Obama, Odinga, al-Qaeda, and El-Hady
About the Author: Born in Boston, I lived and worked in the D.C. area for a time, but have spent most of my life in Tennessee, where I graduated from the University of Tennessee. My political philosophy could best be described as eclectic, though mostly right of center. Read more from this author
Even a dirt road can be beautiful in Kenya
For the Google generation version, you can skip to the final paragraph.
Background
Raila Odinga and Obama are both members of the Luo tribe in Kenya, a mostly Christian (sorry. just sticking to the facts, here) tribe that is one of the two most politically powerful ethnic groups in Kenya. Raila Odinga (a Christian) has a long history of fighting what he feels to be corruption in Kenyan politics.
Kenya had been, prior to events we will catalogue in a moment, long considered a shining example of democracy in sub-Saharan Africa. To put this complement into perspective, Dopey has long been considered one of the seven smartest Disney dwarfs. Kenyan democracy hasn’t always been so democratic. So Odinga, who attended college in communist East Germany, wanted change, some of which was quite justified.
After colonial rule ended in Kenya, this multi-tribal, multi-ethnic country (think Iraq squared) followed a predictable path to internal stability for these types of countries, floating around in various forms of a strong single-party democracy coalition of various interest groups. While great at maintaining the peace, true opposition is not generally promoted in such a system.
While being pretty consistently a de facto single party democracy, Kenya became one, officially and in fact, in 1982. Odinga’s first attempt at change came with his somewhat minimal involvement in the failed 1982 Kenyan coup d’état, which got him several years in prison. Eventually he was released in 1988 due to a lack of evidence. He was then promptly rearrested, later in 1988, for his involvement in the Kenya Revolutionary Movement. Multi-party politics did eventually come to Kenya in the early 1990’s, though ethnic clashes did occur as an early result, with about 2000 murdered in 1992.
Campaign Financing for Obama and Odinga
All good political movements need money and Odinga, free and politically active, had a unique way of getting his campaign financing off the ground. Never mind the multi-millions from small, imaginary donors, both domestic and foreign, that has fueled Barack Obama’s campaign, Odinga just went openly to the source, teaming up with Saudi Oil baron, Abdel Qader Bakri, who has been tied through investigations to al-Qaeda and to Hatem El-Hady, former chairman of Kindhearts, an offshoot of two Illinois foundations that funneled money to al-Qaeda prior to 9/11.
Hatem El-Hady currently lives in Ohio and has recently been a fundraiser for Hamas and, apparently, the Obama Campaign. Here’s a link to the relevant U.S. government investigation into 9/11 that makes the connection between Bakri and Illinois based Global Relief Foundation (which later spawned El-Hady’s Kindhearts). The rest of it you can easily find with a casual search on Google.
It should be noted that El-Hady’s direct connection with the Obama campaign is impossible to establish, which is why I wrote “apparently” above. For an indeterminate period of time, there was a page on the Obama campaign’s website claiming to be El-Hady’s and, according to various accounts, listing very specific fundraising activities, including the automatically generated campaign “points” that he had received for his efforts, and a link from Michelle Obama indicating that they were, at the least, Facebook-style friends. Since all that remains of this scrubbed portion of the website is a useless screen-capture of the main page, the details of the activities have been lost, which would have provided potentially verifiable events.
Of course, anyone can make a page on Obama’s website (as we have) and say anything you like (as we have), but that is why the now deleted details of activities and the points awarded would be so handy. We certainly never got any points for our efforts on behalf of Obama when we were working there. To think that someone pretending to be El-Hady would sign up to Obama’s campaign and do extensive fundraising in the hopes that someone would notice and damage the Obama campaign is a pretty flimsy suggestion, but you just never know for certain. I tend to believe this really was El-Hady. Why not? While it is a proven fact that his organization, Kindhearts, was related to the al-Qaeda funding operations that were busted after 9/11, El-Hady was a late-comer and never arrested, though Kindhearts was rightfully shut down by the government. Technically, then, El-Hady is just another guy in Ohio who gathered charitable contributions and sent them to Hamas (ostensibly for humanitarian use) before he was told to quit.
Speaking of contributions, as for the rumor that Obama contributed $1 million to the Odinga campaign, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that this is either true or false, but common sense finds no reason to favor it, particularly since it seems to have originated in a ridiculous viral email.
Obama’s Excellent Adventure
So Odinga and Obama both have their money, but let’s go back to Odinga’s quest for the Presidency; Odinga, whose slogan, both currently and during his presidential election, was “Your Agent For Change” and whose most innovative method of communicating with supporters was through cell phone text messaging, knows Barack Obama, who took a trip to Kenya in 2006 during which he made several stops with Odinga and lashed out against the incumbent party in a well-publicised speech given at the University of Nairobi. This incident caused the incumbent administration to state that Odinga was “using Sen. Obama as his stooge, as his puppet.” The Kenyan President also stated that they forgave Obama: “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.” This article is here.
