Posted on 01/27/2007 9:15:10 PM PST by bruinbirdman
WHEN Barack Obama, America’s newest presidential hopeful, was hit by allegations that he had attended a radical Islamic madrasah school as a boy in Indonesia, the claims spread like a virus through the media and internet.
It was a lie — the school was barely more religious than British church schools — but it was also a sign that Obama’s chances of winning the presidency depend to an unusual degree on his life story and character.
The race is on to define the gifted but little-known senator for Illinois and The Sunday Times can reveal that his heritage is far more diverse and astonishing than anything American voters have heard so far.
Obama, 45, has two half- sisters, one living in Britain, and five surviving half-brothers, the eldest of whom converted to Islam, and whose stories span the globe.
Nobody was more surprised to hear that Obama had reportedly been educated in a madrasah than Julia Suryakusuma, a close friend of his mother until her death from ovarian cancer in 1995.
Suryakusuma, 53, one of Indonesia’s most outspoken feminist writers, has fearlessly taken on extremist Muslim clerics in print. Last week she described Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, “as a liberal and a humanist”, who learnt to speak fluent Indonesian and adored the culture.
“She was interested in religions but didn’t follow one. She was a free-thinker,” Suryakusuma said. “She was a pioneer and when she came to Indonesia she was ensnared and enchanted.”
On the coffee table in her cool modern house in Jakarta, full of the beautiful Indonesian fabrics and carvings which captivated her friend, lies an album of photographs which record the happy times.
There is Dunham, pale-skinned, jolly and frizzy-haired, celebrating with her friends at an art gallery opening or a drinks party, wearing the baggy, free-flowing clothes often favoured by bohemian western women in Asia. She always seemed to be laughing.
“You know Ann was really, really white,” smiled Suryakusuma, looking through the album, “even though she told me she had some Cherokee blood in her. I think she just loved people of a different skin colour, brown people.”
Dunham was from Wichita, Kansas, but her parents moved to Hawaii in search of a better life. According to Obama, a distant ancestor was a “full-blooded Cherokee”.
Dunham’s first marriage was to a Kenyan student, also called Barack Obama, but he left the family to study at Harvard and returned to Africa.
She went on to marry Lolo Soetoro, another foreign student, and moved to his native Indonesia with six-year-old Barack in 1967, after the new dictator Suharto summoned the country’s citizens home.
Soetoro became a government relations consultant with a big US oil company. “He changed when he came back to Indonesia,” Suryakusuma recalled. “Men can be a certain way when they are in the West and when they come back they are sucked into their own culture.”
In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, first published in 1995, Obama does not conceal the estrangement between his mother and stepfather as Soetoro made compromises with Indonesia’s power elite. They divorced and he died decades later of a liver complaint.
At 10, Obama returned to Hawaii, where he lived with his grandparents and attended an elite private school. His mother went back to Indonesia with Obama’s half-sister Maya, now a professor at the University of Hawaii, and became an expert on the “feminine crafts”, such as weaving and basket-making, practised by the women of Java.
Suryakusuma recalled that Dunham called her son “Berry” — Barry with an Indonesian lilt. “We were both mothers and we talked about how difficult it was for a mother to separate herself and send her child away, but she was really concerned about Barry’s education.”
She first met Obama when he came to visit his mother as a young adult. “She was so proud of him. I remember she was glowing with pride when he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.
“You know, having a white mother and a black father and coming to Indonesia,” Suryakusuma reflected, “I could see he had the same kind of empathy with people that his mother had.”
Obama’s multi-hued heritage has put a distance between him and the African-American community, which has been reluctant to claim him as a “brother”.
America’s white community, in contrast, has embraced Obama as a hopeful affirmation that the fabled melting pot can transcend race. With his middle name Hussein (like Saddam) and surname Obama (like Osama), he is a rare and exotic figure in American politics.
“I believe the American electorate is ready to support leaders who embody the American dream despite their differences. In doing so, we affirm ourselves as a tolerant people,” said William Galston, a senior fellow in public policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Yet there are details in Obama’s life that have yet to be subjected to full scrutiny. It may not be the information itself that matters, according to Galston, but “how Obama talks about the facts as they emerge and handles questions and controversies”.
The Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet was the first to spot in 2004, when Obama burst on the national stage at the Democratic party convention, that his memoir, Dreams from My Father, contained “composite” characters and changed names.
“Except for public figures and his family, it is impossible to know who is real and who is not,” she pointed out.
Obama admitted as much in his introduction, saying he had altered characters “for the sake of their privacy”. As with the revelation that he took cocaine in his youth, he appears to have been candid about potential areas of controversy.
Obama’s African family is particularly complicated. By his own account, his father never really left Kezia, his first wife, in Kenya. She bore Obama Sr two children, Roy and Auma, who now works in social services in Berkshire.
They were separated, Obama’s mother claimed, but “it was a village wedding and there was no document that could suggest a divorce”.
His own father and mother’s wedding in Hawaii may not have been properly documented either. “How and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I have never quite had the courage to explore,” Obama writes in his memoir.
After his father left Ann and two-year-old Barack to study at Harvard, he went to Africa with another American woman, Ruth, who became his third wife. She bore him two sons in Kenya, one of whom died in a motorcycle accident, but Obama Sr continued to see Kezia.
“Traditionally, she was still his wife,” a relative explained. Kezia went on to bear two more sons, Abo and Bernard. Although their paternity is disputed by some relatives, Obama Sr regarded them as his own. Later in life, he fathered another son, George, by a young Kenyan woman.
After his parents split up, Obama saw his father only once before learning that he had died in a car crash in Kenya in 1982.
