The first thing I have to say about "An
Attack That Came Out of the Ether," published by The Washington Post
on June 28th, is that at NO time was I ever contacted by this woman,
Dr. Danielle Allen, from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS). I spoke to two male Post reporters, who spoke to
me over the phone for a period of months. The first contact was in
the fall of 2007. They told me they were trying to track down the
source of emails they considered negative to the Obamamessiah.
Allen, who is an Obama
shill from Chicago and who has
contributed $2,750 to Obama (going back to 2004), obsesses about the "Muslim" Obama stories, but steers clear of
Obama's relationships with communists, Marxists, socialists, terrorists,
racist reverends
and convicted swindlers. The trick she attempts to use is to knock
down one or two or three items so the other four thousand don't count.
The following notice appears on my website's "About"
page: "I don't write this stuff -- I cherry-pick it and publish it here
-- every attempt is made to provide attribution and/or links to the
original source -- if you don't like the writer's viewpoint -- send them
an email -- not me." I want The Obama File to
be able to withstand the type of attack that Allen attempts in this
article.
I was quoted as saying, "If 20 percent of what's on my Web site is true,
this guy is a clear and present danger," the report left out out the
entire statement.
I told her reporters that I believed that The Obama File content was
better than 95% accurate, but that If 20 percent of what's on my Web
site is true, this guy is a clear and present danger. I still
believe that.
Allen writes, "There was 'Beckwith,' whom she pegged as a veteran from
Boston, old enough to vote for John F. Kennedy, in uniform by 1964 (I
got out in '64), and
host of a Web site that devotes considerable space to an 'Obama file'
that says the senator is 'by birth, blood and training, a Muslim.'"
That statement is true. Just ask Obama's sister Maya. In an
interview with the New York Times, published on April 30th, 2007,
Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s younger half sister, told the Times, "My whole
family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim."
I assume Maya thinks of her brother, Obama, as a member of her family?
Even if Maya didn't make such a statement. Islam is patrilinear.
The son of a Muslim is a Muslim (birth, blood) and Obama did study
Islam, the Quran and the Hadith at the Besuki Primary School in Jakarta,
Indonesia for two years (training). Further, he
attended mengaji classes where he studied the Quran in its native Arabic (more
training).
In his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," Obama, himself, mentions studying
the Quran and describes the public school as "a Muslim school." He
wrote, "In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made
faces during Koranic studies."
According to Tine Hahiyary, one of Obama's teachers and the principal
from 1971 through 1989, Barry
actively took part in the Islamic
religious lessons during his time at the school. His teacher was
named Maimunah and she lived in the Puncak area, the Cianjur Regency.
"I remembered that he had studied "mengaji" (recitation of the Quran)"
Tine said.
These facts can account for the startling statement Obama made on
February 27th, 2007, when he said the Muslim call to prayer was "one of
the prettiest sounds on Earth."
In an
interview with Nicholas Kristof, published in The New York Times,
Obama recited the Muslim call to prayer, the Adhan, "with a first-class
[Arabic] accent."
The opening lines of the Adhan (Azaan) is the Shahada:
Allah is Supreme! Allah is Supreme!
Allah is Supreme! Allah is Supreme!
I witness that there is no god but Allah
I witness that there is no god but Allah
I witness that Muhammad is his prophet...
According to Islamic scholars, reciting the Shahada, the Muslim
declaration of faith, makes one a Muslim. This simple yet profound
statement expresses a Muslim's complete acceptance of, and total
commitment to, the message of Islam.
Obama knows this from his Quranic studies -- and he knows the New York
Times will publish this fact and it will be seen throughout the Islamic
world.
Regardless of Obama's religion, what message is he sending the world's
1.2 billion Muslims?
I suppose it's easy for Obama to remember the Shahada for the 35 years
since he left Indonesia -- and in 'first-class' Arabic -- especially
since he believes the Muslim call to prayer is "one of the prettiest
sounds on Earth." -- no matter what religion he belongs to,
those Muslim prayers must run through his head, and often -- what does that
really make him?
And although I do have a Boston accent, of which I'm proud, Allen gets in a little
ethnic stereotyping by calling my accent a "... thick Boston brogue" --
Bostonians don't have brogues -- my antecedents from Ireland do -- it's
a good thing I don't have a chip on my shoulder and charge "racism" at
such obvious stereotyping -- like some folks might.
And there is no "unnamed 'colleague' in Europe" -- that's probably my
friend and fellow blogger, ExpatGuy, who operates the "An
American Expat in Southeast Asia" blog (a truly great resource
about Obama's time in Indonesia).
But, what the heck, Europe, Southeast Asia, they're all foreign places--
ya' seen one, ya' seen 'em all.
Allen is also incorrect when she writes, "His initial goal was to take
swats at the liberal left. 'Then this new guy comes along called
Obama,' he said."
"The Obama File is a spinoff of
www.FreedomsEnemies.com
-- now defunct --
where it started out as a single page. Freedom's Enemies documented
the relationship between the political left and Islam.
