Daily Kos Documents Official Coordination with Obama Campaign

Readers may know that Daily Kos published Barack Obama's "Certification of Birth" yesterday, apparently in a bid to tamp down speculation that the Illinois Senator is foreign born or otherwise not fully forthcoming about his family origins.

Questions of authenticity as to Obama's birth document surfaced immediately. Thus in what I would consider a major revelation, Kos himself has revealed that the document was provided by the Obama campaign itself.

When asked where he got the certificate, Kos says, in the comments to the post:

I asked the campaign ...

Think about this: With all the attention to Barack Obama's community blogs, on the campaign's official website, here we have more evidence that Obama is comfortable in endorsing the work of preachers of hate.

The Kos page still hosts the rabidly anti-Semitic entry, "Eulogy before the Inevitability of Self-Destruction: The Decline and Death of Israel."

Kos himself recently attacked John McCain's physical appearance, ridiculing the Arizona Senator in a post entitled "McCain's Teeth."

The "teeth" post is particularly egregious, considering that the McCain's teeth were broken off at the gumline by his North Vietnamese captors in 1968. As Captaid Ed has noted concerning Kos' attacks on McCain's appearance:

You know, I fail to see how this heals the oceans, helps Michelle Obama’s kids, or has anything to do with why people should vote for or against John McCain. Then again, I’m not the blogosphere’s cheerleader-in-chief for a candidate with no executive experience, no foreign-policy experience, no military experience, and a grand total of three years in national office with no legislative track record. If I was, I’d be tempted to find distractions like the tooth color of a man whose mouth and the rest of his body got tortured and beaten for five and a half years in service to this country.

Note the Captain's reference to the blogoshere's main "cheerleader" for Obama.

This is important, as Kos' page is one of the most prominent repositories of the left's anti-military culture - indeed, Kos himself has argued prevously that every death in Iraq "should be on the front-page," in furtherance of the left's antiwar program of military delegitimization.

I've noted before how Kos claims that his netroots movement represents the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

Thus, it's significant to see now that the presumptive Democratic nominee has confirmed this claim, by providing documentary evidence of birth certification to Markos Moultisas himself.

Now, step back and think about the political parties in terms of organization and hierarchy: The presidential nominee - who is to be officially endorsed by the party at the summer nominating convention - is the spokesperson for the movement and goals of that partisan entity and its popular following.

I have often been spuriously criticized by left-wing nihilists for alleged loose, "guilt by association" attacks on left-wing bloggers and Democratic Party antiwar hacks. But make no mistake, with this latest development in political coordination between Daily Kos and the Obama campaign, we're seeing the true development of a seamless union between the hardcore base of the McCain-bashing anti-Semitic netroots hordes and the top tier of the Democratic Party establishment.

So let me send out the call once more for conservative unity. Our political opponents will sink to the lowest depths of demonization to hatch their plan for a radical takeover of this country.

It's Obama's Deceit, Not His Religion

Like Melanie Phillips, some folks have ignorantly taken me to task with allegations that I've called Barack Obama a Muslim. I have not.

But let's hear more on such attacks from Melanie:

My oh my, what a firestorm I appear to have started with my remarks two days ago on Obama’s background! It was wholly expected, of course, but nevertheless the posters’ comments are so revealing. They graphically illustrate the way in which Obamania has quite obviously destroyed the capacity for reason.

First, it is quite clear that any questioning at all of Obama’s background is entirely off-limits. Next, the posters fail totally to grasp that the real point isn’t what faith he professed or was brought up in as a child – it is the fact that he has not told the truth about his early background. Then, some even compare such questioning with the ‘truthers’ who allege that 9/11 was perpetrated by a conspiracy between America and Israel. They thus demonstrate that they cannot tell the difference between rationality and lunacy, evidence and fantasy, failing to grasp that the sole reason for the questions about Obama is the many discrepancies in the accounts of his early life -- including his own accounts -- plus his many questionable associations.

Ignoring all this substantive evidence and the legitimate questions to which it gives rise (can you imagine how they would be slavering about all this were Obama a Republican candidate??) they instead hurl insults at both me and my sources such as Daniel Pipes – a fine and authoritative scholar (and who has also exposed those who claim he has peddled falsehoods as themselves peddling falsehoods) whose own observations about Obama’s background are clearly and reliably sourced and are couched in Pipes’s characteristically cautious manner -- and then annouce that they have won the argument hands-down!

Oh dear. America really does have a problem here. Looks like what I wrote months ago, that the Obama phenomenon might mean the Americans too are succumbing to Princess Diana Derangement Syndrome, was a serious understatement....

As I have already said -- but let me repeat very slowly for those suffering from Princess Obama Derangement Syndrome – the concerns about Obama’s Muslim antecedents arise from the fact that a) he has tried to conceal them and b) that he has a puzzling number of indirect connections with radical Islamists or their supporters.

1) He has gone out of his way to support in Kenya Raila Odinga, head of the Luo tribe, who promised to introduce sharia law if elected. Obama interrupted his New Hampshire campaign to speak by phone with Odinga. As the Investor’s Business Daily has reported, his half-brother Abongo ‘Roy’ Obama is a Luo activist in Kenya and a militant Muslim who argues that the black man must ‘liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture’ and urges Barack to embrace his African Muslim heritage.

Barack Obama has said he disagrees with his brother. But as the IBD has also reported:

In 1991, when Obama joined the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, he pledged allegiance to something called the Black Value System, which is a code of non-Biblical ethics written by blacks, for blacks. It encourages blacks to group together and separate from the larger American society by pooling their money, patronizing black-only businesses and backing black leaders. Such racial separatism is strangely at odds with the media's portrayal of Obama as a uniter who reaches across races. The code also warns blacks to avoid the white ‘entrapment of black middle-classness,’ suggesting that settling for that kind of ‘competitive’ success will rob blacks of their African identity and keep them ‘captive’ to white culture.

2) His mentor, the black power-supporting Christian pastor Jeremiah Wright, is a close associate of Louis Farrakhan, the demagogue leader of the black power, Jew-hating militant organisation Nation of Islam. A number of Obama’s own staffers have been members of the Nation of Islam.

3) Tony Rezko, who was recently convicted of fraud, money laundering and bribery conspiracy, has been a major supporter of Obama and contributor to his cause – the full extent of which Obama tried to conceal. The Chicago Sun-Times reported:

During his 12 years in politics, Sen. Barack Obama has received nearly three times more campaign cash from indicted businessman Tony Rezko and his associates than he has publicly acknowledged, the Chicago Sun-Times has found. Obama has collected at least $168,308 from Rezko and his circle. Obama also has taken in an unknown amount of money from people who attended fund-raising events hosted by Rezko since the mid-1990s.

