05/5/15

Dreams from Obama’s Different Fathers

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

President Obama on Monday is celebrating his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative, designed to create and expand “ladders of opportunity” for young blacks, many of whom have no fathers to guide them. But does President Obama have the credibility to deal with this crisis when he has failed to acknowledge as President the debt that he owes to his mentor and father figure, Communist Frank Marshall Davis?

What’s worse, Obama’s own half-brother, Malik Obama, is calling the President a con man who has failed to help members of his own poverty-stricken Kenyan family. Asked if President Obama has contributed to the foundation for his father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., Malik told filmmaker Joel Gilbert, “No. No. Nothing.”

Perhaps the senior Obama isn’t Obama’s real father, after all.

The fatherhood crisis in black America was illustrated by the controversy over a black mother in Baltimore pulling her son off the streets when she caught him throwing rocks at the police during the riots. The mother, Toya Graham, has six children but no husband.

In addition to his initiatives on behalf of black fathers and their sons, Obama has unveiled a “fatherhood pledge,” which goes as follows:

“In response to President Obama’s call for a national conversation on responsible fatherhood and healthy families:

  • I pledge to renew my commitment to family and community.
  • I recognize the positive impact that fathers, mothers, mentors, and other responsible adults can have on our children and youth, and pledge to do all I can to provide children in my home and throughout my community the encouragement and support they need to fulfill their potential.”

Signers are told that “President Obama grew up without his dad, and has said that being a father is the most important job he has. That’s why the President is joining dads from across the nation in a fatherhood pledge—a pledge that we’ll do everything we can to be there for our children and for young people whose fathers are not around.”

In one of several stories expected to highlight Obama’s alleged commitment to the progress of black people, Yahoo! News describes Obama’s Monday launch of a new foundation to help black youth as part of his presidential legacy.

But in the blockbuster revelations that have been ignored by the pro-Obama “mainstream media,” Malik Obama, son of Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., told Joel Gilbert in an interview from Kenya that he feels disappointed in, used and betrayed by President Obama. “In the beginning, I didn’t think that he was a schemer,” Malik Obama said. “His real character, his real personality, the real him, is coming out now.” Malik says that after using his Kenyan family for political purposes to get elected, Obama has largely abandoned them.

Malik is so disillusioned that he wants his half-brother to take a DNA test to see if he is really related to him.

The version of Barack Obama’s family history that continues to be disseminated nationally is that he grew up without a dad after his father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., abandoned the family. The experience of not having a dad is said to have sparked Obama’s commitment to strengthen the black family through the “responsible fatherhood” initiative and the “My Brother’s Keeper” program. The foundation launched on Monday is an extension of the latter.

Gilbert asked Malik if he had approached Barack Obama about getting some funds to help bury their aunt, Zeituni Onyango, in Kenya after she died in Boston.  Malik responded, “Yes I did. I told him that she’s our aunt, she’s your father’s sister, she loved you very much and we need to do something for her. We need around $20,000 and he said that was too much and that it seemed like she deserved what she got. And I was saying in my mind, ‘what kind of person is this?’ And I told him, ‘you say you’re your brother’s keeper, I don’t feel it, and I don’t see you living up to what you say.’ She had really been good to him when he came. I felt really sad that he would just abandon her like that. I just left. She was stuck there for a month. People were trying to raise money and we finally got her back.”

“The White House had no comment on Onyango’s passing,” the Boston Globe reported at the time.

Malik’s statement to Obama, “you say you’re your brother’s keeper, I don’t feel it, and I don’t see you living up to what you say,” is just another indication that Barack Obama’s family history is questionable.

Obama’s claim to have been abandoned by his Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., is usually combined with the story that he was raised by his white grandparents in Hawaii. However, this has been demonstrated to be a carefully concocted lie designed to hide the fact that his grandfather picked black Communist Frank Marshall Davis to be Obama’s childhood mentor in Hawaii.

