some Palestinian leaders, including Ibish, took the original quotation as a sign of the candidate's empathy for their plight.

Obama's willingness to befriend Palestinian Americans and to hear their views also impressed, and even excited, a community that says it does not often have the ear of the political establishment.

Among other community events, Obama in 1998 attended a speech by Edward Said, the late Columbia University professor and a leading intellectual in the Palestinian movement. According to a news account of the speech, Said called that day for a nonviolent campaign "against settlements, against Israeli apartheid."

The use of such language to describe Israel's policies has drawn vehement objection from Israel's defenders in the United States. A photo on the pro-Palestinian website the Electronic Intifada shows Obama and his wife, Michelle, engaged in conversation at the dinner table with Said, and later listening to Said's keynote address. Obama had taken an English class from Said as an undergraduate at Columbia University.

Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian rights activist in Chicago who helps run Electronic Intifada, said that he met Obama several times at Palestinian and Arab American community events. At one, a 2000 fundraiser at a private home, Obama called for the U.S. to take an "evenhanded" approach toward Israel, Abunimah wrote in an article on the website last year. He did not cite Obama's specific criticisms.

Abunimah, in a Times interview and on his website, said Obama seemed sympathetic to the Palestinian cause but more circumspect as he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004. At a dinner gathering that year, Abunimah said, Obama greeted him warmly and said privately that he needed to speak cautiously about the Middle East.

Abunimah quoted Obama as saying that he was sorry he wasn't talking more about the Palestinian cause, but that his primary campaign had constrained what he could say.

Obama, through his aide Axelrod, denied he ever said those words, and Abunimah's account could not be independently verified.

"In no way did he take a position privately that he hasn't taken publicly and consistently," Axelrod said of Obama. "He always had expressed solicitude for the Palestinian people, who have been ill-served and have suffered greatly from the refusal of their leaders to renounce violence and recognize Israel's right to exist."

In Chicago, one of Obama's friends was Khalidi, a highly visible figure in the Arab American community.

In the 1970s, when Khalidi taught at a university in Beirut, he often spoke to reporters on behalf of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. In the early 1990s, he advised the Palestinian delegation during peace negotiations. Khalidi now occupies a prestigious professorship of Arab studies at Columbia.

He is seen as a moderate in Palestinian circles, having decried suicide bombings against civilians as a "war crime" and criticized the conduct of Hamas and other Palestinian leaders. Still, many of Khalidi's opinions are troubling to pro-Israel activists, such as his defense of Palestinians' right to resist Israeli occupation and his critique of U.S. policy as biased toward Israel.

While teaching at the University of Chicago, Khalidi and his wife lived in the Hyde Park neighborhood near the Obamas. The families became friends and dinner companions.

In 2000, the Khalidis held a fundraiser for Obama's unsuccessful congressional bid. The next year, a social service group whose board was headed by Mona Khalidi received a $40,000 grant from a local charity, the Woods Fund of Chicago, when Obama served on the fund's board of directors.

At Khalidi's going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. "You will not have a better senator under any circumstances," Khalidi said.

The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.

Though Khalidi has seen little of Sen. Obama in recent years, Michelle Obama attended a party several months ago celebrating the marriage of the Khalidis' daughter.

In interviews with The Times, Khalidi declined to discuss specifics of private talks over the years with Obama. He did not begrudge his friend for being out of touch, or for focusing more these days on his support for Israel -- a stance that Khalidi calls a requirement to win a national election in the U.S., just as wooing Chicago's large Arab American community was important for winning local elections.

Khalidi added that he strongly disagrees with Obama's current views on Israel, and often disagreed with him during their talks over the years. But he added that Obama, because of his unusual background, with family ties to Kenya and Indonesia, would be more understanding of the Palestinian experience than typical American politicians.

"He has family literally all over the world," Khalidi said. "I feel a kindred spirit from that."

Ties with Israel

Even as he won support in Chicago's Palestinian community, Obama tried to forge ties with advocates for Israel.

In 2000, he submitted a policy paper to CityPAC, a pro-Israel political action committee, that among other things supported a unified Jerusalem as Israel's capital, a position far out of step from that of his Palestinian friends. The PAC concluded that Obama's position paper "suggests he is strongly pro-Israel on all of the major issues."

In 2002, as a rash of suicide bombings struck Israel, Obama sought out a Jewish colleague in the state Senate and asked whether he could sign on to a measure calling on Palestinian leaders to denounce violence. "He came to me and said, 'I want to have my name next to yours,' " said his former state Senate colleague Ira Silverstein, an observant Jew.

As a presidential candidate, Obama has won support from such prominent Chicago Jewish leaders as Penny Pritzker, a member of the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, and who is now his campaign finance chair, and from Lee Rosenberg, a board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Nationally, Obama continues to face skepticism from some Jewish leaders who are wary of his long association with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who had made racially incendiary comments during several sermons that recently became widely known. Questions have persisted about Wright in part because of the recent revelation that his church bulletin reprinted a Times op-ed from last year written by a Hamas leader.

One Jewish leader said he viewed Obama's outreach to Palestinian activists, such as Said, in the light of his relationship to Wright.

HOW SAUL ALINSKY TAUGHT BARACK OBAMA EVERYTHING HE KNOWS ABOUT CIVIC UPHEAVAL

by AWR HAWKINS 14 Mar 2012

Throughout Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency and his subsequent time in that office, two things have been said again and again: 1. He has a grudge against America. 2. He takes his marching orders from Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), particularly as encapsulated in the book “Rules for Radicals.”