He also did a land deal with Rezko in 2005, buying land from him to enlarge his own adjoining house at what has been reported to be a discount -- a transaction Obama has subsequently called ‘bone-headed’. In a further twist, as the Times reported earlier this year, a British-Iraqi billionaire, Nadhmi Auchi, who is said to have had connections with Saddam Hussein and who was convicted for corruption in France, lent millions of dollars to Rezko just weeks before that ‘bone-headed’ land deal.

But what has received far less attention is Rezko’s connections with the Nation of Islam. Reszko, born in Syria, was a business associate of Jabir Herbert Muhammad, the son of the founder of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, serving as a vice president and general manager of JHM’s firm Crucial Inc. And finally, Rezko was bailed from jail by Ali Baghdadi, the ‘Middle East adviser’ to the Nation of Islam.

Who know what all this adds up to? But isn’t it rather important that someone finds out before November?

To repeat once again for sufferers from PODS: the issue is NOT Obama’s religion, now or in the past. It is the many questions which need to be answered about a) why he has sought to conceal his early background; b) why he has so many indirect associations with radical Islamism; and c) whether these two questions are in some way related.

Anyone who doesn’t think all this cries out for proper investigation is either a fool or a knave.

I'll put my money on the knaves.

Multicultural Racist Ideology

In response to my morning post, "Arguing Freedom of Speech: American Enlightenment in Perspective," my ace commenter Tim took issue with the term "multi-culti" ideology.

I suggested in reply that multiculturalism is actually a separatist ideology, used for bludgeoning by the radical left, and I left some resources from the Ayn Rand Institute. Following the links one finds, "Multiculturalism: The New Racism":

By embracing “diversity,” multiculturalism claims to extinguish racism. Far from being a cure for racism, multiculturalism is racism in a new, self-righteous guise....

Multiculturalism holds that an individual’s identity and personal worth are determined by ethnic/racial membership—not by his own choices and actions. One cannot urge people to believe that their identity is determined by skin color and expect them to become colorblind. Observe, for instance, how college students have become racial separatists, choosing their friends based on ethnicity—and banding together to form self-segregated dormitories.

Or consider how the clamor for “slave reparations” in fact engenders racism. Whites today, who never owned slaves and bear no personal responsibility for slavery, are asked to accept collective responsibility—simply because they belong to the same race as the slave-owners of the Old South. People are seen not as individuals, but as fragments of a tribal collective.

The premise lurking in the shadows of multiculturalism’s ostensible goals is that the individual’s life has no value or importance apart from the tribal group. He is unworthy of living—because, according to multiculturalism, he is incapable: at root multiculturalism is an assault on the human mind.

Multiculturalism's not assimiliation in the American tradition of openness and integration; it's not a celebration of the ideals of liberty and opportunity, e pluribus unum.

I see it as an ideology of death, and I hope the Ayn Rand link will help folks think more clearly about such issues.

Anti-Semitism at Lawyers, Guns and Money

Since I've been blogging a bit on left-wing anti-Semitism, I'd be remiss to ignore the blow-up on the left over Lawyers, Guns and Money's anti-Jewish theories of alleged Christian evangelical destruction of Judea.

What's the common ground between evangelicals and the Jews?

Listen; it's not just that Evangelicals value Israel in a strictly utilitarian sense, rather than as a country full of human beings. That's certainly part of it, but it's not the only part, and obviously alliances based on a pragmatism can work. But not to put too fine a point on it, RADICAL APOCALYPTIC EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTISM IS NOT GOOD FOR THE JEWS. Pragmatic calculations change, and when it comes time for Hagee and his crew to sell the Jews down the river, they will do so without a twinge of conscience, and in utter confidence that they are doing God's work. Alliances with people who view your destruction as a stepping stone to Armageddon and who, moreover, hate everything else that you represent (loathing of "latte sipping elitist intellectuals" is recognizable as anti-semitism to anyone with eyes open) will not, in the fullness of time, prove sensible.

Beyond the expressive loathing of alleged ubiquitous Jewish coffee-beverage drinkers (God, who could possible think up this hatred?!!), I get the feeling that LGM would gleefully rejoice in Hagee's alleged prophecies coming true for the furtherance of the left's apocalyptic partisan political purposes.

Never mind that Hagee is not McCain's pastor, or that McCain did not attend Hagee's church. Nope, it doesn't matter: Hagee's the new Wright. The YouTube's will be busting off the screen until November! McCain's anti-Semitic! God, we were right all along ... the GOP's Christian Zionism's really a subterranean plot for the destruction of the Jewish homeland.

And Sadly No!, atop the watchtower, endorses LGM, exept that bit about the loathing of elite latte sippers:

Here’s Robert Farley, in a spectacularly irresponsible parenthetical aside to an otherwise sensible post about the Christian fundamentalist-AIPAC alliance:

loathing of “latte sipping elitist intellectuals” is recognizable as anti-semitism to anyone with eyes open

You have got to be sh***ing me.

This is the sort of gift to the right-wing Identity Politickers and Corporate Whores that only a well-paid, hippie-hating academic can give. In one phrase, Farley’s outdone in spades all the Julia Gorins and David Brookses and Norman Podhoretzes of wingnuttia’s “Let’s Cheapen and Expand the Definition of Anti-Semitism Until it Means Nothing Yet Applies to the Entire Left” brigade and at the same time utterly smeared and potentially hamstrung the entire Left Populist movement.

There's one slight problem: This is not a sensible post.

But let me direct readers to Bruce Wilson, who finds anti-Jewish conspiracies in Japanese comic books:

For several years now, I have been tracking and studying the covert aspects of Christian Zionism but today an anonymous source - a devoted and concerned student of the spread of anti-Semitic ideas within American pop-culture and religious culture - sent to me a product, currently sold at Barnes and Noble bookstores, that suggests the historically covert anti-Semitism within American Christian Zionist culture is mutating, changing and entering a new phase: the anti-Semitism is becoming overt. The Christian Zionism of Tim Lahaye and of Senator John McCain's recently renounced political endorser Pastor John Hagee, which has traditionally perpetrated coded attacks on Jews while also declaring them to be blessed by God, especially if they move to Israel, may be entering a new and very dark phase.

