“Of course, one of the main reasons the nation is now “divided, resentful and angry” is because race-baiting, Islamist, class warrior Barack Hussein Obama was president for eight long years." MATTHEW VADUM
How Obama’s Muslim Childhood Became a Taboo Topic
https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-obamas-muslim-childhood-became-a-taboo-
Reflections on when a gigantic biographical inconvenience was successfully hidden and denied.
June 23, 2023 by Daniel Pipes 22 Comments
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[Order Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
Americans have an abiding fascination with their presidents, especially with their foibles and secrets. Who lied? Who ordered illegal operations? Who had mistresses?
Thus was the country transfixed by Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, and the tawdry drip-drip of their liaison. When newly declassified documents revealed hitherto unknown CIA connections to Lee Harvey Oswald, this made a media splash, with Tucker Carlson asking: “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy?”
But that fascination dies when it comes to Barack Obama, the Left’s quasi-sacred figure. About him, no curiosity, please, no gossip, and no hint of impropriety. When he falsely claimed in 1991 to have been born in Kenya, and not in Hawaii, blame fell on a sloppy literary agent. When Stanley Kurtz proved that Obama lied about not being a member of Chicago’s socialist New Party and a candidate for it, the Obama P.R. machine smeared Kurtz and the story disappeared.
When clear evidence showed that Obama had lied about having been born and raised a Muslim, the researcher who made the case was reviled, his investigation scorned, and his argument vaporized.
I should know, as I was that researcher. I wrote five times on this topic in 2007-08, during Obama’s first presidential campaign (three of those times in FrontPageMag.com) and then aggregated all this information, plus new details, in a long and (so far) definitive September 2012 article, “Obama’s Muslim Childhood,” serialized in the Washington Times.
All those writings emphasized that Obama was now a Christian. The first one began with:
“If I were a Muslim I would let you know,” Barack Obama has said, and I believe him. In fact, he is a practicing Christian, a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ. He is not now a Muslim. But was he ever a Muslim or seen by others as a Muslim?
I answered in the affirmative and showed how contradictory evidence concerning Obama’s religious background – from Obama’s father and name, from years in Indonesia, from his family, and most of all from himself – conclusively points to his being born and raised a Muslim.
Throughout, I emphasized not the Islam issue but the character issue; if Obama lies about something so fundamental, how can he be trusted? His other lies, such as Kenyan birth and socialist party non-membership, confirm this problem.
Responses came fast and hard. Ben Rhodes’ “echo chamber” nearly fainted at the impudence of my lèse majesté. Like Kurtz, I was slandered without the facts I presented ever addressed. Here’s a small sampling of the deluge:
· Ben Smith in Politico derided my analysis as “the template for a faux-legitimate assault on Obama’s religion.”
· The Spectator called mine the “the worst article on the presidential election” and also deemed it “mad” and “despicable.”
· Martin Peretz in the New Republic said I had “simply gone bonkers … and malicious.”
· Vice ran an article “Would You Care If Obama Were Muslim?” that responded to my carefully-crafted argument with “BLARGHA BLARGHA BLARGH REPEAL OBAMA BIN HUSSEIN’S GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER OF OUR JOBS.”
The Atlantic published no less than three attacks on the article and me. Mark Ambinder rued “the false notion that Obama is or was ever Muslim.” Andrew Sullivan dismissed my work as “toxins.” Matthew Yglesias ridiculed my saying that I believe Obama is not now a Muslim with “I, for one, believe Daniel Pipes when he says he’s not a child molester.”
And so it went, howling with outrage at the very thought of Obama as a Muslim, mocking and taunting me with ad hominem attacks, speculating about my motives. So relentless was the onslaught, even the conservative press overwhelmingly shied away from the topic. The McCain and Romney campaigns both treated the topic like Kryptonite. The issue of Obama’s lies had no impact on either presidential campaign, both of which – of course – Obama won.
I expect that, at some future time when Barack Obama loses his sacral quality, historians will take great interest in his childhood religious affiliation. They will wonder how, in the information-heavy, politically-riven, and celebrity-mad culture of early twenty-first century United States, so gigantic a biographical inconvenience could be successfully hidden and rendered taboo. They will study how, in a modern democratic society, a determined candidate can suppress even the most important and relevant information.
I look forward to the vindication.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2023 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
Obama Criticizes Israel over Gaza: ‘Don’t Harden Palestinian Attitudes for Generations’
Former President Barack Obama originally said Israel should “dismantle” Hamas, but has now criticized Israel for the way it is “dismantling” the Palestinian terror organization.
In a statement Monday, Obama wrote:
As I stated in an earlier post, Israel has a right to defend its citizens against such wanton violence, and I fully support President Biden’s call for the United States to support our long-time ally in going after Hamas, dismantling its military capabilities, and facilitating the safe return of hundreds of hostages to their families.
But even as we support Israel, we should also be clear that how Israel prosecutes this fight against Hamas matters.