Anyone who listens to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Mark Levin regularly is going to hear point one frequently. For all three men, to the chagrin of their critics, have relentlessly warned Americans that Obama believes it’s time for this country to eat a little humble pie: that it’s time to put away talk of America the exceptional and bring on America the apologetic.

As Limbaugh in particular has said:

Obama has a chip on his shoulder about [this] country. He doesn’t think of it as great…He thinks of it as criminal in many ways, as guilty in many ways. He thinks our superpower status was the result of a theft [of the] resources and ideas from other nations all over the world…And I think Obama wants the people of this country to find out what it’s like to live the way he thinks we have forced other people around the world to live.

So there’s point one: the assertion that Obama has a grudge against this country. And this leads to point two, and the question of what role Mr. Alinsky’s writings and overthrow tactics have had on our president. (By “overthrow tactics” I mean Alinsky’s methods for not only persuading but also enabling the “have-nots” in our society to overthrow the haves and take away their power.)

In a National Review column, dated May 14, 2009, we see that “Obama’s mentors from his Chicago days studied at a school Alinsky founded, and they taught their students the philosophy and methods of one of the first ‘community organizers.’” That same column cites a photo that was on Obama’s presidential campaign website: a photo that showed “Obama in a classroom teaching students Alinskian methods.” It showed Obama standing in front “of a blackboard on which he’d written ‘Relationships Built on Self Interest,’ and illustrated by a diagram of the flow of money from corporations to the mayor.”

His immersion in Alinsky’s teachings is certain from the scenario relayed in National Review. And anyone who’s read “Rules for Radicals” and noted the number of times “change” and some variant of “community organizer” appear may have even asked themselves: Did Barack Obama write this book? Of course he didn’t. But his language and actions so perfectly mirror the language of Alinsky and the actions Alinsky promoted that it’s hard to tell the one community organizer-turned-president from the other community organizer-turned-cult hero.

For example, from “Rules for Radicals,” consider Alinsky’s words of wisdom for emerging community organizers:

[You must help] the people in the community…feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. [An] organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives—agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate. [You must] fan the embers of hopelessness into a flame of fight.

These are the kinds of things Obama was reading when he poured through the pages of “Rules for Radicals,” and these are the kinds of things he would have been taught by the community organizers who trained him. And what have Obama’s tactics as President been to this point, if not tactics of playing one class against another to raise levels of frustration and of creating the very disenchantment about which Alinsky wrote, in order to nurture a passion for change?

Alinsky taught him well. And Alinsky’s son was the first to admit it, when he wrote a letter to the Boston Globe in praise of Barack Obama following the 2008 Democrat National Convention:

Barack Obama's training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.

OBAMA'S BELOVED LAW PROFESSOR: DERRICK BELL
by J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS 8 Mar 2012

Breitbart.com has revealed that while at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama embraced the racially charged cause of professor Derrick Bell.

Both Obama and Bell demanded that Harvard hire professors on the basis of race. Obama and other students rallied to Bell’s side after Bell quit teaching in an attempt to force Harvard to implement race-based hiring policies.

Other archived video tapes I have reviewed reveal that Bell espouses racial ideas deeply at odds with American values--and did so, adamantly, while at Harvard Law School.

The Obama-Bell connection is the latest in a pattern of Barack Obama’s associations with individuals who promoted a racially divisive America.

In 2008, America learned that Obama attended, and had his children baptized, in a church run by the racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright. After the Obama campaign launched a successful existential war to have the Rev. Jeremiah Wright remain a household name only to Fox News viewers, Americans dreamed an Obama presidency would usher in a post-racial era.
That never materialized.

Instead, Professor Derrick Bell’s racial world view is now manifesting in the policies of the Obama administration, particularly in Eric Holder’s Justice Department. That’s why Obama’s radical associations in the past matter.

That’s also why Senator Obama’s appearance with New Black Panther Party President, Malik Zulu Shabazz in Selma, Alabama, matters. I detail the 2007 Selma event and photographs with Obama and Shabazz in my book, Injustice.

Andrew Breitbart courageously published other photos of Obama and Shabazz. The leftist photographer prohibited my publisher (Regnery) from using some of the photos. He knew how incendiary they were, and so did Andrew. Remember, Malik Zulu Shabazz is the very defendant whom Eric Holder let off in the New Black Panther voter intimidation case.

Policies of racial division and racial preference have characterized this administration, even if most in the media have failed willingly to cover them.

Nobody should celebrate this lost chance for national racial healing many voters thought would characterize his Presidency. Nobody should be glad that the Obama administration turns a blind eye, for example, toward racially motivated violence like the mob attacks in Wisconsin or Dayton.

That Obama gravitated toward Bell, Wright, and Bill Ayers and all the others we now know about says something about the man.
Contrary to those who might praise Derrick Bell, America is the worse off because of his ideas.

Bell did more than advocate for race-based hiring. He was perhaps the worst Johnny Appleseed of a nasty racialist legal theory called Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory, in a nutshell, argues that the law is a weapon of the majority whites to oppress “people of color.” It argues for “structural racism”--the idea that American institutions are aligned against blacks, whether the oppressor is the criminal justice system, a cabdriver without a fare, businesses, government, Domino's Pizza, banks, or the police.

Critical Race Theory does not view the law as applying equally to all Americans, but advocates for racially unfair implementation of the law to right past injustice.

Most of the crackpot racial grievance you hear today has a philosophical foundation in Critical Race Theory. It is a counter-American, collectivist idea. Reparations, race-based hiring and excusing New Black Panther voter intimidation are some of the evil fruits of Critical Race Theory.