What's Wilson's training manual for the Jews' destruction?

Manga Messiah, a popular Japanese comic book novel. Here's how Focus on the Family describes the book:

Using the manga comic format that is so popular with today's tweens and teens, this book portrays the life of Jesus from the prophecies that foretold his birth to His ascension into Heaven. Adapted from the ancient Scriptures, these 23 stories refer to Jesus as Yeshuah and use more obscure names in referring to his parents ("Miryam" for Mary and "Yosef" for Joseph). While this graphic novel is not a literal word-for-word presentation of the Bible, the text remains true to the Scriptures. Although this book would not typically be categorized as a devotional, for those who wish to dig deeper in their study of Christ's life, the Scripture references listed on the bottom of each page point to the passage(s) on which the action is based. The writer also adds brief descriptions to the dialogue so that the reader will better understand the settings for these stories. Additional comic "bubbles" within the illustrations gives insight into the thoughts and reactions of the characters. True to comic book format, words such as crash, woosh, rumble and thump are also inserted into the drawings to help readers imagine the sounds that accompany the story.

This is not the description of evangelical hatred we get from Wilson:

Pastor John Hagee professes, with great apparent sincerity, even to tears, to love Jews. But Hagee also promotes, in his sermons and literature, conspiracy theories that trace back, in their lineage, to "The Protocols of The Elders of Zion" and Henry Ford's "The International Jew". How, then, can these clashing views of John Hagee be reconciled ? One answer comes, in the form of a question, from the account of Henry Ford and Rabbi Frankel -- what is the nature of friendship and what is the nature of love ? Another answer comes from the field of criminology, which recognizes: love, hate and murder are, all too often, tragically, not far apart.

Hate-masters on the left, like Wilson, and those at Lawyers, Guns and Money, are so quick to denounce conservative Christians that their attacks backfire to illustrate their own true anti-Semitic ideologies and eliminationist political programs. Nothing is beyond the pale for leftists, who hate George W. Bush, John McCain, the GOP, and its evangelical base.

Compare Wilson to Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, of Efrat, Israel, and his words on Pastor Hagee:

Pastor John Hagee is a towering leader in the Evangelical Church who has dedicated a great part of his enormously successful ministry to reaching out in love and loving-kindness to the Jewish people and the State of Israel. He has admirably defended our right to our historic homeland even when our enemies have attempted to disgorge us from our homes and drive us into the sea; he has praised the Lord for having imbued us, the "post-Holocaust dry bones of Ezekiel," with renewed life and vigor even when our arch-enemy and the arch-enemy of the free world has called us a "stinking corpse." He has organized Christian lobby groups for the only true democracy in the Middle East across the length and breadth of the United States even when a former American President and professors from Harvard and Chicago Universities have denounced our own lobbying efforts as un-American and anti-Democratic....

We are living in a world divided between those who believe in a God of love and peace, and those who believe in a Satan of Jihad and suicide bombers. Any attempt to marginalize and slander leaders of the camp of the former will only serve to strengthen the camp of the latter, with the future existence of the free world perilously hanging in the balance. And so I continue to proudly shout from the rooftops that this rabbi in Israel stands firmly alongside -his beloved friend, a true friend of Israel and the free world, Pastor John Hagee.

Note too that Paster Hagee has apologized for any offensive comments he may have made.

I think radical left anti-Semites ought to do the same.

Obamacons, Tin-Foil Hats, and McCain Derangement

Things are getting crazy on the right side of the political spectrum.

In the months since John McCain became the GOP's presumptive nominee, the conservative political community has hardly coalesced into a unified front of support for the Arizona Senator. I've noted previously that some traditional conservatives have announced their support for Barack Obama's presidential bid, but events of late have frankly gotten out of control, and I'm both dismayed and embarrassed that purported partisans of the conservartive right would consider supporting the Democratic Party's most extreme left-wing candidate since the Vietnam War.

There's a lot of disturbing news available on right-wing dissension - I'll try to be brief but comprehensive.

First, Bruce Bartlett at the New Republic reports that many in the conservative movement - disillusioned with the George W. Bush administration - have gravitated away from the Republican Party in support of Barack Obama - these are the "Obamacans":

There have been a few celebrated cases of conservatives endorsing Obama, like the blogger Andrew Sullivan and the legal scholar Douglas Kmiec. But you probably have not have heard of many of the Obamacons--and neither has the Obama campaign. When I checked with it to ask for a list of prominent conservative supporters, the campaign seemed genuinely unaware that such supporters even existed. But those of us on the right who pay attention to think tanks, blogs, and little magazines have watched Obama compile a coterie drawn from the movement's most stalwart and impressive thinkers. It's a group that will no doubt grow even larger in the coming months.

The largest group of Obamacons hail from the libertarian wing of the movement. And it's not just Andrew Sullivan. Milton and Rose Friedman's son, David, is signed up with the cause on the grounds that he sees Obama as the better vessel for his father's cause. Friedman is convinced of Obama's sympathy for school vouchers--a tendency that the Democratic primaries temporarily suppressed. Scott Flanders, the CEO of Freedom Communications--the company that owns The Orange County Register--told a company meeting that he believes Obama will accomplish the paramount libertarian goals of withdrawing from Iraq and scaling back the Patriot Act.

Libertarians (and other varieties of Obamacons, for that matter) frequently find themselves attracted to Obama on stylistic grounds. That is, they believe that he has surrounded himself with pragmatists, some of whom (significantly) come from the University of Chicago. As the blogger Megan McArdle has written, "His goal is not more government so that we can all be caught up in some giant, expressive exercise of collectively enforcing our collective will on all the other people standing around us in the collective; his goal is improving transparency and minimizing government intrusion while rectifying specific outcomes."

In nearly every quarter of the movement, you can find conservatives irate over the Iraq war--a war they believe transgresses core principles. And it's this frustration with the war--and McCain's pronouncements about victory at any cost--that has led many conservatives into Obama's arms. Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative theorist, recently told an Australian journalist that he would reluctantly vote for Obama to hold the Republican Party accountable "for a big policy failure" in Iraq. And he seems to view Obama as the best means for preserving American power, since Obama "symbolizes the ability of the United States to renew itself in a very unexpected way."

You can find similar sentiments coursing through the Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich's seminal Obamacon manifesto in The American Conservative. He believes that the war in Iraq has undermined the possibilities for conservative reform at home. The prospects for a conservative revival, therefore, depend on withdrawing from Iraq. Thus the necessity of Obama. "For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one," Bacevich concludes.