Along comes Obama -- with a foot in each camp -- and The Obama File just
evolved.
The reason I spun off The Obama File is that I did not want the name, Freedoms
Enemies, to be a pejorative to the information I was compiling on
Obama.
This sentence is also false -- "Beckwith said he built a Web site that
features hundreds of pages of material intended to undermine Obama."
There are dozens of subject area pages on my website and I take
pains to document and provide attribution for everything. Those pages
link to thousands of source articles, primarily from mainstream media
sources (including The Washington Post), and my intention is not to
"undermine" poor Barry -- just like it says on my "About"
page -- it is to "oppose a fascist sitting in the Oval Office" --
and there is "no requirement to
be fair and balanced" -- this is an opposition website.
I suppose it could have been more of a hatchet job, but what amazes me
is Allen's obsession with the Muslim thing -- that rumor is more than a year old
and has been fed by Obama and members of his family more than anyone else.
If she wants to know where the "Muslim rumors" came from, she should
look towards Obama.
Had Obama just come out at the beginning of his campaign and simply
stated that he had spent a couple of years as a child in Islamic studies
as the result of having a Muslim step-father, but has since moved away
from Islam, he wouldn't have to deal with this issue.
Instead
he insists on his official website, in spite of all the evidence to
the contrary, "Obama Has never Been A Muslim" -- and that's
simply not true.
It's Obama's own mendacity and dissimulation that is his
problem and Obama is the source of that problem -- not me or the others
that Allen has chosen to attack.
What I want to know is why she isn't knocking down stories about
Obama's relationship with communists, Marxists, socialists, terrorists,
convicted swindlers, and don't forget the racist Reverends -- Wright, Pfleger, Meeks and Moss.
Could it be that those long-term relationships are just too easy to
document?
Danielle S. Allen is Dean of Humanities and a
Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of
Chicago (where Obama taught) and the UPS Foundation Professor in the
School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), at
Princeton.
She is a past member of the Obama Campaign, resigning the day before she
began this investigation. She is a maximum
contributor to the Obama
Campaign ($2,750) and is probably violating federal law by using
tax-exempt facilities and her grant money to do opposition research for the Obama
Campaign?
She is hardly an
independent investigator, but more likely a friend of Obama from
Chicago -- I wonder where she goes to church?
The Washington Post is silent on these
critical details.
But it is kinda cool that this website is now one of "the most vexing
problems in the universe."
And Matthew Mosk, whose byline the article appears under, is the reporter who
wrote about FreeRepublic.com's (FR) "involvement" with a "smear
campaign" against Maryland's notorious governor, Martin O'Malley. Mosk got himself caught up in the story,
known as the nefarious
MD4Bush scandal,
so much so that he is rumored
to have had an FR screen name at one point.
What is known for sure is that somebody at the Washington Post was
participating in the O'Malley threads; and then, lo and behold, the
Washington Post's Matthew Mosk writes an "expose" about
FreeRepublic.com!
So, one has to wonder about this new attempt by the Washington Post's Matthew Mosk and
this think tank woman to smear FreeRepublic.com and the rest of us --
all conservative, and all in opposition to the Obama candidacy.
How did Danielle Allen find Matthew Mosk to write this piece? Or
did Matthew Mosk feed the FR threads to Allen, and then "discover" her
investigation?
Read the National ReviewOnline's
take on the Washington Post's
attack on me and The Obama File.
At least the Washington Post could have put a link to my website
somewhere in this article so their readers could judge "The Obama File"
for themselves.
Update -- Reader, Stanley V. makes several interesting observations:
Dr. Allen seemed impressed with the level of technical proficiency
required to launch an electronic smear campaign. Do these emails
exist or is this just an excuse to try and discount the information
content of your site. For someone advertised as having, "the
classicist's careful attention to texts and language with the political
theorist's sophisticated and informed engagement" her article sadly
seemed to talk a lot about nothing. What did these emails say?
That he was a Muslim? He was educated to be Muslim, was that point
lost on Dr. Allen?
Perhaps, Dr Allen would like to discount all sources of information, web
or email based, as suspect, if they are negative towards Obama, since
there are obviously sophisticated internet conspirators that are
following a schooling fish model acting to confuse and mislead the
easily manipulated American voter. From the IAS towers we may be
too stupid to be allowed to make up our own minds based on the
information from both sides.
It’s interesting that she was put up as the author of this article after
the fact it needed the IAS logo, otherwise it would have no credibility.
I can understand that a candidate would want a fair chance to offer a
rebuttal to an email that has false content, but as the reader I didn’t
see any rebuttal. I was left with the underlying message to
disregard any negative information about the candidate, and the subtle
reminder that I’m too ignorant to be able to spot a false and fabricated
email if there ever was one. How do I know if the email if
fabricated if the Washington Post won’t publish it along with the
article that references it? If it’s fabricated why not reference
the claims and demonstrate why they are false. This comes back to
the audience is felt to be too limited to follow logic.
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