Bell’s history might be insignificant if he kept it to himself. But he didn’t. He used his professorship to export this worldview to students--students like Obama, who later used their teaching posts to bring Bell's views to the next generation.

In the Obama tapes (that have been revealed so far), we find the future President calling on Harvard students to “open up your hearts, and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.” Race relations in our country are worse off because too many people followed Obama’s advice.

Obama Pal Edward Said Another Fraud

By Jack Cashill
American Thinker
November 4, 2009

Friend and foe alike have wondered how Barack Obama wangled a seat next to Edward Said (pronounced sigh-EED), at an Arab-American community dinner in Chicago in 1998 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Palestinian nakbah, or disaster.

At the time, Obama was an obscure state senator and Said, according to the Nation, was "probably the best-known intellectual in the world."

It is possible that the pair had met when Obama was a student and Said a professor at Columbia University. The Los Angeles Times has reported that Obama took at least one course taught by Said.

It is possible, too, that Said and Obama ran in the same radical New York circles. Among Said's friends and allies on the America-phobic, Arafat-loving left was none other than Bill Ayers. When Ayers published his memoir Fugitive Days in 2001, Said was happy to provide a blurb. "For anyone who cares about the sorry mess we are in," wrote Said, "this book is essential, indeed necessary reading."

Whatever their prior relationship, photos of the 1998 event show Obama and Said immersed in deep conversation. As to its content, Said might have been reassuring the newly minted author that yes, if you can trace your ancestors' roots to the third world, and yes, if you toe the progressive line, you can make up your whole life story and get away with it. Said knew. He had been there, done that, gotten the T-shirt.

Twenty years earlier, Said had published his masterwork, Orientalism, a book so influential that it changed the very direction of Middle Eastern studies. The book's thesis was a bold one in 1978. Writing in full postmodern patois, then still cutting-edge, Said argued that the Western study of the Middle East was inherently corrupted by the position of power from which the observer wrote. In other words, westerners had no right to even think of writing Middle Eastern history.

Said's identity as a Palestinian and a refugee informed everything he wrote, Orientalism most certainly. "Orientalism is written out of an extremely concrete history of personal loss and national disintegration," Said observes in the Afterword of the book's 1994 edition. It is this sense of loss that gives the book its spirit of righteous certainty.

Said's Palestinian childhood became the central, compelling metaphor for his significant life work. "Mr. Said was born in Jerusalem and spent the first twelve years of his life there," confirms the New York Times in a flattering 1998 article. His family left the house and "fled" Palestine for Cairo in late 1947, "five months before war broke out between Palestinian Arabs and Jews over plans to partition Palestine."

Said set out to right past wrongs and succeeded brilliantly. His timing was impeccable. Multiculturalism was still in its embryonic stages, and by fusing it to postmodernism, Said helped to define it. For someone who allegedly did "not exist," Said did a masterful job of making his presence felt.

For fourteen years, he served on the Palestine National Conference, a kind of Parliament-in-exile alongside the likes of the PLO's Yassir Arafat and still-harder-core radicals from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the terrorist group that hijacked the MS Achille Lauro.

Although he denounced violence, Said was forever rationalizing its use and was once photographed on the Lebanese border throwing a rock at Israel as "a symbolic gesture of joy."

Throughout his career, Said returned again and again to the source of his own moral power -- his forced exile from "my beautiful old house" in Jerusalem. So central was the house at 10 Brenner Street to his identity that the Palestinian Heritage Association presented him with a portrait of it during a ceremony in his honor.

In early 1992, Said paid a nostalgic visit to this house, a visit that was celebrated in a Harper's Magazine and eventually in a BBC documentary, In Search of Palestine. One scene in the film shows Said and his son in front of the house "my family owned" while Said angrily talks about getting the house back from the Israeli authorities.

Whether Said knew it or not, however, time was running out on the compelling saga of his own life that he had gone to such pains to shape and share with the world.

By 1998, the year the documentary aired, an Israeli scholar named Justus Reid Weiner had already done two years of hard-nosed, boots-on-the-ground background research on Said's life, and he was about to deconstruct the heck out of it. "Virtually everything I learned," Weiner wrote, "contradicts the story of Said's early life as Said has told it."

Weiner released his findings a year later in the September 1999 issue of the influential Jewish magazine, Commentary. In truth, Said had better establishment credentials than anyone suspected, right down to his Episcopalian upbringing.

The son of an affluent, American immigrant father who had fought under General Pershing in World War I, Said attended the Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts and Princeton University before moving on to Harvard. It was the first twelve years of his life, however, that would truly raise eyebrows.

"I was born, in November 1935," Said wrote in Harper's in 1992, "in Talbiya, then a mostly new and prosperous Arab quarter of Jerusalem. By the end of 1947, just months before Talbiya fell to Jewish forces, I'd left with my family for Cairo." After their forced departure, he wrote in a 1998 London Review of Books, "... my entire family became refugees in Egypt."

Yes, Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935. He was born there because his mother had had a tragic experience with Egyptian health care -- her first son, Gerald, died during childbirth. After Edward's birth, the family returned to Cairo, where his father had been living for the last decade.

There, Said's father continued to expand his extremely successful office supply business and moved the family through an increasingly luxurious series of apartments. A Christian and an American citizen from birth, Said attended the best British schools in Cairo before leaving for a pricey American prep school as a teenager.

The famed house, Weiner learned, belonged not to Said's parents, but to his Jerusalem relatives. During almost all of the years Said was alleged to be living there, the Said relatives rented the upstairs apartment to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia for a consulate's use. In a truly odd twist of fate, they rented the downstairs apartment of the renowned Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who moved there after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938. In 1942, the Said relatives forced Buber out in a rent dispute and occupied the apartment themselves.