This passage is interesting for its diverse cast of characters. Some of these folks, like Andrew Sullivan, aren't really so conservative. As Neo-Neocon has suggested:

Sullivan’s an unusual case: a sort of liberal who became a sort of conservative and then did an about-face towards the end of the first Bush administration over issues of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and gay marriage.

Sullivan's actually a scholar of Oakeshottian conservative ideology, although I do think he's jumped ship from the movement with his schoolboy's crush on the Illinois Senator.

Some of the others that Bartlett mentions raise more troubling issues.

This "libertarian wing of the movement" is a bit hazy - even subterreanean - and includes a few crazed "tin hat" acolytes among its followers. For example, Robert Stacy McCain (no relation to the Arizona Senator) is a libertarian supporter of Bob Barr's presidential bid this year. I've communicated with Robert on a couple of occasions, and he's a jovial kind of guy. Yet I disagree vehemently with his politics, and I don't know if people like him are good for small-government advocates in the United States. Robert's obviously not a supporter of Obama, and it's no wonder: The Southern Poverty Law Center reports (SPLC) that Robert Stacy McCain's a former member of the League of the South who is on record as opposing interracial marriage.

I have no other sources to corroborate these claims, although I would note that Robert keeps abreast of neo-Nazi reporting in an effort to nip potential extreme right-wing associations in the bud.

It's a good thing too, as it turns out the SPLC's got a story out suggesting that right-wing extremists are hoping for an Obama victory in November, which they hypothesize will lead to a race war in the United States:

With the nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic presidential candidate clinched, large sections of the white supremacist movement are adopting a surprising attitude: Electing America’s first black president would be a very good thing.

It’s not that the assortment of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, anti-Semites and others who make up this country’s radical right have suddenly discovered that a man should be judged based on the content of his character, not his skin. On the contrary. A growing number of white supremacists, and even some of those who pass for intellectual leaders of their movement, think that a black man in the Oval Office would shock white America, possibly drive millions to their cause, and perhaps even set off a race war that, they hope, would ultimately end in Aryan victory.

Now, I am not - I repeat - I am not broad-brushing all libertarians. Megan McArdle's on record as admiring Barack Obama's achievement as a historical milestone for our nation.

But some of these so-called "libertarian conservatives" mentioned by Bartlett are more accurately identified as "paleoconservatives," who are generally considered as outside of the mainstream conservative establishment in the United States.

Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history at Boston University, came out for Obama in an article at the American Conservative, "The Right Choice? The conservative case for Barack Obama." I have not spoken with Bacevich, but I'm familiar with his argument claiming a new American militarism, and his arguments in opposition to the Iraq war are perhaps made more compelling by the emotion of losing a son in the conflict. Be that as it may, I find paleoconservative arguments hard to take seriously, even offensive particularly as the movement's flaghip, the Amercan Conservative, routinely publishes outslandish stories, like the current issue's piece alleging Israel's complicity in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Apart for the Obamacans and the crypto-racism of the tin-hat libertarian/paleo axis, we also have plain-old partisans of McCain Derangement Syndrome.

These folks actually irk me the most, for if they would just put aside issues of ego and pride, they might powerfully contribute to building a strong conservative coalition in furtherance of a John McCain victory in November.

As Patrick at Born Again Redneck has suggested, Republicans who don't like McCain ought just "grow up!" In question is Dee's entry from Conservatism With Heart, where she writes:

Even if all of us political junkies hold our nose and vote for McCain, he's going to have a hard time. Why? Because as I have been saying for months and Limbaugh points out in his article the conservative base are the foot soldiers in campaigns. Unless McCain can elicit some excitement, passion and trust among the base he's going to have a hard time getting people willing to volunteer. And without volunteers to get out the vote, you'll have an extremely difficult time winning.

Dee and many like her are indoctrinated by conservative talk radio mandarins such as Rush Limbaugh, who in my opinion care more about their listenership than they do about maintaining conservative power. Calls for "purity" keep irrational Rush-bot "foot soldiers" in check while simultaneously facilitating Barack Obama's threatening shift to a 21st-century socialist utopia. (See the "Open Letter to John McCain," at Right Wing News, for more of what I'm talking about).

So think about it: The American people have now made their choices for the major-party standard-bearers, McCain vs. Obama. The ideological differences between the candidates are stark:

For me, the most important issue's long been the Iraq war. John McCain will maintain troops in Iraq to increase security and facilitate the independence of Iraqi forces. He sees victory on the horizon and envisions troops home by 2013. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has been one of the most vocal Iraq detractors in the Senate, and he'll implement an immediate troop withdrawal upon taking office, putting in jeopardy the hard work and great sacrifice of America's fighting personnel.

On taxes, John McCain wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. He wants to maintain current capital gains tax rates at 15 percent and cut corporate taxes to 25 percent from the current confiscatory 35 percent level. Barack Obama on the other hand, will raises taxes dramatically, repealing the Bush tax cuts and hiking capital gains taxes, with more likely to come through efforts at "restoring fairness" to the tax code. Watch this YouTube for more:

On health care, John McCain wants to unleash insurance markets and use tax incentives to expand health coverage. McCain focuses on deregulation, choice, and affordability. Barack Obama, on the other hand, will socialize American medicine, launching a federal takeover of healthcare with a price tag starting at $110 billion, a program that includes punitive mandates on commercial owners certain to drive down small-business expansion.

On social issues, John McCain is a rock-ribbed conservative, opposing abortion rights, the distribution of birth control to minors, same-sex marriages, and restrictions on the rights of gun owners. Barack Obama' on the other hand, is implacably opposed to traditional social values. He would further shift American culture to the anything goes moralism of the Demoratic Party's multicultural, abortion-on-demand, and military-bashing ideology of the contemporary left.

Sure, John McCain's got his apostasies, on global warming and immigration, but if the deranged anti-McCainiacs remain intent on privileging purity over victory, then America may well be in for a long-period of Democratic Party Jacobinism.

The general election's now engaged. As far as the extreme right-wing surrender hawks and racists are concerned, cut them loose I say. Let these libertarian/paleos forage in the wilderness for a few cycles, until they come to their moral senses. But red-blooded conservatives still smarting over Mitt Romney's collapse or Fred Thompson's laziness should just suck it up and get with the program.