Obama’s eldest brother Roy moved to America and went on to convert to Islam.
Obama, in contrast, became a committed Christian while he was working as a community activist in Chicago. Last week he denounced the reports that he was educated in a madrasah as a “ludicrous” smear.
Larry Sabato, professor of political science at the University of Virginia, believes Obama’s richly textured African and Indonesian background will attract voters, no matter how controversial it is.
“America loves a success story — the new generation that rises from the sins and misfortunes of the older generation,” Sabato said.
In Indonesia, Suryakusuma said she could still feel the “warm” presence of Obama’s mother Ann. “She would be so proud if she knew about Barry, so proud to think that her little boy would be running for president of the United States.”
Americans don't vote for candidates with character. Goldwater was the last one, and you know what happened to him. Kennedy was the last president with any sort of character, and you know what happened to him. Anybody with character who is smart enough to hold the job is also smart enough to avoid it.
DOA?
No. There is no candidate so vile the democrats would not support if it would help them destroy the last free country on earth.
The bribes and blackmail in 4,3,2,
Obama has *got* to be pond scum. After all, he's a US senator. And, since he's also a Democrat, 'Muslim fanatic' might just be a promotion!
"Little known??" What he stands for may be little known, but . . .
How does one prove they are a natural born citizen of the U.S. and therefore met the constitutional requirement to run for POUS? Is it done with a birth certificate, or a bunch interviews from the local village???
O'bombHa, show me the paperwork.
These Obama orgies by the guilt-ridden PC white press are getting to be complete barfers.
Shut up already, you morons.
Kennedy had character? Please elaborate. He was son of Joe Kennedy and had the election bought for himself. He was a horrific womanizer (even after seeing how his father treated his mother). He was drugged. Where's the character?
Accept him for what he is - a communist - and beat him for that.
What's with the Cherokee? Seems to me practically everyone who can trace their ancestry
back and claim Indian blood ... insist it was Cherokee. Cherokee's must have been very
busy in early America.
If he wins the vote, he won't be the first one we've had occupy the whitehouse. hehe
Thats not a family tree, it's a family tangle.
so can we call him Barry Big Ears now?
That would not be a stretch at all. Obama's mother was a free love hippie Unitarian who spent the better part of her life stuck in the 60's. For better or worse I've known these people before, and believe me - Ann Dunham has all the telltale signs of a mushroom licking flower sniffing fruitloop.
I knew several of these types of women in high school and college. It's typically a daughter of early baby boomers - almost always white liberal parents who are extremely active in either a fringe cultish liberal church or an atheist movement. She grows up with all the other flower children of their parent's friends, and spend the better part of high school getting dragged around to protest marches and peace sitins not unlike the one that happened in DC yesterday. Once high school is over, she leaves for college, having never worked a day in her life. She's idealistic nonetheless, thinks of herself as an expert on everything, and is arrogant as hell. She thinks that she personally knows how to fix the world's problems, and the solution always involves creating more peace, love, and multiculturalism.
When she get to college she'll hook up with a beatnik liberal professor in some fake major such as "gender studies" or a traditionally liberal field such as sociology or literature. That's when she starts meeting exchange students on a visa from some third world craphole, often attracted by an exotic sounding name, culture, or religion...which is more often than not islam. A few months of free love go by and he inevitably gets her knocked up, which in the best case scenario will produce a wedding - which the visa guy is always happy to oblige since it means a path to citizenship via a wife and anchor babies. Since the girl's not emotionally mature enough to handle marriage, and since the guy's in it for reasons other than genuine affection for her, it almost always ends in divorce. Followed by another marriage to another muslim on a visa, and a couple of babies. Followed by another divorce and so forth. In the worst cases the girl, now an unwed mother of several children by several different husbands, finds her finances drying up around Junior or Senior year of college and drops out. Then its off to the south pacific for a decade of collecting medicinal herbs and flowers with the kids in tow.
Now ask yourself - what effects would you expect that kind of a lifestyle to have on the children it produces (and, yes, victimizes)? They grow up as flower children just like their parents. They grow up getting dragged all over the remote extremities of the third world while mommy collects exotic weeds and searches for "inner peace." They grow up in a social circle with other flower children in tow of their hippie parents. They grow up getting shuffled through school after school after school, many of which are ideologically supportive of marxism like their parents and none of which resemble anything near a traditional education. They grow up attending protest marches, Unitarian youth outings, and the local chapter of Osama Scouts in whatever backwards cesspool of a country their parents happen to be visiting.
That is what produced Barack Obama.
I actually pity the guy some, because he can't help the fact he was born to a hippie nutcase. But don't doubt for a minute that this same hippie nutcase indoctrinated her kids in the same marxist crap she grew up on. And don't doubt for a minute that he believes in it to this day. The fact that Obama had a partially muslim upbringing is notable, but it is not the problem. It is only a symptom of the problem. The problem was the marxist hippie lifestyle he was raised in, which also happened to include a dose of islam amidst all sorts of other crazy leftwing ideologies.
I would really hope that we conservatives could defeat this guy based upon the fact that his liberalism is corrupt and dangerous. This should matter ONLY as a possible window into his soul and illuminate why he has omitted so much as he attempted to romanticize his old man in his book.
Why do we never see his mom? Doesn't he owe infinitely more to her and his maternal grandparents than runabout Dad? What does his relative lack of celebration of MOM say about how he wants us to percieve his public personae?
I don't know about Obama Jr, but his father could have secured the Dem nomination with that resume.
At the time people thought he had good character. The debunking came much later.
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