One would think that in all his public recollections of this house, Said might have remembered sharing it with Buber or the Yugoslav consulate, but he did not. It is possible, in fact, that he never even stayed there. The apartment would have been too small for his Jerusalem relatives to share with their prosperous Cairo cousins if they had come to visit.

Said was busted big time. Weiner had proved beyond all doubt that America's most celebrated Palestinian refugee was not really a Palestinian or a refugee, let alone a Muslim. Indeed, during the century's most turbulent years, 1935-1947, years that witnessed the death and dispossession of scores of millions of innocent people, Said had been living high on the hog in Cairo. The whole moral basis for his post-colonial posturing as a victim of western injustice seemed shot.

Although its headline suggests a nationalist bias on Weiner's part -- "Israeli Says Palestinian Thinker Has Falsified His Early Life" -- the New York Times gave his exposé decent coverage. If Said could ignore Weiner, he could not ignore the Times. His comments are instructive and all too typical. "I have never said I am a refugee," he told the Times. "Never in my life. On the contrary, I go out of my way to say I had a very privileged life, we had a house in Cairo."

Just a year earlier, remember, the Times had interviewed Said and written, "Mr. Said was born in Jerusalem and spent the first twelve years of his life there." Until caught by Weiner, this is what Said had told everyone.

By the time Said died four years later, however, the controversy had died as well. The Guardian of London does not even hint at one. Its obituary closed with a tribute from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan saying, "Both the Middle East and the United States will be the poorer without his distinctive voice."

The New York Times raised the Weiner objection, but it did so dismissively, 2,000 words into a glowing 2,600-word obituary. In the beginning of the obituary, the "paper of record" had already decided to revive Said's imaginary past.

Edward Said was born in Jerusalem on Nov. 1, 1935, and spent his childhood in a well-to-do neighborhood of thick-walled stone houses that is now one of the main Jewish districts of the city. His father, a prosperous businessman who had lived in the United States, took the family to Cairo in 1947 after the United Nations divided Jerusalem into Jewish and Arab halves.

Say what one will about Said, but at least he wrote his own fictions.

The Alinsky Administration

Today, reading Rules for Radicals is illuminating and worrisome.

By Jim Geraghty
May 14, 2009
National Review

Barack Obama never met Saul Alinsky, but the radical organizer’s thought helps explain a great deal about how the president operates.

Alinsky died in 1972, when Obama was 11 years old. But three of Obama’s mentors from his Chicago days studied at a school Alinsky founded, and they taught their students the philosophy and methods of one of the first “community organizers.” Ryan Lizza wrote a 6,500-word piece on Alinsky’s influence on Obama for The New Republic, noting, “On his campaign website, one can find a photo of Obama in a classroom teaching students Alinskian methods. He stands in front of a blackboard on which he has written ‘Relationships Built on Self Interest,’ an idea illustrated by a diagram of the flow of money from corporations to the mayor.”

In a letter to the Boston Globe, Alinsky’s son wrote that “the Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style. . . . Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.”

As a tool for understanding the thinking of Obama, Alinsky’s most famous book, Rules for Radicals, is simultaneously edifying and worrisome. Some passages make Machiavelli’s Prince read like a Sesame Street picture book on manners.

After Obama took office, the pundit class found itself debating the ideology and sensibility of the new president — an indication of how scarcely the media had bothered to examine him beforehand. But after 100 days, few observers can say that Obama hasn’t surprised them with at least one call. Gays wonder why Obama won’t take a stand on gay marriage when state legislatures will. Union bosses wonder what happened to the man who sounded more protectionist than Hillary Clinton in the primary. Some liberals have been stunned by the serial about-faces on extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention without trial, military-tribunal trials, the state-secrets doctrine, and other policies they associate with the Bush administration. Former supporters of Obama, including David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, Jim Cramer, and Warren Buffett, have expressed varying degrees of criticism of his early moves, surprised that he is more hostile to the free market than they had thought.

Obama’s defenders would no doubt insist this is a reflection of his pragmatism, his willingness to eschew ideology to focus on what solutions work best. This view assumes that nominating Bill Richardson as commerce secretary, running up a $1.8 trillion deficit, approving the AIG bonuses, signing 9,000 earmarks into law, adopting Senator McCain’s idea of taxing health benefits, and giving U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown 25 DVDs that don’t work in Britain constitute “what works best.” Obama is a pragmatist, but a pragmatist as understood by Alinsky: One who applies pragmatism to achieving and keeping power.

One of Alinsky’s first lessons is: “Radicals must have a degree of control over the flow of events.” Setting aside the Right’s habitual complaint about the pliant liberal media, Obama has dominated the news by unveiling a new initiative or giving a major speech on almost every weekday of his presidency. There has been a steady stream of lighter stories as well — the puppy, Michelle Obama’s fashion sense, the White House swing set, the president and vice president’s burger lunch.

The constant parade of events large and small ensures that whenever unpleasant news arises and overtakes the desired message — think of Tom Daschle’s withdrawal, the Air Force One photo op, or North Korea’s missile launch — it leads the news for only a day. For contrast, consider what happened when the photos of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse appeared: As American Journalism Review reports, they “dominated the headlines for a month. Day after day, top national newspapers brought to light new aspects of the debacle on their front pages.”

When Obama announced a paltry $100 million in budget cuts, and insisted this was part of a budget-trimming process that would add up to “real money,” he clearly understood that the public processes these numbers very differently from the way budget wonks do. Alinsky wrote: “The moment one gets into the area of $25 million and above, let alone a billion, the listener is completely out of touch, no longer really interested, because the figures have gone above his experience and almost are meaningless. Millions of Americans do not know how many million dollars make up a billion.”