…
Still, the world is watching closely as events in the region unfold, and any Israeli military strategy that ignores the human costs could ultimately backfire. Already, thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the bombing of Gaza, many of them children. Hundreds of thousands have been forced from their homes. The Israeli government’s decision to cut off food, water and electricity to a captive civilian population threatens not only to worsen a growing humanitarian crisis; it could further harden Palestinian attitudes for generations, erode global support for Israel, play into the hands of Israel’s enemies, and undermine long term efforts to achieve peace and stability in the region.
A siege of Gaza would be lawful under international law, as an expert recently noted. Moreover, as Israel’s ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog, has noted, Gaza only obtains 7% of its water from Israel in any case.
Obama ignored Israel’s long record as one of the best, if not the best, countries in the world in upholding human rights and international humanitarian law in war against a ruthless, terrorist enemy.
As Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz has said: ““No other country with comparable internal and external threats has as good a human rights record as Israel.”
Obama’s own approach to terrorism came under criticism when he was president for being ineffective. Foreign Affairs wrote:
[W]hereas [George W.] Bush’s approach was sometimes marred by an overly aggressive posture, Obama has sometimes erred too far in the other direction, seeming prone to idealism and wishful thinking. This has hampered his administration’s efforts to combat the terrorist threat: despite Obama’s laudable attempts to calibrate Washington’s response, the American people find themselves living in a world plagued with more terrorism than before Obama took office, not less.
Obama allowed the rise of ISIS, the so-called “Islamic State,” after a hasty retreat from Iraq and after mocking the group as the “JV team” in explaining why his adminstration was not being more assertive in standing up to radical Islamic terror — a phase he almost never used.
Politico reports that Democrats are starting to worry about a backlash among Arab-American voters in swing states like Michigan, who are upset that most elected Democrats — with very prominent exceptions — have supported Israel against Hamas.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
*** WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT *** ‘This Is the Gate of Hell’: Israeli Forensic Team Shows Media Bodies of Hundreds of Hamas Terror Victims
SHURA MILITARY BASE, Ramle, Israel — “This is the gate of hell.” That is how Gilat Bahat, an officer in the Israeli Police, describes the effort to identify the victims of the October 7 attack by the Palestinian terror group Hamas.
Israeli authorities brought the foreign press to this site to share the horror of what happened to innocent civilians — and to make sure there is never any doubt, never any attempt to deny it, or to excuse it.
Of the more than 1,400 people murdered, 784 bodies have been delivered to this site, in refrigerated trucks. The bodies are already bagged by first responders; the forensic investigators then have to open the bags to identify the victims.
They dread the moment.
Reporters view refrigerated trucks containing hundreds of bodies of Israeli victims murdered by Palestinian Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. Shura Military Base, Ramle, Israel, October 24, 2023 (Joel Pollak / Bretbart News)
Michal Levin Elad, a 25-year veteran of crime scene investigations for the Israeli police, told reporters: “We have seen children who were decapitated. We have seen children who were dismembered. It’s sights I have never seen before and hope to God I never see again.”
One particularly difficult moment, she said, was when they had to examine the body of one of their colleagues — a forensic investigator who had been at the Supernova music festival.
“I went to see him so that family and friends would know how he died,” she said. She was relieved: “He was one of the fortunate ones that was just shot.”
Other bodies, Bahat said, arrived in parts, having been dismembered. Some bodies were beheaded after being shot. The worst, he said, were the large groups of small bags — children, including infants between three and six months old, who had been shot and burned.
“This is the enemy we are dealing with.”
Refrigerated trucks containing hundreds of bodies of Israeli victims murdered by Palestinian Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. Shura Military Base, Ramle, Israel, October 24, 2023 (Joel Pollak / Bretbart News)
Dentist Dr. Ilana Engin, who volunteers as a forensic investigator, said, “The horrors of what I saw will be etched in my mind forever.”
Some remains were “heads without bodies that we needed to identify.” Some bodies “ended up being two people hugging together while being burnt.” And some bodies were little more than fragments of bone and ashes.
She spoke about the struggle to put her own emotions aside when she herself is a mother of a three-year-old.
Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart NewsNatah Katz, a commander in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in charge of forensic investigations, said: “I’ve been trying to shield my family and my friends from everything that has happened over the past two weeks. But the time has come for everybody to understand what happened.”
He spoke of whole families who had been torn to pieces when terrorists threw grenades into the bomb shelters where they had been hiding. He spoke of the eight Thai farmworkers whose hands had been bound behind their backs with Zip ties, who had been forced to kneel, and who were then executed with shots to the back of the head.
“These are things that I will never get out of my head. Nobody will.
“These are atrocities on a Holocaust scale.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Watch: The Horror of the Hamas Terror Attack on Civilians at Kibbutz Be’eri in Israel
Breitbart News’ Joel Pollak details the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7 and explains why Israel’s fight against the terror group is important for peace in the Middle East.
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