This year represents the most important election in my lifetime. The stakes in '08 are of the highest order, between traditionalism and radicalism, and it's about time that right-wingers of all (good) stripes pull together in support of the GOP nominee. History's in the making, so let's do right by our nation's historical vision of goodness, honor, and values. I firmly believe Barack Obama is genuinely opposed to upholding that heritage.

**********

UPDATE: My good friend Stogie, in the comments, vouches for Robert Stacy McCain:

I know Robert Stacy McCain and he's no racist. I remember when the Bell Curve came out and the subject of IQ variances by race were a hot topic of discussion. Robert, who is a devout Seventh Day Adventist, refused to believe that God would cause some races to have lower IQ's than others. He also knows that I have an Asian wife and never said boo about it. The Southern Poverty Law Center should never be taken as a credible source.

Morris Dees is an extreme leftist and manufactures "racists" for his group to oppose...

My response to Stogie is here.

I have no particular beef with Robert Stacy McCain. As I noted at the post above, Robert is a friendly man, but we have political differences, and it looks now as though these include questions of race. And as always, my purpose here is to simply clarify differences of opinion among various factions on the right.

For corroboration, here's some additional information on Robert Stacy McCain's views, from Michelangelo Signorile:

Last week I quoted the scary Washington Times’ backer, the Unification Church leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon ("Satan’s harvest is America," was just one of that charmers’ comments), whose paper Al Gore two weeks ago charged was "part and parcel of the Republican Party." Some people wrote in with the rather weak but nonetheless entertainable argument that Moon funds the paper but he has a "hands-off" approach and let’s the editors do what they want....

So, let’s take a look at the views and not-so-hidden agenda of one of the actual editors of the paper, specifically, assistant national editor Robert Stacy McCain, who has a habit of posting commentary on message boards and elsewhere around the Internet:

"[T]he media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us."

Yes, you read that right: a "natural revulsion" and "THIS IS NOT RACISM."

That was posted by Robert Stacy McCain (who has contributed to New York Press in the past) on a website called Reclaiming the South. The Washington Times editor posts a lot on the right-wing FreeRepublic.com as well, using an assumed name (BurkeCalhounDabney) but often linking back to his personal website, where there are photos of him and the rest of his large family of Seventh Day Adventists (and which identifies him by his real name and as a Washington Times editor). Editor McCain, who hails from Rome, GA, is one of those Confederate types who still hasn’t gotten over the Civil War and is trying to get the South to secede. He’s a member of a Southern secessionist organization called League of the South....

Perhaps attempting (unsuccessfully, in my opinion) to distance himself just a bit from this repugnant and totally kooky extremist stuff, McCain has written, in a piece he posted on the Web titled "Down On Dixie: The Confederate Cause and the South’s Scalawag Press," that "We may never all agree that The South Was Right!...but the least we owe our ancestors is a fair hearing and a balanced portrayal to our readers."

McCain, an editor and sometimes commentator at a paper that the gay Andrew Sullivan, the African-American Thomas Sowell and other right-leaning members of minority groups are only too happy to write columns for and take cash from, believes that Abraham Lincoln was a "war criminal" who should have been tried for "treason." (His reasoning, he writes, is that Lincoln and the Northerners were the true racists; something tells me–actually, studying his other comments and affiliations is what tells me–that that is not the real reason at all.)

In his Web postings McCain has stated that Harvard president Lawrence Summers should be "persecuted and run out of town" for supporting gay rights. He also believes that the civil rights movement directly resulted in "black criminality" because people were encouraged to break the law by getting arrested at demonstrations!

"I am disturbed…by [Jesse] Jackson’s idea that ‘breaking white folks’ rules’ was somehow inherently just," he wrote on FreeRepublic.com. "If rules were to be broken merely because they were work of white folks, then hasn’t Jackson gone a long way toward explaining the explosion of black criminality that began in the 1960s? This shows how the civil rights movement, to a great extent, represented a direct assault on tradition and law."

These viewpoints offer background for and insight into some of McCain’s pieces in The Washington Times. This past October he warned about the "Backlash Building in White America," as the headline of his article blared, and he interviewed and promoted an obscure professor who claimed "that society should combat white nationalists in part by acknowledging the legitimacy of some of their grievances" and that white nationalism is "the monster that identity politics created." (Yes, blame it all on blacks themselves!)

Signorile's essay does not include links, and I imagine he's got his own axes to grind.

Check, in any case, a separate SPLC article on Robert Stacy McCain, "Defending Dixie."

For Robert Stacy McCain's own essays in defense of Southern conservatism, see "Good-Bye, Dixie," and "The Confederate Cause in the 21st Century."

The discussion here is useful in that so far we've all agreed that such views are not acceptable for conservative discourse.

We on the right are better than the hate-addled leftists against whom we're fighting this election season. My goal is to help clear disputes among right-wing partisans, and marginalize those who continue to spew hatred.

Additional feedback and comments are solicited.

"Afro-Centric" Teacher Dismissed Over Activist Curriculum

The Los Angeles Unified School District has fired Karen Salazar, an untenured second-year English teacher at Jordan High, who was promoting student activism in her curriculum:

Students and fellow educators are rallying behind a fired Jordan High School teacher they say was sacked for encouraging political activism among her students.

About 60 students rallied Wednesday at the Watts campus, while a colleague of the fired teacher said he and 15 other instructors planned to resign or transfer to other schools to protest the dismissal of Karen Salazar, a second-year English teacher.

The dust-up has gone digital as well. Salazar backers have posted videos on the website YouTube. The postings, which have attracted thousands of hits, intersperse music, outraged protesters and interviews, as well as statements from the outspoken educator.

"You embody what it means to be a warrior-scholar, a freedom-fighting intellectual," she told students through a bullhorn in one video. "You are part of the long legacy, the strong history, of fighting back."

In another instance, Salazar rips the Los Angeles Unified School District, saying, "This school system for too long has been not only denying them human rights, basic human rights, but doing it on purpose in order to keep them subservient, to subjugate them in society."

A union official said the critique against Salazar included a statement that her teaching was too "Afro-centric." An assistant principal, in his evaluation of a particular lesson, accused Salazar of brainwashing students, according to Salazar and others.

Her course materials include "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," which is approved for students. Salazar, 25, also sprinkles in lyrics of slain rapper Tupac Shakur and the poetry of Langston Hughes.

Salazar's political science degree from UCLA includes minors in African American studies and Chicano studies. She recently completed a master's in education at UCLA.

A veteran teacher assigned to mentor Salazar took issue with the negative characterization of Salazar's teaching.