Obama insists that he doesn’t want the government to run car companies, but he has fired CEOs, demonized bondholders, ensured the UAW gets the sweetest deal, and guaranteed warrantees. He insists that he doesn’t want to run banks, but his Treasury Department hesitates to take back some of the TARP funds that give them influence over bank policies. He’s critical of Wall Street, but he signed off on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s remarkably generous plan to give hedge funds and private investors a low-risk, high-reward option on toxic assets.

Much of this is explained by Alinsky’s epigram, “In the politics of human life, consistency is not a virtue.”
During the campaign, Obama’s critics laughed and marveled at how quickly the candidate threw inconvenient friends, allies, and supporters under the bus once they became political liabilities. Over on the Campaign Spot, it’s been easy to compile a list of quickly forgotten promises. But it is unlikely that Obama would consider any of this a character flaw; instead, it is evidence of his adaptability and gift for seeing the big picture.

Alinsky sneered at those who would accept defeat rather than break their principles: “It’s true I might have trouble getting to sleep because it takes time to tuck those big, angelic, moral wings under the covers.” He assured his students that no one would remember their flip-flops, scoffing, “The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success or failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father.” If you win, no one really cares how you did it.

Lizza’s profile offered an example of how Obama isn’t quite as cynical as Alinsky’s power-at-all-costs mentality would suggest:

Moreover, when Obama’s ideals clash with reality, he has been able to find compromises that don’t put him at a political disadvantage. For instance, no Democrat can win the general election while adhering to the public financing system if the Republican nominee doesn’t do the same. Clinton and John Edwards have simply conceded that the public financing system is dead and are ignoring fund-raising restrictions that would be triggered if either ends up playing within the public financing scheme. Facing the same situation, Obama — a longtime champion of campaign finance reform in general and public financing in particular — asked the Federal Election Commission if he could raise the potentially restricted money now (the world as it is) but then give it back if he wins the nomination and convinces his Republican opponent to stick with public financing (the world as we would like it to be).

But Obama quickly ignored that pledge when Senator McCain indicated he was willing to restrict himself to the public-financing system. Obama audaciously claimed that his donors had created a “parallel public-financing system” and announced his changed position at a fundraising dinner.

Moderates thought they were electing a moderate; liberals thought they were electing a liberal. Both camps were wrong. Ideology does not have the final say in Obama’s decision-making; an Alinskyite’s core principle is to take any action that expands his power and to avoid any action that risks his power.

As conservatives size up their new foe, they ought to remember: It’s not about liberalism. It’s about power. Obama will jettison anything that costs him power, and do anything that enhances it — including invite Rick Warren to give the benediction at his inauguration, dine with conservative columnists, and dismiss an appointee at the White House Military Office to ensure the perception of accountability.

Alinsky’s influence goes well beyond Obama, obviously. There are many wonderful Democrats in this world, but evidence suggests that rising in that party’s political hierarchy requires some adoption of a variation of the Alinsky philosophy: Power comes first. Few Democrats are expressing outrage over Nancy Pelosi’s ever-shifting explanation of what she knew about waterboarding. Those who screamed bloody murder about Jack Abramoff’s crimes avert their eyes from John Murtha. The anti-war movement that opposed the surge in Iraq remains silent about sending additional troops to Afghanistan. Obama will never get as much grief for his gay-marriage views as Miss California.

It’s not about the policies or the politics, and it’s certainly not about the principles. It’s about power, and it has been for a long time. 

Frank Marshall Davis, alleged Communist, was early influence on Barack Obama

New details about a black poet in Hawaii who was a key early influence in Barack Obama’s life can be revealed by The Telegraph.

By Toby Harnden in Washington
The Telegraph
22 Aug 2008

Although identified only as Frank in Mr. Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father, it has now been established that he was Frank Marshall Davis, a radical activist and journalist who had been suspected of being a member of the Communist Party in the 1950s.

Mr. Davis moved to Honolulu from Chicago in 1948 with his second wife Helen Canfield, a white socialite, at the suggestion of his friend the actor Paul Robeson, who advised them that there would be more tolerance of a mixed race couple in Hawaii than on the American mainland.

A bohemian libertine who drank heavily and loved jazz, he became friends with Stanley Dunham, Mr. Obama’s maternal grandfather in the 1960s. Mr. Davis died in 1987 at the age of 81, five years before Mr. Dunham.

“He knew Stan real well,” said Dawna Weatherly-Williams, a close friend of Mr. Davis. “They’d play Scrabble and drink and crack jokes and argue. Frank always won and he was always very braggadocio about it too. It was all jocular. They didn’t get polluted drunk. And Frank never really did drugs, though he and Stan would smoke pot together.”

While his mother was in Indonesia during part of his teenage years, Mr. Obama lived with his white grandparents. Mrs. Weatherly-Williams said that the poet was first introduced to the future Democratic presidential candidate in 1970 at the age of 10.

“Stan had been promising to bring Barry by because we all had that in common - Frank’s kids were half-white, Stan’s grandson was half-black and my son was half-black. We all had that in common and we all really enjoyed it. We got a real kick out of reality.”

Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama's half-sister, told the Associated Press recently that her grandfather had seen Mr. Davis was “a point of connection, a bridge if you will, to the larger African-American experience for my brother".

In his memoir, Mr. Obama recounts how he visited Mr. Davis on several occasions, apparently at junctures when he was grappling with racial issues, to seek his counsel. At one point in 1979 Mr. Davis described university as “an advanced degree in compromise” that was designed to keep blacks in their place.

