In my book and on my blog, I broke numerous stories on Obama's dangerous alliance with Raila Odinga. I warned America that Obama was aligning against our ally in the only real democracy in Africa, President Kibaki of Kenya. In the book I have a chapter on Obama and Odinga. In an August 2006 campaign stop, Illinois Senator Barack Obama thundered against corruption: “My own city of Chicago, Ill., has been the home of some of the most corrupt local politics in American history over the years, from patronage machines to questionable elections.” But he wasn’t speaking in Chicago. Barack Obama was in Kenya. “Here in Kenya, there is a crisis,” Obama said, “a crisis that’s robbing an honest people of the opportunities they fought for.” Although he didn’t mention him by name, he was attacking the President of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, and appeared with Kibaki’s chief opponent, Raila Odinga. Foreshadowing his own presidential campaign slogan, Obama declared, “Kenyans are now yearning for change.” Alfred Mutua, a spokesman for the Kibaki government, accused Odinga of “using Senator Obama as his stooge, as his puppet.” Mutua was magnanimous about Obama’s apparent naivete: “It is now clear that he was speaking out of ignorance and does not understand Kenyan politics, we earlier thought he was mature in his assessment of Kenyan and African politics. We forgive him because it is his first time in the Senate and he is yet to mature into understanding issues of foreign policy.” Obama’s support for Odinga is consistent with his other associations: Odinga is a socialist who is enough of a hardcore true believer to have named his son Fidel. Odinga’s history suggests that he is more of a Marxist than a social democrat: his father, longtime Kenyan opposition leader Oginga Odinga, was a communist. The East German government gave Raila Odinga a scholarship to Technical University Magdeburg, from which he graduated in 1970. Odinga also had troubling ties to Islamic hardliners, although the exact nature of those ties was hotly disputed. Odinga reportedly made a fortune in the oil industry by making a deal with the Al-Bakri Group of Saudi Arabia; Abdulkader al-Bakri, the CEO of the Al Bakri Group, has been identified as a sponsor of Al-Qaeda. Odinga also cultivated ties with Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi. Watch this video from January 3, 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ws5cdiTFa4 Odinga campaigned against the Kibaki government’s cooperation with the U.S. war on terror, making an issue out of the extradition of a group of accused al-Qaeda operatives, some of whom the Odinga camp maintained were innocent. “Our government will not be held at ransom to extradite Muslims to foreign lands,” thundered Odinga at a campaign rally. And with Muslim Kenyans, the message resonated: “Islamic outrage,” observed Joshua Hammer of the New York Times, “had placed the incumbent, Kibaki, on the defensive and provided Raila Odinga with a tool to rally the support of Kenya’s Muslims.” Nor was that all. Just a month before the December 27 election, controversy broke out over a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that Odinga had purportedly signed on August 29, 2007 with Sheikh Abdullahi Abdi, chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum (NAMLEF), an umbrella organization comprised of the nation’s principal Islamic groups. I posted the MoU here on January 4, 2008 here: The Memorandum had Odinga promising “within six months” to “rewrite the Constitution of Kenya to recognize Sharia as the only true law sanctioned by the Holy Quran for Muslim declared regions.” Odinga, according to the Memorandum, would recognize “Islam as the only true religion” and give Islamic leaders an “oversight role to monitor activities of ALL other religions.” Christian preaching, alcohol and pork would be banned. Darara Gubo, the regional manager for Africa of International Christian Concern, denounced the agreement for undermining “the secular nature of Kenya and open[ing] a Pandora’s box of chaos and conflict similar to what happened in Nigeria and Sudan.” Gubo added: “This is not a stand-alone incident; rather, it is part of strategy to Islamize Eastern Africa and the Horn of Africa, through the introduction of Sharia law.” Odinga denounced the leaked Memorandum as a forgery, and the next day released what he said was the genuine Memorandum of Understanding that he really had signed with Abdi – a substantially more innocuous document that Odinga termed “very innocent.” Abdi sought to reassure the public: “The objective was to safeguard the interests of a section of the Kenyan community (Muslims) that has undergone atrocities