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September 17, 2008

Exclusive: Obama’s Radicalized Mind (Part One of Two)

Dr. Candace de Russy

Handlers of the Democrat Convention took pains to finesse protests like those that roiled the 1968 Chicago convention, even erecting a concrete pen to hold protestors. The spectacle of agitators gone ballistic, observed Charles Hurt before the convention, could have reminded the public of Barack Obama's involvement with radicals like William Ayers, the Weather Underground terrorist. "Any images," said Hurt, "reminiscent of radicalism will cement for voters the idea that Obama is a risk not worth taking."

Obama may very well succeed in convincing most Americans that he espouses their more moderate, traditional mind-set: According to a recent New York Times/CBS News Poll, 63% of those surveyed believe the nominee shares the values most Americans try to live by.

But we now inhabit an upside-down, "morally contested world," as Daniel Henninger bemoans. We can no longer naively assume even presidential candidates sign on to our historic common principles. Before entrusting our fate to any of them, it is now, more than ever, not only justified but also necessary to examine everything about them, including, perhaps most especially, whatever might shed light on their inner, core political beliefs.

Such discovery is all the more crucial in Obama's case because of his remarkable inexperience, calculated lack of a scholarly "paper trail," absence of papers from his Illinois Senate days and similar lacunae, deceptively understated or "stealth liberalism," and ill-defined rhetoric.

One blind spot in the public's understanding of Obama concerns his education, in the broad sense of the term: What might he have absorbed of his parents' outlook? What formal, including religious, instruction did he receive? Which mentors and academic associates has he chosen? To what political philosophy has he consistently been drawn? A look at this, Obama's intellectual formation and bent, shows that he has been steeped, by virtue of upbringing and personal choice, in an often extremely radical worldview. Throughout his life he has also typically chosen to consort with radicals of various stripes and gravitated toward radical causes.

Obama's history of radicalization is, of course, not absolutely predictive of a radically inclined Obama presidency, but his or any other president's habits of mind would surely inform their decisions.

Consider some of the main educational influences that came to bear on Obama as well as indications of his ideological disposition:

Parental Leanings

In The Obama Nation, Jerome R. Corsi documents the intellectual journey of the candidate's Kenyan father who abandoned him and about whom he poignantly wrote in his autobiography, Dreams From My Father. Corsi shows how Obama Senior's leftist ideology gradually hardened into more extreme communist views, bringing him into step with (state Professors David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno) "'endogenous communitarian [Kenyan politician] Odinga Odinga'" and others who held that Kenya is "'neither African nor socialist enough.'" It would seem that Obama Senior did influence his son: In Dreams, Obama Junior speaks of his father's "strong image" which had provided him with "bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to ... ."

As for Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, the candidate himself, in The Audacity of Hope, portrays her as "an unreconstructed liberal" inspired by the civil rights movement. Yet he stakes out a position different from her liberalism of a "pre-1967 vintage." He dwells instead on his fascination with "the Dionysian, up-for-grabs quality" of 1968, a time when, as Corsi notes, the "Far Left hardened" and "the civil rights and antiwar movements were both radicalized." In Dreams, Obama recalls how he "soaked in a vision of the sixties" based on events such as the rise of Huey Newton, the co-founder of the militant Black Panthers. Obama then seems to put some critical distance between himself and far left "orthodoxy" with the claim that he had begun "to reexamine" its tenets. To this day, however, there is scant evidence that any such serious reexamination has taken place.

Islamic Education

An AP photo gives tangible proof that Obama registered for elementary school as an Indonesian citizen of the Muslim faith. In an interview with WorldNetDaily, Corsi points out that this document contradicts the Obama campaign's insistence that he never received training in Islam and never lived as a Muslim, adding:

‘The most convincing evidence Obama was living in Indonesia as a Muslim, not simply registered as Muslim because his father was Muslim, comes from Obama's experience at the government-run public school at SDN 1 Menteng, Jakarta ... he received the type of Islamic instruction reserved for Muslim children in a government school system that mandated Islamic instruction at that time for all children attending public school in Indonesia.'

In The Obama Nation, Corsi further cites a Kaltim Post interview with Tine Hahiyary, one of Obama's teachers at the public school, who stated that he had been registered as a Muslim and took part actively in the Islamic religious lessons during his time at the school. "I remembered that Barry [as he was known then] studied ‘mengaji'" (recitation of the Quran), she affirmed. "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," wrote the 'An American Expat in Southeast Asia' blog.

"The Obama campaign desperately wants to deny Obama was raised as a Muslim child in the four years he lived in Indonesia from age 6 to 10," Corsi avers. "These are formative years in a child's religious education."