Mr. Obama quoted him as saying: “Leaving your race at the door. Leaving your people behind. Understand something, boy. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained.”

He added that “they’ll tank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same.”

It has also been established that Mr. Davis, who divorced in 1970, was the author of a hard-core pornographic autobiography published in San Diego in 1968 by Greenleaf Classics under the pseudonym Bob Greene.

In a surviving portion of an autobiographical manuscript, Mr. Davis confirms that he was the author of Sex Rebel: Black after a reader had noticed the “similarities in style and phraseology” between the pornographic work and his poetry.

“I could not then truthfully deny that this book, which came out in 1968 as a Greenleaf Classic, was mine.” In the introduction to Sex Rebel, Mr. Davis (writing as Greene) explains that although he has “changed names and identities…all incidents I have described have been taken from actual experiences”.

He stated that “under certain circumstances I am bisexual” and that he was “ a voyeur and an exhibitionist” who was “occasionally mildly interested in sado-masochism”, adding: “I have often wished I had two penises to enjoy simultaneously the double – but different – sensations of oral and genital copulation.”

The book, which closely tracks Mr. Davis’s life in Chicago and Hawaii and the fact that his first wife was black and his second white, describes in lurid detail a series of shockingly sordid sexual encounters, often involving group sex.

One chapter concerns the seduction by Mr. Davis and his first wife of a 13-year-old girl called Anne. Mr. Davis wrote that it was the girl who had suggested he had sex with her. “I’m not one to go in for Lolitas. Usually I’d rather not bed a babe under 20.

“But there are exceptions. I didn’t want to disappoint the trusting child. At her still-impressionistic age, a rejection might be traumatic, could even cripple her sexually for life.”

He then described how he and his wife would have sex with the girl. “Anne came up many times the next several weeks, her aunt thinking she was in good hands. Actually she was.

“She obtained a course in practical sex from experienced and considerate practitioners rather than from ignorant insensitive neophytes….I think we did her a favor, although the pleasure was mutual.”

On other occasions, Mr. Davis would cruise in Hawaii parks looking for couples or female tourists to have sex with. He derived sexual gratification from bondage, simulated rape and being flogged and urinated on.

He boasted that “the number of white babes interested in at least one meeting with a Negro male has been far more than I can handle” and wished “America were as civilized as, say, Scandinavia”. He concluded: “I regret none of my experiences or unusual appetites; for me they are normal.”

According to Mrs. Weatherly-Williams, Mr. Davis lost touch with Mr. Dunham some time in the 1980s. John Edgar Tidwell, who wrote the introduction to Davis's memoir and edited a collection of his work, said that there was no mention of Mr. Dunham or Mr. Obama in any of Mr. Davis’s papers.

Long-lost article by Obama's dad surfaces

By BEN SMITH & JEFFREY RESSNER | 4/15/08
Politico

Barack Obama’s dad was such an important but absent figure in his life that he devoted his first book, “Dreams From My Father,” to the search for details about his father’s life and how the quest helped forge a son’s identity.

Now, a long-forgotten essay written 43 years ago by Obama’s father has surfaced, and its contents reveal much — not only about the senior Obama’s grasp of economic theory but also about the iconoclastic politics that, his son would later write, sent him into the spiral of career disappointment that concluded with his death in 1982 in his native Kenya.

Parts of the article, titled “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” have been making the rounds on several small blogs over the past week, but Politico.com is now, for the first time, reproducing the entire piece in its original form.

The scholarly eight-page paper, credited to “Barak H. Obama,” is never mentioned in “Dreams From My Father,” nor has the candidate discussed it in any of his many public speeches. (Politico brought the article to his campaign’s attention late last week, but aides did not respond to a request for comment from Obama.)

The paper’s substance, though, offers insight into the mind and the political trajectory of a man described by his son largely through his emotional life, his family and his traditions.

Published in the esoteric East Africa Journal in 1965, the year after Kenyan President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta took power and the country declared independence from British rule, the paper takes a gently mocking tone to the Kenyatta government’s key, controversial statement of economic policy, titled “African Socialism and Its Applicability to Planning in Kenya.”

Obama senior’s journal article repeatedly asks what the Kenyan government means by “African Socialism,” as distinct from Soviet-style communism, and concludes that the new phrase doesn’t mean much.

Elements of Obama’s argument now seem prescient, others deeply dated, but his central aim — particularly in the context of the heady early days of African independence — was moderate and conciliatory.

“The question is how are we going to remove the disparities in our country, such as the concentration of economic power in Asian and European hands, while not destroying what has already been achieved and at the same time assimilating these groups to build one country,” Obama senior wrote.

When he wrote the paper, he was in Nairobi and working on a never-completed Harvard doctoral dissertation, according to his brief biography in the journal.

Two years earlier, he had divorced his wife, who was raising his son in Hawaii.

But even back in Nairobi, the elder Obama felt free to mock the Kenyan government.

“Maybe it is better to have something perfunctorily done than none at all!” he concluded.

That’s the attitude, his son would later find, that took him from a career in the Kenyan governing class to “a small job at the Water Department” and then to unemployment and alcohol.

Obama senior, who returned to Kenya after his Harvard years, soon became a public critic of Kenyatta’s growing favoritism toward the Kikuyu tribe, over Obama’s Luos.

“Word got back to Kenyatta that the Old Man was a troublemaker, and he was called in to see the president. According to the stories, Kenyatta said to the Old Man that because he could not keep his mouth shut, he would not work again until he had no shoes on his feet,” Obama quoted his half-sister as telling him.