Though Kenya forgave him, the Kenyan ambassador to the U.S. did complain. After all, Kenya has a history of violence erupting between factions and the elections were not that far away. Obama’s response was a sharply worded statement reiterating his call on the current government of Kenya to cease its corruption.
Now it should be pointed out about Obama’s excellent adventure that Obama sympathisers have accused Odinga of latching himself onto Obama and not the other way around. Personally, I find it hard to believe that Obama was anything but a willing campaigner for Odinga. After all, he did make various stops with him and speak out against the incumbents. Also, Odinga has ever been considered a sympathetic hero of the left, both here and abroad. As a member of the same tribe and a co-agent of change who spoke out against the existing Kenyan government, Obama should have felt uncomfortable supporting Odinga? That would be showing a certain level of prescience that no one I know, other than Barack Obama, attributes to Barack Obama.
Proponents of this reverse order of attachment point to Odinga making a statement to the BBC that Obama and Odinga were cousins, specifically that Obama’s father was his maternal uncle. Technically, this isn’t correct, but that is taking a Euro-American view of the statement. In fact, having a mother come from the same town or village in Kenya often qualifies as being casual cousins. When Obama showed up to his “hometown” in Kenya, the children gathered to sing about his being their “brother”.
So far, Andrew Sullivan has yet to demand paternity testing.
In barely related news, Obama and Dick Cheney are, in fact, eighth cousins. That should make liberals madder than his being a first cousin of Odinga.
Odinga’s Excellent Adventure
So then Odinga travels to America after the official kick-off of his campaign where he meets with Obama. As I said above, for a variety of reasons, it is not universally agreed that Odinga, even today, is a bad fellow (as far as Kenyan politicians go). He has met with many American political figures, including most recently as the Prime Minister of Kenya, where he was praised by Condoleezza Rice thusly: “I’d like to welcome the Prime Minister of Kenya, Prime Minister Odinga. It is very good to have you here. I believe that your election as Prime Minister shows that the Kenyan people have come through difficult times…you and the President did a fine job to get Kenya back on the road again, and welcome, Raila. Good to have you here.”
Not that this actually means anything, as most non-Iranian officials are met with grandiose respect by the State Department. Sometimes we even tell little bitty lies. For instance, Odinga wasn’t even elected the Prime Minister of Kenya, as we’ll soon see.
So Odinga, the candidate, returns home to Kenya after meeting with Obama and others and is followed shortly by Dick Morris who arrives to help consult for the campaign. Various conservative bloggers have speculated that it was Obama who set Odinga up with Dick Morris, but there is no reason to believe that, and Morris refuses to tell. Lest you think that the McCain supporting Morris would absolutely never help Obama, you need to remember that Morris’s primary goal in life, particularly at this juncture, was to ruin Hillary Clinton’s chances to become President, so it is possible (likely) that Morris could be a part-time ally of Obama. But with Morris, who is one of the most despicable and duplicitous members of American politics, it is just impossible to say for certain. If you need any understanding of just how bad Morris is, he was essentially washed out of Kenya on a wave of outraged public opinion. This is Kenya, mind you, the place with all the upstanding politicians.
I bring Dick Morris up only because conspiracy-minded folks have included him and because I find him amusing. I don’t actually see anything other than humor about this part of the story.
The Elections and the Aftermath
Fast forward, at last, to the elections, where a nation full of honorary members of ACORN went to the polls and managed to cheat themselves to a virtual deadlock. On December 30, 2007, Reuters filed this report:
NAIROBI, Dec 30 (Reuters) - President Mwai Kibaki has beaten opposition leader Raila Odinga by a narrow margin to win re-election in Kenya’s closest ever vote, the head of the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) said on Sunday.
“The commission therefore declares Honourable Mwai Kibaki as the winner,” ECK chairman Samuel Kivuitu told a small group of reporters at the election tally centre.
Kivuitu, whose attempt to make the announcement in public was halted by scuffles and shouting minutes earlier, said Kibaki had 4,584,721 votes compared to 4,352,993 for Odinga.
Odinga’s opposition party has called the count a fraud.
And that is when all hell broke lose that resulted in widespread murder and more than 600,000 displaced Kenyans. During this time Obama called Odinga and others in the Kenyan government trying to encourage an end to the violence. Any suggestions otherwise are patently ridiculous. What would Obama have to gain from being associated with genocide in Kenya? And the Bush administration was actively seeking Obama’s assistance. At one point, at Condoleezza Rice’s request, Obama recorded a statement that was played over the Voice of America asking for calm.
