marvellous piece on obama and odinga myth

Jihad fantasies of Obama, Dick Morris and Kenya
John Gorenfeld, Firedoglake, August 6, 2008

They say say nobody reads books anymore. But Dr. Jerome Corsi, the man of right-wing letters whose goofy books got Americans talking in 2004 about whether John Kerry shot himself on purpose (Unfit For Command), and in 2007 about the “coming merger with Mexico and Canada” (The Late Great U.S.A.) has just struck New York Times Bestseller List gold with his dumb new book, The Obama Nation. And this one has people asking whether Barack Obama plans to team up with his depraved cousin from Kenya—the Luo politician Raila Odinga—to make your daughters wear burqas and pledge allegiance to Terrorist Law. “Obama-backed ally forged pact with radical Muslims,” was how WorldNet Daily heralded Corsi’s book, “New book details intervention in Kenyan presidential election.”

In the Muslim-rumor laboratories of the Internet, stories have circulated for months of an evil pact—not between Obama and the Wall Street donors you would think to look at, but between Obama and Raila Odinga, Kenya’s goateed socialist opposition leader and Obama’s fellow Luo. In 2007, a disputed election brought on riots and murder, which Corsi would like to blame on the Democratic senator. Odinga, as it turns out, is an Anglican. And his promise to Muslims to blanket Kenya in Islamic sharia law appears only in a document that seems, at first glance, to be a shoddy forgery created by his enemies.

During a 2006 trip to Kenya, the story goes, Obama had campaigned for Odinga, his fellow Luo, so ardently that an government spokesman (representing the corrupt Kibaki regime) had accused the senator of being a “stooge.” Celeste Davis, an influential missionary in Africa who has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, is credited with an e-mail missive that tries to link the Kenya riots to Obama’s alleged true nature as an Islamist who plans to bring on a “race war” akin to the tribal fighting in Kenya. Davis also claimed the senator gave $1 million to help his evil Muslim cousin campaign for a power-sharing agreement. And on Sean Hannity’s site, someone has written: “This puts both Obama and Odinga right up there in a pantheon with Idi Amin!” Which would put George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice up there, too; the president has backed the power-sharing agreement between Odinga and his rival, incumbent Mwai Kibaki, who has become a controversial figure for allowing his constituents to be renditioned to Guantanamo Bay and various abusive countries. It turns out that the supposed $1 million “Friends From Senator BO” donation has been debunked by Snopes. And in a delightful twist, if you want to blame someone for planning the Odinga campaign, you are better off blaming Dick Morris, the campaign consultant and prolific author of Jerome Corsi-esque books about wicked liberals. He was part of the Odinga campaign team, Reuters has reported.

What about Odinga’s shadowy promise to enslave Kenyans under the full weight of sharia Islam? Though this claim has been repeated in a shoddy story by Daniel Johnson in The New York Sun, and elsewhere in the Right Web, the muckraking site Wikileaks cuts through the story pretty quick. It lets us compare two versions of a “Memorandum of Understanding” signed by candidate Odinga. One of them is a nuanced document pledging to work harder to protect Muslim Kenyans from renditions. The other (download it, seriously) is a nutty and crude version of the first one. Someone has inserted Muslim prayers and insha’Allah ‘s all over the place. There are explicit orders to make every child attend a madrassa, recognize sharia as “the only true law” in some regions, outlaw Christian TV, ban liquor, reject “heathens and Zionists.” Odinga, an Anglican, is cast in the world of this zany document as a crypto-Muslim “who recognizes Islam as the only true religion.” It comes across as the Kenyan answer to the Michelle Obama “Whitey Tape.”

And what about Obama’s supposedly outrageous 2006 appearance in Kenya? I imagine that hundreds of Corsi fans are Googling “Obama + Odinga” tonight and deducing, from the sheer volume of nonsense clogging the top Google results, that the senator was down there advocating something luridly tribal and alien. A different picture comes across in coverage of Obama’s visits to Kenya in the conservative Economist or the mainstream CBS, which find Obama pleading for the violence to end and declaring that “ethnic-based tribal politics have to stop.” No mention of any hidden jihadist thrust behind it all, which would be a secret safe with Dick Morris.