Obama wrote that his father was rehabilitated after Kenyatta’s death in 1978 but was by then broken and embittered.

Obama senior’s 1965 paper, however, brims with confidence and optimism.

The article, with a loaded term in the title and a casual discussion of socialism, communism and nationalization, has raised the hackles of some anti-Obama conservatives who have been discussing it online.

Greg Ransom, a blogger who unearthed the journal at the University of California, Los Angeles, library, calls the article “the Rosebud” that provides the missing key to Obama’s memoir. Ransom wrote about the article’s contents recently in a posting with the provocative headline “Obama Hid His Father’s Socialist and Anti-Western Convictions From His Readers.”

But Kenya expert Raymond Omwami, an economist and UCLA visiting professor from the University of Helsinki who has also worked at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, said Obama senior could not be considered a socialist himself based solely on the material in his bylined piece.

Omwami points out that the elder Obama’s paper was primarily a harsh critique of the controversial 1965 government document known as Sessional Paper No. 10. Sessional Paper No. 10 rejected classic Karl Marx philosophies then embraced by the Soviet Union and some European countries, calling instead for a new type of socialism to be used specifically in Africa.

The government paper rejected materialism (i.e., “conspicuous consumerism”), outlined the nation’s goals to eradicate poverty, illiteracy and disease, and also laid out important decrees regarding land use for economic development. Obama senior’s response covers these issues, frequently focusing on the distribution of real estate to farmers. Since most Kenyans could not afford farmland in line with market forces established earlier by white British farmers, the elder Obama argued that strong development planning should better define common farming space to maximize productivity and should defer to tribal traditions instead of hastening individual land ownership.

In other words, Obama senior’s paper was not a cry for acceptance of radical politics but was instead a critique of a government policy by Kenya’s Ministry of Economic Planning and Development, which applied African socialism principles to the country’s ongoing political upheaval.

“The critics of this article are making a big mistake,” says Omwami, who at Politico’s request read the document and the associated Internet debate over the weekend. “They are assuming Obama senior is the one who came up with this concept of African socialism, but that’s totally wrong. Based on that, they’re imbuing in him the idea that he himself is a socialist, but he is not.”

Omwami says he would instead refer to the elder Obama as “a liberal person who believed in market forces but understood its limitations.” Sessional Paper No. 10 centered on the new control of Kenya’s resources, promoting a form of trickle-down economics in which financial aid would be consolidated in more populated areas with the hope that positive effects would eventually be felt by smaller villages.

Obama senior argued against this notion, and Omwami suggests history has proven him correct since most, if not all, small communities in Kenya have yet to benefit from monies that poured into larger cities since the nation’s independence four decades ago.

The elder Obama also looked ahead to what has become a shaping force across Africa — urbanization — arguing that the government’s efforts to lure citizens back to the land were futile.

“If these people come out in search of work, it is because they cannot make a living out of whatever land they have had,” he wrote.

In retrospect, it was one of several warnings in the paper that would prove true.

“If you understand the Kenyan context, you can clearly see in that paper that Obama senior was quite a sharp mind,” Omwami concluded. “He addresses economic growth and other areas of development, and his critique is that policymakers in Kenya were overemphasizing economic growth.

“We had high economic growth for years but never solved the problems of poverty, unemployment and unequal income distribution. And those problems are still there.”

Obama senior’s projections and critiques are so spot on, says Omwami, that he plans to assign the paper to his classes in the future.

Webmaster note: Barack Obama's father believed that socialism could increase productivity.
It is true that proper uses of resources are of paramount importance if we are going to increase both productivity and per capita incomes, but we cannot deal with this unless and until we deal with ownership and within the African socialistic system. Problems Facing Our Socialism, page 29.

Webmaster note: Barack Obama's father believed believed in the public ownership of resources.
Looked at this way, we can avoud economic power concentration and bring standardized use and control of resources through public ownership, let alone the equitable distribution of economic gains that would follow. Problems Facing Our Socialism, page 29.

Webmaster note: Barack Obama's father believed that people should forced into collective farm camps.
Since proper land use and control is very important if we are going to overcome the dual character of our economy and thereby increase productivity, the government should take a positive stand and, if need be, force people to consolidate through the easiest way, which, I think, would be through clan co-operatives rather than through individual initiative. Problems Facing Our Socialism, page 29.

Webmaster note: Barack Obama's father believed restrictions should be placed on individual ownership of property.
If the government should, however, feel that individual ownership is the best policy to take in order to bring development, then it should restrict the size of farms that can be owned by one individual throughout the country and this should apply to everybody from the President to the ordinary man. Problems Facing Our Socialism, page 29.

Webmaster note: Barack Obama's father did not regard foreigners as people.
If some of these firms were to stop functioning today the country would be at a standstill. Let the government take an active part in these spheres and see to it that the people are actively represented in them. Problems Facing Our Socialism, page 30.

Webmaster note: Barack Obama's father believed in confiscatory taxation.
Certainly there is no limit to taxation if the benefits derived from public services by society measure up to the cost in taxation which they have to pay. Problems Facing Our Socialism, page 30.

Webmaster note: Barack Obama's father was well read in the communism of Karl Marx.
Yet one who has read Marx cannot fail to see that corporations are not only what Marx referred to as the advanced stage of capitalism but Marx even called it finance capitalism by which a few would control the finances of so many and through this have not only economic power but political power as well. Problems Facing Our Socialism, page 30.

Webmaster note: Barack Obama's father believed in confiscatory taxation.
Theoretically, there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 per cent of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed. Problems Facing Our Socialism, page 31.