"I did not see the same things that the administrator said he saw," said Miranda Manners, who observed the same lesson during a different class period. "I saw a new, young teacher teaching her lesson according to the objectives she stated on the board. I saw her engage with her students and interacting with them in a very positive way."

As for Salazar's overall campus profile, "she is definitely a teacher who wants kids to wake up and look around them and ask questions and be motivated and be engaged."

It was the latter penchant that caused the furor, said others.

Salazar served as faculty advisor for campus student activists who wanted to pass out surveys about the school and students' education. Unlike at other schools, Principal Stephen G. Strachan forbade the distribution of surveys on campus.

Salazar said Strachan also accused her of starting a separate student activist group that demanded more culturally relevant courses as well as accurate, up-to-date student records. Some students have complained that transcript errors result in them being placed in the wrong classes.

"She's one of the teachers that needs to stay here," said junior Deysy Ruiz, 16, who estimated that at least half of her teachers had been ineffective by comparison.

Another group behind the protest was the Assn. of Raza Educators, which includes Santee Education Complex teachers who advocated successfully for the removal of a principal at that high school.

Photo Credit: "Jordan High School teacher Karen Salazar, center, is greeted with cheers during an after-school rally to protest her contract not being renewed," Los Angeles Times.

Here's Jordan's educational statistics for English Language and Math Achievement:

Schoolwide or LEA-wide ELA Percent of students scoring Proficient or Above: 12.9%

Here:	13%
State average from 1015 schools:	50%

Schoolwide Math Percent of students scoring Proficient or Above: 10.8%

Here:	11%
State average from 1024 schools:	45%

ELA Percent Proficient or Above African American: 5.3% (5 proficient out of 94)

Here:	5%
State average from 514 schools:	41%

Math Percent of students scoring Proficient or Above African American: 3.2% (3 proficient out of 94)

David Starr Jordan Senior High:	3%
State average from 511 schools:	31%

ELA Percent of students scoring Proficient or Above Hispanic: 14.7% (59 proficient out of 401)

Here:	15%
State average from 887 schools:	40%

Math Percent of students scoring Proficient or Above Hispanic: 12.5% (52 proficient out of 415)

Here:	13%
State average from 888 schools:	36%

ELA Percent of students scoring Proficient or Above Socioeconomic Disadvantaged: 13.7% (60 proficient out of 438)

Here:	14%
State average from 913 schools:	38%

Math Percent of students scoring Proficient or Above Socioeconomic Disadvantaged: 11.3% (50 proficient out of 444)

Here:	11%
State average from 920 schools:	36%

ELA Percent of students scoring Proficient or Above English Learner: 11.3% (39 proficient out of 346)

Here:	11%
State average from 776 schools:	28%

Math Percent of students scoring Proficient or Above English Learner: 10.3% (37 proficient out of 359)

David Starr Jordan Senior High:	10%
State average from 776 schools:	33%

ELA Percent of students scoring Proficient or Above Students with Disabilities: 1.9% (1 proficient out of 53)

David Starr Jordan Senior High:	2%
State average from 724 schools:	17%

Math Percent of Students with Disabilities scoring Proficient or Above: 1.5% (1 proficient out of 65)

Here:	2%
State average from 731 schools:	15%

Graduation Rate for 2006, Class of 2004-05: 51.9%

Graduation Rate for 2005, Class of 2003-04: 53.5%

ELA 2006 Percent Proficient Target: 22.3%
Math 2006 Percent Proficient Target: 20.9%
Number of Scores included in the 2006 Academic Performance Index (API) : 1414

Barely half of Jordan's students graduate. Perhaps these folks need less activism and more academics.

Arguing Freedom of Speech: American Enlightenment in Perspective

As noted, I've only followed Mark Steyn's legal case before Canada's Human Right Commission intermittently (here and here).

I do check Blazing Cat Fur for updates occassionally, but today's New York Times has a great background piece for the uninitiated, "Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech:"

A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Maclean’s, Canada’s leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their “dignity, feelings and self-respect.”

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions here last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean’s violated the law. As spectators lined up for the afternoon session last week, an argument broke out.

“It’s hate speech!” yelled one man.

“It’s free speech!” yelled another.

In the United States, that debate has been settled. Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minorities and religions — even false, provocative or hateful things — without legal consequence.

The Maclean’s article, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” was an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called “America Alone” (Regnery, 2006). The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate speech, as in so many other areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal path.

“In much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at one’s legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk, and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment,” Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called “The Exceptional First Amendment.”

“But in the United States,” Professor Schauer continued, “all such speech remains constitutionally protected.”

Canada, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France.

Earlier this month, the actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, was fined $23,000 in France for provoking racial hatred by criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughter of sheep.

By contrast, American courts would not stop a planned march by the American Nazi Party in Skokie, Ill., in 1977, though a march would have been deeply distressing to the many Holocaust survivors there.

Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed a libel case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business executive who had called food stamps “basically a Puerto Rican program.” The First Amendment, Justice Eve M. Preminger wrote, does not allow even false statements about racial or ethnic groups to be suppressed or punished just because they may increase “the general level of prejudice.”

Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.

“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”

Professor Waldron was reviewing “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment” by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Mr. Lewis has been critical of efforts to use the law to limit hate speech.

But even Mr. Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections “in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism.” In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court’s insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.

The imminence requirement sets a high hurdle. Mere advocacy of violence, terrorism or the overthrow of the government is not enough; the words must be meant to and be likely to produce violence or lawlessness right away. A fiery speech urging an angry mob to immediately assault a black man in its midst probably qualifies as incitement under the First Amendment. A magazine article — or any publication — intended to stir up racial hatred surely does not.

Mr. Lewis wrote that there was “genuinely dangerous” speech that did not meet the imminence requirement.

“I think we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience, some of whose members are ready to act on the urging,” Mr. Lewis wrote. “That is imminence enough.”

Harvey A. Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer in Cambridge, Mass., disagreed. “When times are tough,” he said, “there seems to be a tendency to say there is too much freedom.”

Note something about this story: In the U.S., those arguing for resrictions on speech are on the left- folks who apparentlly have less confidence that their ideas will prevail in the marketplace of ideas.

Having said that, I do think that speech that constitutes express incitement to killing should not be constitutionally protected, and I've debated that question recently with regards to Texas Fred's constant advocacy of murdering undocumented Mexican migrants as they cross the border into the United States. Thus, one needs to be careful with the "imminence standard," basically looking for the shift from the mere expression of an idea to express advocacy and operational planning.

