President Obama will “make a major speech on ties with Muslims” on June 4th, as part of a “continuing effort of the president to engage the Muslim world.”
The text has not yet been released, but the content of that speech has been being written throughout our president’s life.
He was born in Hawaii to Barrack Hussein Obama, Sr., a Kenyan of the Luo ethnic group , and Ann Dunham.
“My grandfather, who was Kenyan, converted to Christianity, then converted to Islam,” Obama said. “[A]lthough my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist, thinking religion to be so much superstition.”
Ann Dunham Obama next married Indonesian student, Lolo Soetoro, whose visa was revoked in 1967.
So, when Barrack was six, his family moved to Indonesia, where Barrack was enrolled and listed as a Muslim attending a Muslim school in central Jakarta from 1968 to 1972.
The Chicago Sun-Times quoted Obama’s own description of his stepfather’s faith: “Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths.”
“In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology,” but his own favorite book, Mr. Obama says, is “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, Alex Haley’s book about the assassinated leader of the Nation of Islam .
As an adult, Obama was a member of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Chicago church for more than two decades.
Rev. Wright’s church gave Louis Farrakhan, the current head of the Nation of Islam, its 2007 “Trumpeter Award” because, Rev. Wright said, “Minister Farrakhan will be remembered as one of the 20th and 21st century giants of the African American religious experience.”
During the primary season, Rev. Jeremiah Wright commented: “Barack might be forced by the media and/or by supporters to be very absent from this church and to put distance between our church and himself.”
Wright explained: “When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli” to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with Louis Farrakhan, “a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”
Obama identified Rev. Wright as his “spiritual adviser” and mentor. The training he received from Wright, Obama said, “was the best education I ever had.”
Former PLO and Arafat spokespersons Raschid and Mona Khalidi founded the Arab American Action Network in Chicago. A gala dinner was held in their honor with a commemorative book filled with testimonials, including ones from the Khaladis’ friends and Hyde Park neighbors, the ex-Weatherman domestic terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers and then-state Senator Barack Obama.
One of Mona Khalidi’s groups had received a $40,000 grant from the Woods Fund of Chicago, when Obama and Ayers served on the fund's board of directors.
Khalidi told the mostly Palestinian crowd that state senator Obama deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat: “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances.”
Earlier this year, news cameras filmed President Obama bowing to Saudi King Abdullah at the Group of 20 summit in London, showing our president bent low at the waist, head lowered, and his right hand extended for King Abdullah to accept. The Saudi-backed Arabic paper Asharq Alawsat wrote approvingly: “Obama wished to demonstrate his respect and appreciation of the personality of King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz…”
What will the president say in his June 4th speech? Whatever he says, we can only pray that it will be spoken with a respect and appreciation of the personality of the people for the United States, whose national motto is, “In God We Trust.”
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