Only time would tell how such roots and training would color a President Obama's actual Middle Eastern policy. But it is less than reassuring to learn that, as Daniel Pipes notes, the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan pronounced Obama "the hope of the entire world" and likened him to his racialized Islamic sect's founder, Wallace Fard Muhammad.

One scholar, Shireen K. Burki of the University of Mary Washington, does not share Farrakhan's elation. She views him as "bin Laden's dream candidate." Should he become U.S. commander-in-chief, she warns, al Qaeda would likely "exploit his background to argue that an apostate is leading the global war on terror ... to galvanize sympathizers into action."

It is telling that the Obama campaign chose at the convention to feature and thus politically legitimate the president of the Islamic Society of North America, Ingrid Mattson, at an "Interfaith Gathering" of Leftwing religious leaders. This decision is "profoundly disturbing," declares Alex Alexiev of the Center for Security Policy, for ISNA is the largest and most important front organization of the American Muslim Brotherhood, a conspiratorial Islamist revolutionary movement dedicated, in their own words, to "a grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands."

How might a President Obama, given his ties to Islam, deal with real-life Jihadists? We certainly cannot tell from his convention speech, in which he hardly mentioned terrorism and other dire threats to our national security. The public should demand to know much more about Obama's views of Islam, Islamism, and what his plans are to keep us safe.

Frank Marshall Davis, ‘Red Mentor'

Of the curriculum at Punahou Academy, the college prep school Obama attended for several years in Hawaii, we know little. But in Dreams, he describes the school as "prestigious" and, indicating a class-consciousness still much in evidence today, as "an incubator for island elites." He relates his intensifying sense of racial alienation and victimization, attempt to find solace in marijuana and cocaine, and readings of often extremist black authors.

An apparently greater intellectual influence in those years was a mysterious mentor-writer identified in Dreams only as "Frank," who counseled him over whiskey on issues relating to race, education and American values, and who read him poems. This close personal mentor has recently been identified as Communist Party USA member Frank Marshall Davis, a key high-level operative in a Soviet-sponsored network in Hawaii. The CPUSA, reports Cliff Kincaid, was described in a 1956 report to the Senate as "'a Russian-inspired, Moscow-dominated, anti-American, quasi-military conspiracy against our Government, our ideals, and our freedom.'" Davis himself was the subject of an FBI investigation. So entangled was he in the CPUSA that he recruited members for the organization and had personal ties to party members such as Paul Robeson and Harry Bridges.

As related in Dreams, Davis advised Obama that "black people have a reason to hate" whites. About college Davis had this "wisdom" to confer:

You're going there to get trained ... They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that s***. They'll ... tell you you're a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they'll ... let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid n*****, but you're a n***** just the same.

Moreover, Kincaid notes, one of Davis's poems was a paean to the Soviet Red Army, and another ridiculed the work of Christian missionaries.

Obama's relationship with Davis could shed light on why he dallied with socialists, anti-communists and anti-Americans during college, and in his political career in Chicago. It also raises questions about Obama's typically Leftist breast-beating in face of the recent Russian invasion of Georgia. As characterized by Commentary's Abe Greenwald:

Faced with a geopolitical challenge that demands unwavering Western fortitude and American stewardship, Barack Obama apologizes for the misuse of American strength and initiative. This speaks of a worldview in which America's faults are always kept at the fore and a national security paradigm in which the U.S. must seek to understand enemy action as a manifestation of American arrogance. This worldview leaves us dangerously ill equipped to tackle or even contain antagonists like Vladimir Putin and company.

Is it likely that Obama's worldview prompted his pusillanimous response to the Russian invasion?

The College ‘Experience'

Many contemporary Americans have, of course, been swept up in Leftwing thought and activism because of exposure to radicalized campus life. But perhaps because of an already well established "comfort zone" with radicals and leftists, Obama seems more readily than most to have fallen into step with them in his college years. In Dreams, he recalls how at Occidental College in Los Angeles, striving not to be "mistaken for a sellout," he selected his companions carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets ... we discussed neocolonialism, [revolutionary writer] Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy ... We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.

One of Obama's friends, incidentally, was "Marcus," who believed "white people don't see us as human beings."

The black nationalism of Malcolm X also attracted Obama, although he rejected this extremist ideology as impractical and ineffective. Nonetheless, it is significant that in Dreams, written, after all, when Obama was a 33-year-old lawyer, he also resentfully rejects integrationist assimilation, which he compares to gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be ... nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed ...become only so grateful to lose ourselves in ... America's happy, faceless marketplace; and we're [not outraged by the indignities] ... less fortunate coloreds have to put up with ... but because we're wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary n*****.