On the other hand, it is naive to believe that Odinga didn’t initially encourage and then, over time, use the unrest to secure his future, power-sharing position as Prime Minister. Various Kenyan citizens stated that they knew the violence was planned. One Kenyan commentator and Obama fan, Khadija Mohammed, noted during the crisis that if anything good was to come from the actions of Odinga’s political party, ODM, that it was that “The increased interest in Raila Odinga may serve to redeem the foreign media from their fixation on a paradigm long gone, one in which President Kibaki plays the role of a brutal corrupt dictator and Raila Odinga an almost angelic crusader for the wider good.” In the best case scenario, Obama was just as ignorant as the aforementioned foreign media. The worst case scenarios require a secret handshake before you can hear them.
By the way, there is a news video of members of the Luo tribe killing and raping in a mass riot while declaring, “We are Taliban,” but I refuse to link to it. It’s on the Internet and happy hunting if you are that interested. Oh, and just because you shout something while killing people doesn’t make it true.
Except for all the dead and displaced, all’s well that ends well, and a distinctly undemocratic power-sharing truce was eventually reached with help from the outside (not Obama). Odinga was made the Prime Minister.
So where does that leave us today? Well, that just depends on what you make of the story. We can say that Odinga, and maybe Obama, received significant campaign funds from supporters of terrorism and that Obama actively supported a politicalinsurgent who caused massive destruction after a failed presidential campaign. We can also say that Obama showed his usual propensity for terrible judgment both in getting involved with Odinga at all and also in helping to sow the seeds of dissent in a foreign country by giving a careless and inflammatory speech that was broadcast to the entire Kenyan nation. We can then, perhaps, lay at least a small portion of blame for the loss of all those souls in the riots, but that would be somewhere between a speeding ticket and “aiding and abetting,” since it would be naive to believe that Odinga and the ODM would have just quietly accepted defeat if only Obama had not opened his mouth. But there is the distinct possibility that Obama’s statements were looked upon as a U.S. sanction for violence.
In fact, many in Kenya are no longer so in love with Obama. The New York Times reported on 2/24/08 that “You might think that all Kenyans would be vigorously supporting Mr. Obama. But Kenya has been fractured along ethnic lines in the last two months, so now Mr. Obama draws frenzied support from the Luos ethnic group of his ancestors, while many members of the rival Kikuyu group fervently support Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
Journalism and Jerome Corsi
Which brings us to the biggest problem in this whole deal, which is the complete absence of the media. If not for Kenya recently detaining and then releasing “journalist” Jerome Corsi, the media wouldn’t have been reporting anything about Kenya at all other than the Palin once being blessed by a Kenyan pastor story.
Corsi, the hyperbolic, money-grubbing imagineer behind a thousand liberal conspiracies, who attached himself to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (who later shook free of him) in 2004 and who wrote The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,is a bane to every conservative trying to get the truth out about Obama. Instead of sending viral emails with imaginary information, he publishes best selling books with imaginary information. He had gone to Kenya to hold a press conference where everyone listening would have needed to be wearing a tinfoil hat or risk permanent brain damage. He had also intended to give Barack Obama’s brother a check for $1000 in a show of…something. Given that Corsi is a multi-millionaire, I’m not sure it could be considered generosity. But I’m not as demented as Corsi, so I can’t tell you what he was trying to do other than gain publicity. You’ll have to talk to Dick Morris for more insight than that.
But Corsi got even better publicity than he intended by being detained. It even saved his livelihood, at least temporarily. Had he just stood in front of a podium and announced, as he had planned, that his findings were that the Prime Minister of Kenya and Obama and al-Qaeda were conspiring to put Obama into the White House and take over America from the inside, who would have listened? Even the vast majority of Republicans would have looked uncomfortably away and tried to return The Obama Nation to Barnes & Noble. As it is, no one heard that garbage, but people are beginning to report about Kenya.
As for the allegations regarding al-Qaeda and various odd moves, including resisting deportation of terrorist suspects, that Odinga has made that seem to imply a more than friendly attitude toward terrorism, I’d have to agree that he is, in fact, partially beholden to interests that run counter to civilized interests. This is not an international conspiracy. It’s small town politics played out in Third World form.
At last, the Bottom Line
Obama has a history of incredibly poor judgment, which is blaringly evident all over this story. He has no control over his campaign financing, and he showed absolutely no tact or prescience in his dealings with Kenya. By choosing sides and speaking out on multiple occasions against the sitting government, Obama helped to propel Odinga’s career and to create a situation that exploded tragically on December 30, 2007. As one of the most, if not the most, recognizable political figures in the world and the defacto voice of America when he travels abroad, Obama bears, if unwittingly, at least a part of the blame for the tragedy that happened in Kenya. And the mainstream media deserves all of the blame for not getting this story out there.
[...] Barack Obama’s involvment with Odinga in Kenya has received scant attention. This story hits straight at the heart of Obama’s lack of judgment but nobody’s talking about it. [...]