In any case, here's Steyn's piece:

"The Future Belongs to Islam."

Unscientific Support for Impeachment, but Unhinged Anyway

Representative Dennis Kucinich sought to introduce 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush today, although House Speaker Nancy Pelosi scuttled the bid, "saying such a move was unlikely to succeed and would be divisive."

Still, you've got to love this from LGF:

Never mind that there is absolutely no legal basis for even asking the question: Live Vote: Should Bush be impeached? - Politics- msnbc.com:

This is all leading up to war crimes trials for the Bush administration, if Obama is elected.

You don't say?

See my earlier entry, "In Power, Obama May Seek War Crimes Tribunals."

Al Qaeda in Iraq Struggling to Stay Relevant

Michael Ware is CNN's journalistic Cassandra reporting from the Middle East, which is why his report that al Qaeda in Iraq is seriously degraded should be given careful consideration: "Papers Give Peek Inside al Qaeda in Iraq":

Rear Adm. Patrick Driscoll, the American military's spokesman in Baghdad, says the document trove [of al Qaeda's security prince for Anbar province, a man referred to in secret correspondence as Faris Abu Azzam] is unique, "a kind of comprehensive snapshot" of al-Qaeda during its peak.

"It reveals," Driscoll said, "first of all, a pretty robust command and control system, if you will. I was kind of surprised when I saw the degree of documentation for everything -- pay records, those kind of things -- and that [al Qaeda in Iraq] was obviously a well-established network."

That network is now under enormous stress, primarily from the more than 100,000 nationalist insurgents who formed the Awakening Council militias and initiated an extremely effective assassination program against al Qaeda, but also from recent U.S. and Iraqi government strikes into their strongholds.

As a result, says Lt. Col. Tim Albers, the coalition's director of military intelligence for Baghdad, "al Qaeda in Iraq is fighting to stay relevant."

While on the defensive, the files indicate the frightening degree of al Qaeda's murderous residual operations:

According to the internal al Qaeda correspondence in the files, Iraqis have taken to, and effectively run, al Qaeda in Iraq. Foreign fighters' roles seem mostly relegated to the canon fodder of suicide attacks.

Though the upper tiers of the organization are still dominated by non-Iraqis, in Anbar, at least, all the princes and brigade and battalion commanders are homegrown.

"Correct. They're all Iraqis," Abu Saif said. "In my house [one time], there were about 18 Arab fighters under Iraqi commander Omar Hadid, mercy of God upon him, and the [foreigners] did not object, they just did their duty."

That Iraqification of the network is what perhaps enabled al Qaeda to foresee its demise years before the Americans did.

Documents from 2005 and 2006 show that top-ranking leaders feared the imposition of strict religious law and brutal tactics were turning their popular support base against them.

One memorandum from three years ago warned executions of traitors and sinners condemned by religious courts "were being carried out in the wrong way, in a semi-public way, so a lot of families are threatening revenge, and this is now a dangerous intelligence situation."

That awareness led al Qaeda to start killing tribesmen and nationalist insurgents wherever they began to rally against it, long before America ever realized that it had potential allies to turn to.

Yet those same practices that accelerated al Qaeda in Iraq's undoing were breathtakingly documented.

In a vein similar to the Khmer Rouge's grisly accounting of its torture victims, within the files of one al Qaeda headquarters in Anbar alone was a library of 80 execution videos, mostly beheadings, none of which had been distributed or released on the Internet. And all were filmed after al Qaeda in Iraq ended its policy of broadcasting such horrors.

So why keep filming? According to former member Abu Saif and the senior U.S. intelligence analyst, to verify the deaths to al Qaeda superiors and to justify continued funding and support.

The videos also bear insight into al Qaeda's media units. Raw video among the catalog of beheadings shows how al Qaeda's editing skills hide not just its members' faces (caught in candid moments on the un-edited films) but also their failures.

When three Russian diplomats were kidnapped and killed in June 2006, a well-polished propaganda piece was released. It showed two diplomats being gruesomely beheaded, and yet the third diplomat was shot with a pistol, in a different location. The full video of the slayings answers why.

Though bound and blindfolded, the third diplomat struggled so defiantly that his ailing executioners could not draw their knife across his throat. In the horrific and chaotic scenes, the faces of his killer and the cameraman are seen.

And those scenes, like the intricacy of the prince of Anbar's planning and internal analysis of Operation Desert Shield, reveal an al Qaeda in Iraq that the world still barely knows.

Perhaps this residual terrorist activity explains some of the worries among Iraqi parliamentarians, who suggest that a rapid U.S. withdrawal would cause "chaos and anarchy" in the country.

Measly Poll Bounce for Obama Upon Securing Nomination

Jackie Calmes provides a balanced analysis of the Wall Street Journal's new poll finding Barack Obama with a six-point lead against John McCain in a general election matchup:

Democrat Barack Obama begins his presidential race against Republican John McCain with a lead in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, but not so great an edge as might be expected given the gale-force political headwinds against Sen. McCain's party.

Sen. Obama leads Sen. McCain by 47% to 41%, a spread that is twice the edge he had in the previous poll in late April . The poll's margin of error is 3.1 percentage points. Still, that lead is significantly smaller than Democrats' 16-point advantage, 51% to 35%, when voters are asked which party they want to win the White House, without candidates' names.

The record unpopularity of President Bush and the Republican Party, combined with economic worries among voters and a broad desire for change, would normally make this "the single best year for an Obama-type candidacy, and the single worst year for a McCain-type candidacy," said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducts the Journal/NBC poll with Republican Neil Newhouse.

But Sen. Obama continues to do poorly among white-male voters, according to the poll. More ominous is his weakness among white women, particularly suburbanites, who generally are open to Democratic candidates and whose votes could be decisive.

Memeorandum highlights additional polls out today, and of particular interest is this tidbit from Mark Murray's write-up of the WSJ data:

Looking at the issues that will drive the presidential race, respondents in the poll cite job creation/economic growth and the Iraq war as the top priorities for the federal government to address.

That is, the economy and Iraq are the top issues going forward, and I would argue that McCain will have a much better time making inroads with insecure econonomic voters than Obama will have in convincing Americans that we're losing the war. The public's conflicted on the economy, for example, as Market Watch reports:

While voters say we want government to act to boost the economy, a solid majority of us say the best thing government can do is to get out of the way by reducing regulations and taxes, just like McCain says.

