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From: azjohn
Newsgroups: dfw.politics,az.politics,misc.survivalism
Subject: How I became George Obama's 'brother'
Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2012 14:04:32 -0700
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By Dinesh D'Souza
Published August 16, 2012
A few days ago I received a call from a man I recently met named George.
He was a bit flustered, and soon informed me that his young son was
sick with a chest condition. He pleaded with me to send him $1,000 to
cover the medical bills. Since George was at the hospital I asked him
to let me speak to a nurse, and she confirmed that George’s son was
indeed ill. So I agreed to send George the money through Western Union.
He was profusely grateful. But before I hung up I asked George, “Why
are you coming to me?” He said, “I have no one else to ask.” Then he
said something that astounded me, “Dinesh, you are like a brother to me.”
Actually, George has a real life brother who just happens to be the
president of the United States. (George Obama is the youngest of eight
children sired by Barack Obama Sr.) George’s brother is a
multimillionaire and the most powerful man in the world. Moreover,
George’s brother has framed his re-election campaign around the “fair
share” theme that we owe obligations to those who are less fortunate.
One of Obama’s favorite phrases comes right out of the Bible: “We are
our brother’s keeper.” Yet he has not contributed a penny to help his
own brother. And evidently George does not believe, even in times of
emergency, that he can turn to his brother in the White House for help.
So much for spreading the wealth around.
Obama’s refusal to help George is especially surprising because George
doesn’t just live in American-style poverty but rather in Third World
poverty. He lives in a shanty in the Huruma slum in Nairobi. He gets
by on a few dollars a month. Obama also has an aunt named Hawa Auma,
his father’s sister, who ekes out a living selling coal on the streets
of a small village in Kenya. She says she would like to have her teeth
fixed, but she cannot afford it. Obama hasn’t offered to help her either.
What’s going on here? Why is President Obama so hesitant to help family
members in need?
A couple of years ago, George teamed up with a British journalist Damien
Lewis and the two of them published George’s story in a book called
"Homeland." Yet according to Lewis, shortly before the book’s
publication in America, the publisher Simon & Schuster decided to shred
the entire print run, more than 20,000 copies. Lewis tried
unsuccessfully to get an explanation from Simon & Schuster but to no
avail. He now suspects that the White House convinced Simon & Schuster
that George’s story might prove embarrassing to the president.
In 2010, George also applied for a visa to come to the United States and
was refused. While George confesses that in his younger years he was a
delinquent, he has never been convicted of any crime. Moreover, he has
a very good reason to visit the United States: his mother Jael Otieno
lives in Atlanta. So why would the U. S. embassy in Nairobi refuse a
tourist visa to the brother of the president who just wants to spend
time with his mother?
In the past few days, an article has been circulating on the web that
depicts George as a social undesirable. First published in the London
Daily Mail, the article portrays George as a habitual drunk and
philanderer. I spent a day with George this past February while
interviewing him for my documentary film 2016: Obama’s America. I can
attest that George is not an innocent. If he had been, he would not
have survived life in the Huruma slum. Yes, George is street smart and
cunning and I did smell alcohol on his breath.
But so what? George may be a drinker and a skirt-chaser but, as becomes
clear from his book, he is also a survivor. He has overcome his past as
a gang-member and petty thief and now works as the organizer of a slum
soccer league. He is trying to uplift himself, and he is trying to help
slum kids aspire to a better life. On balance, Lewis assures me,
“George is not a bad guy. He is on the side of the angels.”
But even if Lewis is wrong, and George exhibits some harmful cultural
pathologies, the liberal argument—one that Obama himself makes in his
book "The Audacity of Hope" — is that the cultural pathologies of the
poor are themselves the product of social disadvantage.
Barack Obama Jr. first met George in 1987, when George was five years
old. He met George again in 2006 when he visited Kenya as a U.S.
Senator from Illinois; George was then in his early twenties. Had Obama
helped George along the way, perhaps this young man would not have ended
up dirt-poor and living such a degraded life.
So what’s the real story here? Where’s George Obama’s “fair share”?
George’s tragic situation exposes President Obama as a hypocrite. Here
is a man who demands that others pay higher taxes to help the poor—even
poor people who are not related to them—while Obama himself refuses to
help a close relative like George.
Yet I believe there is a deeper explanation that goes beyond hypocrisy
for why Obama wants nothing to do with George. After all, it would
cost Obama so little to raise George out of poverty, and yet he won’t do
it. This isn’t mere negligence; it suggests an active animus. The
reason for that animus emerges in George’s book and also in my interview
with George in the film 2016. In that interview, George rejects the
anti-colonial philosophy that was espoused by Barack Obama Sr. This is
the “dream from my father” that President Obama celebrates in his own
autobiography.
From the record of their lives and writings, it’s clear that Barack
Obama Sr. and Barack Obama Jr. both share the anti-colonial view that
blames Western colonial exploitation for the poverty and suffering of
the Third World. Yet George doesn’t buy it. He observes that at the
time of its independence in the early 1960s “Kenya was on an economic
par with Malaysia or Singapore. Look where we are now, and where they
are. They’re practically developed and industrialized, while Kenya is
still a basket case.” George believes that poor countries should take
responsibility for their own situation. “What’s our excuse for failure?
We don’t have one. We’ve only got ourselves to blame.”
Incredible though it seems, George Obama is, within the context of his
own society, a conservative. He doesn’t worship at the shrine of Barack
Obama Sr. and he espouses an ideology diametrically opposed to that of
his father and his famous brother. George has experienced first-hand
the empty rhetoric of the two Baracks, and he rejects it based on his
actual experience of Third World poverty.
No wonder President Obama despises George, doesn’t want him around,
doesn’t care to hear George’s views circulated in America, and won’t
lift a finger to help him even when George’s son is in the hospital.
So that’s why George Obama felt he had to call me. He had no one else
to call. He reached out to me in his time of need because he felt he
couldn’t call on his real life sibling living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
That’s how I got to be, if only metaphorically and for a short time,
George Obama’s “brother.”
Dinesh D’Souza, narrator and co-director of the film "2016 - Obama's
America," is also the author of the new book "Obama’s America,"
published this week by Regnery.
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