Webmaster note: Barack Obama's father hated European and Asian enterprises.
If we are going to nationalize, we are going to nationalize what exists and is worth nationalizing. But these are European and Asian enterprises. Problems Facing Our Socialism, page 33.

Webmaster note: Barack Obama's father was a racist and hated non-black people.
Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country? It is mainly in this country that one finds almost everything owned by the non-indigenous populace. The government must do something about this and soon. Problems Facing Our Socialism, page 33.

Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Obama

April 10, 2008|Peter Wallsten | Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

CHICAGO — It was a celebration of Palestinian culture -- a night of music, dancing and a dash of politics. Local Arab Americans were bidding farewell to Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights, who was leaving town for a job in New York.

"That's my personal opinion," Ibish said, "and I think it for a very large number of circumstantial reasons, and what he's said."

Aides say that Obama's friendships with Palestinian Americans reflect only his ability to interact with a wide diversity of people, and that his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been consistent. Obama has called himself a "stalwart" supporter of the Jewish state and its security needs. He believes in an eventual two-state solution in which Jewish and Palestinian nations exist in peace, which is consistent with current U.S. policy.

Obama also calls for the U.S. to talk to such declared enemies as Iran, Syria and Cuba. But he argues that the Palestinian militant organization Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, is an exception, calling it a terrorist group that should renounce violence and recognize Israel's right to exist before dialogue begins. That viewpoint, which also matches current U.S. policy, clashes with that of many Palestinian advocates who urge the United States and Israel to treat Hamas as a partner in negotiations.

"Barack's belief is that it's important to understand other points of view, even if you can't agree with them," said his longtime political strategist, David Axelrod.

Obama "can disagree without shunning or demonizing those with other views," he said. "That's far different than the suggestion that he somehow tailors his view."

Looking for clues

But because Obama is relatively new on the national political scene, and new to foreign policy questions such as the long-simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both sides have been looking closely for clues to what role he would play in that dispute.
And both sides, on certain issues, have interpreted Obama's remarks as supporting their point of view.

Last year, for example, Obama was quoted saying that "nobody's suffering more than the Palestinian people." The candidate later said the remark had been taken out of context, and that he meant that the Palestinians were suffering "from the failure of the Palestinian leadership [in Gaza] to recognize Israel" and to renounce violence.

Abunimah quoted Obama as saying that he was sorry he wasn't talking more about the Palestinian cause, but that his primary campaign had constrained what he could say.

Obama, through his aide Axelrod, denied he ever said those words, and Abunimah's account could not be independently verified.

In Chicago, one of Obama's friends was Khalidi, a highly visible figure in the Arab American community.

The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.

Though Khalidi has seen little of Sen. Obama in recent years, Michelle Obama attended a party several months ago celebrating the marriage of the Khalidis' daughter.

"He has family literally all over the world," Khalidi said. "I feel a kindred spirit from that."

Ties with Israel

One Jewish leader said he viewed Obama's outreach to Palestinian activists, such as Said, in the light of his relationship to Wright.

"In the context of spending 20 years in a church where now it is clear the anti-Israel rhetoric was there, was repeated, . . . that's what makes his presence at an Arab American event with a Said a greater concern," said Abraham H. Foxman, national director for the Anti-Defamation League.

Obama's Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11

By BRIAN ROSS and REHAB EL-BURI
ABC News
March 13, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama's pastor says blacks should not sing "God Bless America" but "God damn America."

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's south side, has a long history of what even Obama's campaign aides concede is "inflammatory rhetoric," including the assertion that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own "terrorism."

In a campaign appearance earlier this month, Sen. Obama said, "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." He said Rev. Wright "is like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with," telling a Jewish group that everyone has someone like that in their family.

Rev. Wright married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, "The Audacity of Hope."

An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright's sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda's attacks because of its own terrorism.

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation.

Sen. Obama told the New York Times he was not at the church on the day of Rev. Wright's 9/11 sermon. "The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification," Obama said in a recent interview. "It sounds like he was trying to be provocative," Obama told the paper.

Rev. Wright, who announced his retirement last month, has built a large and loyal following at his church with his mesmerizing sermons, mixing traditional spiritual content and his views on contemporary issues.

"I wouldn't call it radical. I call it being black in America," said one congregation member outside the church last Sunday.

"He has impacted the life of Barack Obama so much so that he wants to portray that feeling he got from Rev. Wright onto the country because we all need something positive," said another member of the congregation.

Rev. Wright, who declined to be interviewed by ABC News, is considered one of the country's 10 most influential black pastors, according to members of the Obama campaign.

Obama has praised at least one aspect of Rev. Wright's approach, referring to his "social gospel" and his focus on Africa, "and I agree with him on that."

Sen. Obama declined to comment on Rev. Wright's denunciations of the United States, but a campaign religious adviser, Shaun Casey, appearing on "Good Morning America" Thursday, said Obama "had repudiated" those comments.

In a statement to ABCNews.com, Obama's press spokesman Bill Burton said, "Sen. Obama has said repeatedly that personal attacks such as this have no place in this campaign or our politics, whether they're offered from a platform at a rally or the pulpit of a church. Sen. Obama does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms. Like a member of his family, there are things he says with which Sen. Obama deeply disagrees. But now that he is retired, that doesn't detract from Sen. Obama's affection for Rev. Wright or his appreciation for the good works he has done."

MAIN INDEX

BIBLE INDEX

HINDU INDEX

MUSLIM INDEX

MORMON INDEX

BUDDHISM INDEX

WORD FAITH INDEX

WATCHTOWER INDEX

MISCELLANEOUS INDEX

CATHOLIC CHURCH INDEX