Other recent polls continue to demonstrate no public demand for an immediate pullout, and McCain will be able to paint Obama as seeking to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as the Illinios Senator continues to pander to the antiwar base with calls for a disastrously precipitous withdrawal.

Don't forget that WSJ's survey has a 3.1 margin of error, which is another reason Democrats should call home to momma with the results.

Praise Allah! Multiple Deceptions on Obama's Afro-Muslim Heritage

Melanie Phillips is on a roll. Recall her outstanding entry yesterday in defense of Israel and Western civilization.

Well, Phillips has another great post today, where she begins with Barack Obama's anti-Semitic community blogs (which are posted at the official campaign website), then hits her stride on Obama subterranean religious deceptions and obfuscations: "Obama and the Giant Blogosphere Conspiracy":

Today’s Guardian reports that Barack Obama is setting up an entire unit to combat ‘virulent rumours’ about him on the internet. Doubtless one of the blogs in the sights of team Obama is Little Green Footballs, which in the last few days has been excavating examples of wildly anti-Jewish and anti-American prejudice and conspiracy theories posted up by fans on Obama’s own website. LGF is making hay with the fact that the Obamanables are belatedly taking (some of) this stuff down from the site while simultaneously insisting that its presence is nothing to do with them because the website has no moderators. Yeah, right.

The Guardian quotes the director of some monitoring outfit as saying that the blogosphere’s smears about Obama are particularly vicious.

He added that one of the most persistent is that Obama, a Christian, is ‘some kind of Muslim Manchurian candidate, planted by Islamic fundamentalists to betray the country and it is very widespread’.

Well now. Crazed Jew-hating American-loathing moonbats posting comments on Obama’s website are one thing. But the fact is that there are serious and troubling questions about Obama’s ancestry and associations and what he himself has said about them, which have surfaced in the blogosphere but have been almost wholly ignored by the mainstream media in its collective Obamanic swoon.

First is his childhood background. Last November, his campaign website carried a statement with the headline:

Barack Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim

followed by

Obama never prayed in a mosque. He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian.

Obama has also said:

I've always been a Christian

and

I've never practised Islam.

But none of this is true. As is explored in detail on Daniel Pipes’s website, Obama was enrolled at his primary schools in Indonesia as a Muslim; he attended the mosque during that period; his friends from that time testify that he was a devout Muslim boy. A former teacher at one of these schools, Tine Hahiyary, remembers a young Obama who was quite religious and actively took part in ‘mengaji’ classes which teach how to read the Koran in Arabic. The blogger from Indonesia who reported this commented:

‘Mengagi’ is a word and a term that is accorded the highest value and status in the mindset of fundamentalist societies here in Southeast Asia. To put it quite simply, "mengaji classes" are not something that a non practicing or so-called moderate Muslim family would ever send their child to... The fact that Obama had attended mengaji classes is well known in Indonesia and has left many there wondering just when Obama is going to come out of the closet.

His father was a Muslim, as was his stepfather. His grandfather was a Muslim convert. His wider family appear to have been largely devout Muslims. Yes, we only know about Obama’s early years as a Muslim; and yes, twenty years ago he became a Christian. The issue, however, is why he has been less than candid about his early background and his family. Indeed, he appears to have actively deceived the public about it. That is why the blogosphere is so exercised about it.

Now here’s another curious thing. Much has been made of his membership of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago whose former pastor and his long-standing mentor, Jeremiah Wright, Obama was forced finally to renounce on account of his obnoxious views (although he has signally failed unequivocally to denounce those views themselves and the no less obnoxious philosophy of the Trinity United black power church). But according to a passing reference in a profile in The New Republic last year, Pastor Wright was himself a Muslim convert to Christianity. He seems to have moved from being a Muslim black power fanatic to a Christian black power fanatic – which might go some way to explaining his close affinity to the Muslim black power ideologue Louis Farrakhan.

Then there is also Obama’s troubling support for the Kenyan opposition leader -- and his cousin -- Raila Odinga, the leader of the violent uprising a few months ago against the newly elected Kenyan government and who signed a memorandum of understanding with Kenyan Muslims to turn Kenya into an Islamic state governed by sharia law. At the time, the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya released a statement in which church leaders said Odinga

comes across as a presumptive Muslim president bent on forcing Islamic law, religion and culture down the throats of the Kenyan people in total disregard of the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of worship and equal protection of the law for all Kenyans.

As the Atlas Shrugs site reported, Obama actually went to Kenya in 2006 and spoke at rallies in support of Odinga, causing the Kenyan government to denounce him as ‘Raila’s stooge’. Why was Obama supporting such a person? Why has no-one bothered to find out??

Daniel Pipes makes another highly significant point about Obama’s Muslim background. He points out that, in the eyes of the Muslim world, Obama remains a Muslim regardless of what religion he now professes because he was born to a Muslim father. By his own admission (of Christianity) therefore, he is a Muslim apostate – a status regarded by the Muslim world as a sin to be punished by death. Pipes thinks this would put his life in danger and undermine his initiatives towards the Muslim world. But surely the more significant point is that much of that Muslim world has actually embraced him. Indeed the Muslim Brothers of Hamas – who most certainly would regard any Muslim apostate as someone to be eliminated – actually came out publicly in support of him (until Obama blotted his copybook by professing undying support for Israel).

We are entitled therefore to ask whether the Muslim world supports him because it believes he is still a Muslim. We are entitled to ask precisely when he stopped being a Muslim, and why. Did Obama embrace Christianity as a tactical manoeuvre to get himself elected? Why indeed has he dissembled about his family background if not for that end?

These multiple known deceptions by someone who may become President of the United States are deeply alarming. The concealment is the issue. To dismiss such concerns and the related questions they provoke as a smear campaign is to attempt to browbeat into silence those who legitimately raise them and require urgent answers as a matter of the most acute public interest.

Update: In this entry I originally included the following quote from the American Expatriate in Indonesia blog quoted above: 'Another of Obama’s former classmates, Emirsyah Satar, now CEO of Garuda Indonesia, has been quoted as saying: At that time, he was quite religious in Islam but after marrying Michelle, he changed his religion.' It has been pointed out to me that comments posted on that blog claimed that this was a mistranslation, and that the quote attributed to Satar was written instead by the author of the article.

See also, African Connection? Questions of Character Surround Barack Obama."

Related: "The Obama Campaign Deleted my Blog Post!"