According to Barack Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, Davis, referred to as “Frank,” gave him advice on such topics as going to college and race relations, telling him that blacks “have reason to hate.” Davis’s true identity in the Obama book Dreams from My Father was obviously concealed because of his controversial background—which has been extensively documented by Accuracy in Media—as a suspected Soviet espionage agent, pornographer and pedophile.

It was communist historian Gerald Horne who initially disclosed “Frank” to be Davis at a 2007 event announcing that the archives of the Communist Party USA were being stored at New York University’s Tamiment Library. He had noted Davis’s influence over Obama and predicted in his remarks, “Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party,” that Obama would go down in history as a major and influential figure.

Despite Obama’s professed concern for the future of the dysfunctional black family, he has never been asked publicly by the media to explain his relationship with Davis, and he has avoided even mentioning the subject in public, except for one 1995 appearance that just recently surfaced on the Internet in a video. Obama said in that appearance that Davis had schooled him on the subject of white racism before he went off to college.

At one time, Malik Obama said, they were very close. Yet, Barack Obama has largely abandoned his family in Kenya. “He doesn’t want anything to do with me anymore,” Malik said. “I don’t understand how somebody who claims to be a relative or a brother can behave the way that he’s behaving, be so cold and ruthless, and just turn his back on the people he said were his family.”

Gilbert, the director of a film claiming Obama’s real father is Davis and not the Kenyan Obama, asked Malik if he thinks Barack Obama may be the child of Frank Marshall Davis rather than Barack Hussein Obama Sr. “There’s a great resemblance,” Malik replied. “I think Frank Marshall Davis and Barack, they look alike. Some kind of moles I see on his face and Frank, he has those too. There’s a resemblance.”

President Obama has promised to visit Kenya in July. White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz said, “he did not yet know whether the President would visit with members of his extended family,” CNN reported.

Gilbert asked Malik, “Do you expect when he comes to Kenya that he will come to see you?” He replied, “No, I don’t expect that. I don’t. He’s coming to Kenya right now. I’ve not been informed…An embarrassment and demeaning.”

We are two years into the second term of the presidency of Barack Obama and still serious questions are raised about the history and background of the President of the United States.

However, Gerald Horne and others on the left always have seemed secure in their knowledge of what this presidency represents.  “At some point in the future,” Horne had said, “a teacher will add to her syllabus Barack’s memoir and instruct her students to read it alongside Frank Marshall Davis’ equally affecting memoir, ‘Living the Blues’…”

At that point, perhaps, we will learn the complete truth about Barack Obama and Frank Marshall Davis.

04/30/15

Black Mom Changes Leftist Narrative on Violence

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

The reaction among responsible black and white law-abiding citizens to the black thugs rioting in Baltimore was captured by Toya Graham, the black mother who smacked her son around when she found him on the streets joining the attacks on police. Even liberals in the major media applauded her efforts.

“I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray,” she told CBS News, referring to her son and the black youth who died under mysterious circumstances while in police custody.

CBS reported, “Graham, a single mom with six children, denounced the vandalism and violence against police officers. She said rioting in Baltimore is no way to go about getting justice for Freddie Gray and that she doesn’t want that life for her son.”

Graham then appeared on the CBS This Morning Show to discuss the incident and the struggle to raise her children.

The important teaching moment represented by this dramatic incident, a brief moment of sanity in the media, undercut the left-wing effort to somehow blame the police for the riots. As a result, the “progressives” had to go on the attack against the black mother.

Over at Think Progress, the blog of the pro-Obama Center for American Progress, Graham was attacked as a “misguided” mother who exercised bad judgment in holding her son accountable.  Writer Kira Lerner said the issue was alleged police violence, not rioting in the streets by black youth.

She quoted a woman with a group opposed to “police brutality” as saying that “While she doesn’t condone the looting that was highlighted by the media in Baltimore Monday night, she said she understands where the violent protesters are coming from.”

