What is Obama and His Campaign All About? October 28, 2008

by Paul Eidelberg

In Obama Unmasked (2008), Floyd Brown & Leo Troxler raise the question, “Why is Obama trying so hard to deny that he was born a Muslim?” As his middle name Hussein implies, Barack Obama is a Muslim under Islamic law because his father was a Muslim, for descent in Islam is patrilineal.

Although his professed conversion to Christianity makes him an apostate subject to death under Islamic law, Muslims nonetheless support Obama overwhelmingly. These Muslims include Islamofascists and terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezballah. In fact, jihadists have contributed to Obama’s campaign funding.

This funding troubles New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, despite for her liberal-left reputation. In her op-ed piece of June 29, 2008, Dowd states she was informed by one of Obama’s campaign internet workers that his internet campaign raised some $200 million. That, she says, is more then twice the total amount raised by any candidate in history.

Dowd asks, “Where was this money coming from?” According to Dowd, one of the web site security monitors began to notice that the bulk of the contributions were coming in from overseas internet service providers. Although the security monitors were not able to track most of the sources, they were able to trace contributions from a few credit card accounts and bank electronic funds in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other Middle Eastern countries. These donations, she says, were very likely coming from sources other than American voters. Obama’s campaign people claimed that “none of these donations violated campaign financing laws.”

Dowd nonetheless asks, “Is it right for foreign investors to help decide who will be our next president?” Indeed, given Obama’s Muslim background and substantial funding from Muslim sources, a serious voter should be worried about Obama’s intellectual independence or integrity.

Consider his insistence on negotiating with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions, even though this Muslim ruler calls for a world without America and Israel. Never mind that five years of American and European negotiations with Iran have only given that despotic regime five additional years to develop nuclear weapons. Couldn’t Obama bring himself to state, as a precondition, that Ahmadinejad must renounce his genocidal ambition to wipe Israel off the map, a threat that violates international law?

And what about Ahmadinejad’s saying “death to America”? Surely any patriotic or self-respecting American would insist that Ahmadinejad apologize for such outrageous statements. Strange that Senator McCain and Governor Plain failed to take their opponents to task for this obvious lack of honor.

I wonder whether the honorable senator from Illinois would approve of negotiating with Hitler without preconditions? Comparing Hitler and Ahmadinejad is not hyperbole. Iran used thousands of its own children to walk through and explode minefields in the Iran-Iraq war.

Allow me to juxtapose Islam’s denial of human rights and Obama’s vote against the “Born Alive Infant Protection Act.” This act is intended to protect an infant that is actually born during an abortion procedure. To put it bluntly, Obama voted to kill the baby—something not even Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy voted for!

Returning to campaign financing: Brown and Troxler report that the AFL-CIO and its affiliates have raised an unprecedented $250 million to put 200,000 union workers to campaign for Obama. No wonder: Obama supports unionization of businesses with less than twenty employees. He also voted NO on extending the tax cuts on capital gains and dividends. And he supported subprime mortgages that led to the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the current economic crisis.

Obama is playing the “poor man’s” card, while he receives incalculable support from billionaire George Soros. With only one appearance, he raised $18 million from Hollywood movie stars, 95 percent of whom are leftstream.

Obama is also playing the “race” or guilt card. Countless Americans, especially the liberal-left, feel guilty about the injustices suffered by the black race—boatloads of whom were sold into slavery by Muslims and even by their own people. Voting for Obama, “liberals” feel, will absolve them of guilt or of any accusation of racism. To erase the stain of racism, these liberals are now applying affirmative action programs to Obama’s bid for the presidency regardless of whether he is qualified for the most important and complex office on this planet.

Liberals do not see that their pro-Obama attitude is not only an extension of affirmative action programs, but that those programs are really racist! After all, what is racism if not judging and treating people not according their intellectual and moral character, but by the color of their skin?

Geraldine Ferraro said, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position” Ferraro was Walter Mondale’s vice-presidential running mate for the Democratic Party in 1984.

Obama is also playing: the “image” card despite his associations with questionable public figures. His youth and glibness, together with his being half black and half white, trumps his having had anti-American tutors such as black nationalist Rev. Jeremiah Wright and communist Saul Alinsky. Such associations do not alienate self-hating American multiculturalists of the liberal-left. Obama’s attraction to anti-Americans means nothing to youth ignorant of the American heritage, which has made America the most powerful and beneficent nation on earth. Obama is a novelty, mystifying, for democracy’s bored and impressionable youth.

Obama has cleverly translated the novelty and audacity of his candidacy into campaign slogans: CHANGE and YES WE CAN. How appropriate—since change and cheek flourish the further democracies are removed in time from the aristocratic and religions traditions.

What do Obama and his adulators know about a living tradition, one that reconciles permanence and change, that unites reverence for the past and creativity, national pride and progress?

Like contemporary liberals and all-too-many self-styled conservatives, he disdains conservatives like Justice Clarence Thomas who subordinates himself to the Constitution, which cannot be revered as the nation’s fundamental law if it changes with every generation. Unlike Mr. Justice Thomas or that other great American, Thomas Sowell, Obama regards the Constitution as mere wax on which the majority can stamp its transient prejudices, which can only deprive youth of national purpose and identity. Given the idolatry of CHANGE, is it any wonder that youth are preoccupied with fads and steeped in hedonism? How can it be otherwise when so many universities propagate moral relativism and thus teach nothing of human excellence or greatness—yes, and when so many academics, including mentors of Obama, spew anti-Americanism?

These academics take civilization for granted. They forget how much virtue and sacrifice are required to build civilization and prevent its relapse into barbarism. Raised in a consumer or self-indulgent society, today’s crop of liberals cannot face the reality of Islamic penetration of the United States. A thousand mosques preach hatred of America and Jews, and these liberals hardly blink. They are not disturbed by the growing network of jihadists, including Hezballah sleeper cells, now dotting America. They cannot imagine how Muslims throughout the world would exult and be incited to greater violence if the Crescent and the Sword flew over eastern Jerusalem, as Obama advocates and without a word of criticism from McCain and Palin.

The word “Islam” has yet to appear in the campaign debates. This can hardly be attributed to the economic crisis. True, this crisis distracts U.S. decision-makers from America’s most lethal enemy, Iran, the epicenter of Islamic terrorism.

Judging from his rhetoric, Obama does not comprehend the enormous danger posed by a nuclear-armed Iran. He does not see that Iran’s proxy, Hezballah, defeated Israel in the Second Lebanon War—Israel, the most powerful nation in the Middle East. He does not see that Israel’s defeat was largely the result of irresolute and inexperienced leadership. Neither Israel nor the United States has seen the full consequences of the Lebanon fiasco. Perhaps this will only come to light if Obama enters the White House. This he may well do if Senator McCain and Governor Palin fail to reveal what Obama is really about, and this will require them to be teachers of what America is all about, beginning with America’s Founding Fathers

Prof. Paul Eidelberg is founder and president of the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy. In 1976, he joined the faculty of Bar-Ilan University where he taught political science. Before that time, he served as first lieutenant in the United States Air Force, and earned his doctoral degree at the University of Chicago, and wrote a trilogy on America’s founding fathers: The Philosophy of the American Constitution, On the Silence of the Declaration of Independence, and a Discourse on Statesmanship. Since then, he has written over 1,000 articles, policy papers, and books on Israeli, European, and American politics.