over the last 44 years. Fears that Muslims want to introduce Sharia law and make Islam the supreme religion in this country are false and only meant to generate hostility between us and our Christian and Hindu brothers. Islam does not suppress other religions.” Not everyone was mollified, however. The human rights group International Christian Concern, which monitors persecution of Christians worldwide, concluded that the pro-Sharia version of the Memorandum was in fact not a forgery at all, but an authentic secret agreement made between Abdi and Odinga. The Evangelical Alliance of Kenya said that in both versions of the Memorandum Odinga “comes across as a presumptive Muslim president bent on forcing Islamic law, religion and culture down the throats of the Kenyan people in total disregard of the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of worship and equal protection of the law.” Whatever the truth of the matter, Kenyan Christians remained concerned that with Odinga would come Sharia, with its institutionalized discrimination against non-Muslims – but ultimately there proved to be no way to tell whether or not their fears were justified. For despite Barack Obama’s help, Odinga lost the Kenyan presidential election – and then the violence began. Amid widespread charges that Kibaki had stolen the election, Odinga supporters staged bloody reprisals, killing 700 and displacing 250,000 within a month after the election. By the middle of February 2008, just over six weeks after the election, the death toll had risen to 1,500, with 500,000 homeless. 200 people were burned alive when Odinga supporters torched a church in which they had taken refuge. A Human Rights Watch report stated that “several leaders involved in anti-Kikuyu violence” had said that “they were merely doing by force what they had been denied a chance to do through the ballot box.” A Kenyan tribal elder said that the Odinga camp planned the unrest beforehand: “[The elders] said that if there is any sign that Kibaki is winning, then the war should break [sic]. They were coaching the young people how to go on the war [sic].” Stanley Kamau, who campaigned for Kibaki, declared: “It was definitely as if it had all been planned. Before the elections they (the Luos) said: ‘It is our turn’. They told us no matter what, they were going to take power.” Barack Obama was so concerned about the violence in Kenya that he took time out of his hectic schedule during the New Hampshire primary to call…Raila Odinga. Twice. Time reported in January 2008 that “in the days since his Iowa victory, Obama has had near daily conversations with the U.S. ambassador in Nairobi, Michael Ranneberger, or with Kenya’s opposition leader, Raila Odinga. Obama was trying to reach Kibaki as well.” Kibaki doesn’t seem to have taken Obama’s calls, but in an attempt to quell the rioting and murder, Kibaki named Odinga prime minister – in which role Odinga realized a longstanding dream of his friend, supporter, and possible relative Barack Obama: in February 2009, he met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And now here we are a year and half into Obama's disastrous presidency, and we bear witness to the poisonous fruit of this. WASHINGTON, DC, August 6, 2010- On Thursday, President Obama praised Kenya for approving a controversial new constitution that liberalizes abortion laws and that partially implements Muslim Sharia law within Kenya’s borders. “This was a significant step forward for Kenya’s democracy,” President Obama stated, “and the peaceful nature of the election was a testament to the character of the Kenyan people.” The new constitution was approved by about 70% of voters. It permits abortion for the sake of the “health” of the mother – a term that opponents of unborn rights admit can be “broadly interpreted when need be” to help bring about abortion on demand. It also carves out legal space for Muslim khadi courts, which handle family issues in accord with Sharia law. Only about 12% of Kenya is Muslim. President Obama stated that his administration had been “pleased to support Kenya’s democratic development and the Kenyan people, including through the visit of Vice President Biden earlier this year.” The Obama administration has spent about $23 million supporting the new constitution, a move that some congressmen have contested violates the Siljander amendment, a statute that prohibits the federal government from lobbying for or against abortion with foreign aid funds.
Sunday, 8 August 2010
Obama Pushed/Bankrolled/Implements Sharia Law in New Constitution in Kenya, Non-Muslim Country
August 7, 2010
Only about 12% of Kenya is Muslim.
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