Such harangues are not only racist, that is, bigoted against whites. They also show Obama to have been unmindful of the real meaning of assimilation and unappreciative of its immeasurable worth. Thanks to the process of assimilation - the uniting under the banner of this nation's democratic creed, laws, and ethics - millions of disparate immigrants have enjoyed unprecedented freedom and prosperity.

Interestingly enough, not only did Obama visit Pakistan during this time - a time of great turmoil, when the country was under martial law - but his mother was a frequent visitor to the country.

Having come to "understand [himself] as a black American," Obama then transferred to Columbia University in order to "test [his] commitments." In New York he continued to fixate on issues relating to race and class:

... I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America's race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia's bathrooms as well, where ...the walls remained scratched with blunt correspondence between n****** and k****.

Obama's absorption in "the politics of the dispossessed" characteristically led him back to socialist solutions. He attended socialist conferences at Cooper Union and worried, justifiably, about "uninhabitable tenements" and black unemployment and low-level jobs. Admirably concerned about the plight of the poor, he nevertheless showed a remarkable lack of receptivity to other than his received views. In his college years, notably, he showed no interest in how individual liberty and free markets might improve the lot of the poor.

Alinsky ‘Apprenticeship'

Fresh out of college, and with a range of work or study options before him, Obama elected to become a Left-wing community organizer in Chicago. He was hired for the job, Freddoso stresses, by persons who had actually trained under academic-turned-radical- socialist and self-described agitator Saul Alinsky. Employed to bring jobs and government benefits to needy Chicago neighborhoods, Obama would later praise this activist stint as "'the best education of his life.'"

What does an apprenticeship at the hands of Alinsky's acolytes entail? What is the Alinsky approach to organizing communities to which the young Obama was so receptive? In an interview, Corsi defines it as a "'radical revolutionist methodology of wealth redistribution, community organizing and political power building.'" He also emphasizes that Alinsky taught organizers to hide their true intentions in the words they spoke. Alinsky had learned the old communist adage that derision would cause community audiences to laugh at their opponents, rather than listen to what their opponents were saying.

Freddoso specifies that Alinsky followers were taught to churn up popular dissatisfaction, manipulate self-interest groups, appear to have integrity and not to exhibit class hated, and intimidate when necessary.

Did Obama imbibe Alinsky's lessons? Freddoso declares him akin to "other street organizers in the Alinsky mold" and cites Mike Kruglik, once also an Alinsky organizer, who declared Obama "'the undisputed master of agitation.'"

What might Obama's formation in the Alinsky mold mean in an Obama presidency? As Freddoso observes, alluding to the presidential candidate's earlier political service in Chicago: Like other Alinsky-ites, "[h]e had a narrow range of solutions to offer South Siders that matches with the rigid adherence he has shown in office to liberal ideas." And - taxpayers take note - nothing in Obama's Chicago experience disabused him of the notion "that government spending can serve as the economic keystone of a large, successful community."

‘Lying Low' at Law School and in Teaching Years

About Obama's time at Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the law review, the New York Times reports, "In dozens of interviews, his friends said they could not remember his specific views from that era, beyond a general emphasis on diversity and social and economic justice." While his main concern continued to be social change, he learned to be politic, no doubt judging this approach most beneficial to his political future. Obama became "deft at navigating an institution scorched with ideological battles, many of which revolved around race," and, in particular, issues relating to affirmative action. He became adept at not giving away his true positions, "giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once."

Later, during his years of teaching constitutional law as an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago, Obama also concentrated on his political rise and kept a low profile. Although his focus remained on race, rights and gender "at a school where," the Times writes, "market-friendliness" prevailed and "economic analysis was all the rage," he did not engage in the heated debates on the campus, had few close friends except for liberal constitutional law professors, and produced no scholarship at all. Obama did not venture outside his own, pre-established, "progressive" worldview, and contact with some of the most distinguished conservative minds in the nation seems to have had no impact on him. In the words of Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague, Obama "'doesn't have the slightest idea where folks like me are coming from," was "an absentee tenant" in ideological debates, and "was unwilling to put his name to anything that could haunt him politically, as [Lani] Guinier's writings had hurt her.'"

Did Obama's Leftist views evolve during these periods of his life? Because of his systematic avoidance of intellectually engaging, one cannot know. This habit of obfuscation does, however, cast doubt on his intellectual honesty and courage.

Part Two will continue Thursday.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. Candace de Russy is a former college professor who was appointed by George W. Bush to serve on the Board of Visitors of the U.S. Air Force Academy from 2002-2005. She currently serves on many education-related boards, and is a nationally recognized writer and lecturer who contributes regularly to such publications as National Review Online.

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