Meet the First Obama Girlfriend

It only took nearly six years for the media to begin vetting President Obama’s past.

Today, Vanity Fair released an excerpt from a new biography of Barack Obama by David Maraniss. The excerpt discusses Barack Obama's first love affair, with a white Australian woman named Genevieve Cook. It's a telling examination of who Obama was as a young man -- and it shows a self-absorbed "internationalist" with delusions of grandeur.

The book itself sounds like an ode to Obama. Maraniss writes, “At age 20, Obama was a man of the world … He could not be of one place, rooted and provincial.” No, says Maraniss, this was a broadminded young man who “knew the ways of different cultures better than he knew himself.”

When he first moved to New York, he was in the midst of an affair with Alexandra McNear, a girl from Occidental. They exchanged a series of purple letters with one another – turgid missives from overfevered young minds. Here, for example, is tendentious Obama explaining poetry to his young girlfriend:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets,

https://tinyurl.com/y9al3ug6

I am still married to Genevieve Moustafa-Cook. I haven’t divorced her. She disappeared from Australia with my two children Alaa Moustafa-Cook and Alyia Moustafa-Cook when they were aged 7 and 6 in 1996. I strongly believe in multiculturalism as Genevieve did and I look like Obama, who she always talked about which made me angry as in middleeastern culture it is forbidden. But it took me so many years to understand we should listen to womans’ feelings to. I wanted to change the world and draw my own. I started to believe I am a saviour the day that Genevieve asked me to keep her safe. I was so lonely and tired and broken hearted over an arranged marriage of the girl that I loved to someone else.

When selling books on the street corner as a boy in Alexandria, I fell in love with the Statue of Liberty and dreamed of America. As I arrived, the first thing I learned was the “f” word as my welcome. A young man who grew up in a country that does not have street signs or traffic lights and the children sit on the floor in schools. Schools with no playgrounds so we made our own in the surrounding streets.

Genevieve and I married in New York in the Waldorf Astoria but i didn’t really care where I got married and I thought about it as a waste. I remembered those nights back home where there was not always food for the 5 kids and if there was I would pretend I was full. But life in New York was even harder with 2 young kids trying to feed and educate them when the public schools were terrible so we decided to move to Australia. To me it was heaven on earth and I fell in love with it and I thought my dreams had come true. But since my family went back to New York in 1996, I have not been able to find them. Their names have changed but their skin has not. I have thought about them every day for the past 16 years. I know they are not children any more but they are still the same as the last time I saw them. I look at their pictures every day and named my restaurant Three Angels, after my 2 missing children and the one I have here with me. I was advised there is nothing I can do to find them. I understand clearly because I came from hell too and human beings are the same anywhere. Some good, some bad, some caring and some heartless. I didn’t give up. My faith in people was always there. Very funny when I was at my lowest, my middleastern friends were gone but total Aussie strangers gave me his hand. Then I remembered the comment that Genevieve’s mother made, not to go to Australia, as they are racist. But she was wrong. Even when I was at my lowest it was an Aussie that held my hand while the tears were flowing. And he asked me why? I remembered my kids and I was worried about them having to experience what I had to experience but I was very confident that they would be safe as they were surrounded by the most educated and civilised people

I had ever met.

I still remember when we all went for a walk to the river and I was happy for Michael Cook to carry my son on his shoulders. Then when he found broken beer bottles off the road, he was angry and picked up every single piece of shattered glass. It was a comparison in my mind of you way of life in a civilised world and the way of life that I came from. At that point I was so sad because he was worried about his dog getting glass in his foot when back home, if a man died on the road, someone covered him up with a newspaper. I am still sad for those who are less fortunate and haven’t had a chance to enjoy freedom. And when the uprising happened in Egypt and the regime fell on my birthday, February 13, I was so happy and I felt I was born again. As you know, I never celebrated my birthday like millions of children. I miss home and all my friends. My parents passed away without seeing their grandchildren as often as your mum. She arrived in Australia and never bothered to give photos of them but they are still in my heart and on my mind all the time. And God rewarded me with Jasmine. She is very good at school and gym and looks like her brother and sister. She misses them and is curious about them and looks at their photo.

I have made reckless phone calls to your mum in Washington but all the numbers have been cut off. I left a message to her to let her know, she was responsible for my hard times as I was dealing with your alcoholic, emotional and psychological problems all on my own. With a childhood that was full of trauma for both of us. As I entered Melbourne County Court for the day my legal aid announced I would be released, I was looking for you at the court room but no-one was there. I needed your support but no-one was there. The judge said that I had done my best to change your life but unfortunately you pushed me over the edge by something that had changed in you. As you became sober and free from alcohol, you looked at me as a total stranger despite the life I had been through, I did love you and I still strongly believe it was not your fault you were an alcoholic. And now I understand it was a disease but it was too late. But whatever happened, it was a total accident. I was lonely, depressed, far away from home on an island that I knew no-one. I made friends but they were not real friends and I met total Aussie strangers who helped me in my extremely difficult time. It was a beautiful day before Christmas to be free. It was afternoon rush, the sunshine was beautiful but I did not know where I should go. On King St corner in Melbourne, the pedestrian light turned green and I asked myself where I should go? You left me with nothing and I was there for 10 years for you. I missed the nights that when I come home at midnight I had to give the kids a bath after they were eating leftover pizza from my shop in New York. I still see you walking on West 53rd St crossing in front of my restaurant in your pyjamas to buy your wine and beer. That is why sometimes I would buy it for you. When you used to drink, you were a happy person so I didn’t mind but then it became worse and we decided to go to Australia.

I am happy where I am and I am very lucky. We have the best school and health care. And not so much gap between poor and rich. Now do you understand why Australians are very generous and it is a good place to raise children and to have the family of your dreams. Sorry Genevieve, I couldn’t take it for so long. Sorry that I collapsed and I took it all out on you and always remember it was only an accident and I was there so scared as you. I am sorry I did not let you talk about your feelings, as you know I am middleeastern and it took me so many years to understand that women have to talk about their past like men do. Until today, the thing that we believe didn’t change. Women still have no rights in so many places in our little world. But at least we tried.

Dear Genevieve, I haven’t left Australia and I have no plans to leave as it is my home. It was very emotional the day that my humanity was recognised when I became an Australian citizen and I really do appreciate it.

Would you please tell my kids that I am alive and well and you always remember I love you just as I love them.

www.obamaelmasry.ga

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