Did Barack Obama Support A Communist-Sharia Ticket In Kenya? (UPDATED)

I have been hearing more and more about this story, and now Founding Bloggers reader Sheila left this link to the video below.

It tells the story of Obama cousin Raila Odinga. The first 6 minutes of the video establish who Raila Odinga is, and in a nutshell, he is Barack’s Obama’s communist cousin who ran for president and lost by a narrow margin. He then incited murderous riots to force his way into office. His strongest political alliance is with Jihadis, who he has signed an agreement with to institute sharia law in a country that is only 20% Muslim.

Bottom line…in 1996 Barack supported (by campaigning for, making public appearances for) his cousin who believes in imposing Sharia law on a country where 80+% of the population is Christian and killing anyone who stands in his way. [LINK]

The video then reveals (6:22) that Senator Obama traveled to Kenya (on the tax payer’s dime?), and supported his cousin’s run for office! His cousin also ran as a change candidate!

On October 3rd, The Wall Street Journal mentioned Obama’s support for Raila Odinga, almost in passing, in the context of why he chose Biden.

Clearly, Barack Obama’s much-touted advisory board of 300 foreign policy experts was inadequate. They had to shore up a nominee whose only foreign policy experience to date had been to interfere in the elections in Kenya on behalf of his cousin, Raila Odinga.

Ouch!

If this story is true, then it is hard not to see a vote for Obama as anything other than a vote of endorsement of his support of Sharia law. If it is not true, I would like to know who produced it, and they should be receive a very public media flogging. Although, that would require mainstream media to acknowledge the story to begin with, and that is something they have been derelict in doing.

UPDATE Additional background on Obama’s trip to Kenya, and it is very enlightening.

I found a Frontline “dispatch” from January 25, 2008 titled “Obama: The Kenya Connection”. The author is incredulous to the idea that Obama could possibly endorse Odinga.

Kenyan politicians have been using his popularity as political capital. In 2006, opposition leader Raila Odinga tried to portray Obama’s trip to Kenya as a personal endorsement. Odinga’s supporters created T-shirts and posters with cleverly computer-altered images that showed Obama and Odinga standing side by side, arms around each other.

More recently, on January 8th, Odinga told the BBC that Obama is his maternal cousin. Those who understand Kenyan politics know that Odinga’s claim is meant to rally Kenyans behind him as he tries to fight his way into the State House, Kenya’s highest office, which he contends Kibaki robbed him of by rigging the December 27 elections.

……

Obama’s perceived support for Odinga may have arisen from a speech he gave to university students in Nairobi during his 2006 visit. Obama spoke out against corruption in President Kibaki’s government. Because Odinga is Kibaki’s main political rival, Obama’s criticism was misconstrued to mean that he had endorsed Odinga.

Either Obama is too green to know that his appearance with Odinga would be used for political gain, or he knew exactly what it meant to appear with Odinga while criticizing the incumbent government. Neither scenario flatters a sitting US Senator.

I for one would like to see the full speech he gave. There was obviously at least one camera around.

There is more evidence of the connection between Obama and his socialist cousin [emphasis added]:

Odinga is the son of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first vice-president, a socialist who sent his son to Communist East Germany for college. The younger Odinga named one of his sons Fidel Castro and has also admitted to being one of the masterminds of a 1982 attempted coup against Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s second president. In American Op-Ed pages and in the blogosphere, many of Obama’s political foes are already capitalizing on his supposed ties to Odinga.

When Obama took time off his campaign in New Hampshire to make a five-minute phone call to Odinga, urging him to talk with President Kibaki in order to avoid more bloodshed, New York Sun columnist Daniel Johnson wrote, “If [Obama] has been putting tribal or family considerations above America’s national interest by supporting Mr. Odinga’s anti-Western candidacy, it raises serious questions about his judgment.”

I love it. The writer of the dispatch characterizes the connections as “supposed”, and then gives a concrete example of a connection in the very next paragraph.

Also, from that NY Sun article comes this this little nugget:

In August 2006, Mr. Obama visited Kenya and spoke in support of Mr. Odinga’s candidacy at rallies in Nairobi.
…….
At the time of his visit in 2006, President Kibaki’s spokesman complained that Mr. Obama was behaving like a “stooge” of Mr. Odinga — which was at best undignified for a visiting American senator, and at worst unwarranted interference in the internal politics of another country.

UPDATE Was Obama’s visit with his socialist cousin supported with tax dollars?

If this is the same visit, it looks like he was there as a US Senator:

NAIROBI, Kenya – Hundreds of U.S. Embassy employees and their families cheered and sang to greet Sen. Barack Obama after he met Friday with President Mwai Kibaki during Obama’s first trip to his father’s homeland since taking office.

Tags: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, Cananda Free Press, Daily Blogster, Kenya, Mainstream Media, Raila Odinga, Sharia Law, Wall Street Journal

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