Meanwhile, over at Hot Air, a piece by Noah Rothman ran under the headline, “Don’t let urban unrest derail conservative criminal justice reform.” While the riots were underway, he insisted that “a consensus opinion” had emerged on both the left and the right in favor of getting soft on criminals and letting more of them out of prison.

In the wake of what has happened in Baltimore and Ferguson, the Republican primary electorate might be tempted to embrace a “tough on crime” candidate, but “That would be a mistake,” Rothman informed Hot Air readers.

What’s more, he lectured them, the war on drugs has “failed” and there is no alternative to letting “non-violent offenders” out of prison.

In fact, the war on drugs did not fail. David Evans, a special advisor to the Drug Free America Foundation, notes that marijuana use went down among young people by 25 percent from the advent of the Reagan administration’s “Just Say No” campaign to the inauguration of President Obama. “If we had had a reduction in any other health problem in the U.S. of 25 percent, we would consider it an outstanding success,” he said.

Being “tough on crime” is precisely what many observers, including that courageous Baltimore mom, have concluded needs to be done in the inner cities.

Going soft was precisely what the Baltimore mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, had done, accounting for the weak police response to the riots. Former police officer Michael Tremoglie points out that the Baltimore police knew that the mayor had said she wanted “protesters” protected and room furnished for them to “destroy,” and that “They knew that the DOJ [Department of Justice] was ‘monitoring’ what was occurring during the riots.”

Before he came to Hot Air, a site owned by Salem Communications, a Christian firm, Rothman had sung the praises of the pro-marijuana voices in the media such as MSNBC’s Touré. On another occasion, he had highlighted how comedian Kevin Hart and rapper Ice Cube had attacked commentator Nancy Grace’s anti-marijuana comments.

Hot Air, which claims to be the most heavily-trafficked conservative blog on the Internet, has emerged as a forum for pro-marijuana and soft-on-crime viewpoints, most of them articulated by Rothman, a former libertarian writer for Mediaite.

It is certainly true that the Rothman perspective on “criminal justice reform” has been embraced on the left.

As Accuracy in Media noted recently, in an article about a “criminal justice reform” conference held in Washington, D.C., there is a White House-directed effort to enlist conservatives to join with various progressive organizations to weaken laws against a series of violent and non-violent crimes.

Hillary Clinton joined the campaign on Wednesday, saying that “It’s time to end the era of mass incarceration.”

Some readers at Hot Air were astounded by the advice given by Rothman, who cited the Obama Justice Department as a reliable source of information on criminal justice issues, including alleged police violence.

One said, “Isn’t it great when we can come to Hot Air to read some halfwit ‘conservative’ columnist agree with Eric Holder about root causes?”

Another said, “I don’t think this is a very timely post. At least not whilst the animals are burning, looting, robbing, raping, killing each other and forming alliances with opposing gang bangers to destabilize the structure of society.”

Still another called attention to Heather MacDonald’s piece in the New York Post, “The Perilous New Push to Excuse Lawlessness,” as being “a hundred times better than Noah’s.” The writer said, “She’s an actual conservative who lived through the times when ‘law and order’ were questionable values, and conservatives had to fight hard to implement them.”

MacDonald had referred to “a wide-ranging movement [which] is already under way to transform the criminal justice system in order to avoid a disparate impact on blacks.” But since blacks commit a disproportionate amount of the crime, she said that fulfilling this promise “would require gutting murder statutes, and most other criminal laws,” and that the country’s two-decade-long crime drop would be in jeopardy.

Despite cities like Ferguson and Baltimore going up in flames and the rare story of a mother like Toya Graham making a plea for law-and-order, the liberal media are going to make sure that the movement for criminals’ rights that now operates under the goal of achieving “criminal justice reform” will get the lion’s share of the publicity.

Indeed, Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” just ran a favorable story about the “Coalition for Public Safety,” which is trying to make the ACLU sound like a reasonable organization conservatives can work with. Based on what was reported, it looks like some conservative groups are taking the bait.