Scott Johnson of Powerline flipped on the neon “AHA!” sign today in noting parrallels between the respective political trajectories of Keith Ellison, our country’s first Muslim congressman, and Barack Hussein Obama, our country’s first Muslim-descended presidential candidate. He began by discussing how political correctness—fear of discussing race, Islam, and Nation of Islam—became the key weapon that gave both men the edge over their rival, establishment Democrats. Scott writes:
Watching the emergence of Barack Obama this year I have experienced at least a slight sense of déjà vu. With modifications and variations, the Obama phenomenon was anticipated by the rise of Keith Ellison in 2006. …
Scott did ground-breaking reporting throughout that Ellison campaign, some of it assisted, he explains, by political players in Minnesota who were disgusted and frustrated by the media’s failure to report on Ellison’s past and ideology. Sound familiar? He writes:
Given Ellison's status as the first black congressional nominee in Minnesota and first Muslim congressional nominee in the United States, the constraints of political correctness drastically inhibited the Minneapolis Star Tribune's coverage of Ellison.
As Yogi Berra would say, It's deja vu all over again. When it comes to Obama's political rise, the “constraints of political correctness” have not only drastically inhibited the MSM—who, of course, want to be inhibited to boost their Messiah—but also the McCain campaign, whose fear of being labeled “racist” for bringing up Jeremiah Wright and Frank Marshal Davis, for starters, practically shut down the campaign’s offensive game. It certainly kept them from making the coherent case about Obama’s lifelong associations with the subversives and radicals that, as Daniel Pipes has written, by rights should make Obama ineligible for a Federal security clearance. William Ayers did not stick out like a sore thumb in Obama’s life--he was in fact a central figure in a pantheon of subversives, but McCain- Palin seemed afraid to explain this. Getting back to Ellison, Scott writes:
From the time of Ellison's first published article in the University of Minnesota Daily in 1989 under the name Keith Hakim through the time he first ran for public office ten years later under the name Keith Ellison-Muhammad, unsuccessfully seeking the Democratic endorsement for a state legislative seat, Ellison was a self-avowed advocate of the Nation of Islam. Ellison's self-identification as a member and leader of the Nation of Islam remained one of the deep secrets of his 2006 campaign.
Certainly, Obama’s membership in anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-American, Farrakhan-admiring Jeremiah Wright’s church—what Scott later calls Obama’s ”useful Christian analogue of the Nation of Islam”--was supposed to be one of the deep secrets of the 2007-2008 campaign. On becoming public, this affiliation became a liability—just as Ellison’s situation with the Nation of Islam had been one early on. Like Ellison, Obama severed his connection with Wright and his church. Scott continues:
Both Ellison and Obama attended Louis Farrakhan's 1995 Million Man March. In Ellison's case, attendance came in the heyday of his involvement with the Nation of Islam. For Obama, attendance appears to have been an act of racial solidarity. In Obama's eyes, Farrakhan himself was retrograde.
In Dreams From My Father, Obama meditates on Farrakhan, finding: "If [black] nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence." As Steve Sailer notes, Obama "dispassionately rejected Black Nationalism as economically and politically impractical." In Sailer's words, Obama concluded that "the Black Muslims are losers, and Obama, with his two Ivy League degrees and boundless ambition, is a winner."
Obama nevertheless found the functional equivalent of Farrakhan in Jeremiah Wright. Wright had no such reservations regarding Farrakhan. He has an enduring relationship with Farrakhan that goes back at least as far as their joint trip to visit Col. Gadaffi in 1984. In casting his lot with Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama found the useful Christian analogue of the Nation of Islam.
Ellison abandoned his affiliation with the Nation of Islam after he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic endorsement for a state legislative seat as a self-identified member of the Nation of Islam running under the name Keith Ellison-Muhammad in 1998. In 2002, as a Muslim, Ellison won the Democratic endorsement for the legislative seat minus the -Muhammad. This year, after avowing his allegiance to Wright in a celebrated speech, Obama famously cast aside Wright and Trinity United Church under pressure late in the primary season.
Scott then brings up both candidates’ support from Hamas & Co.:
In seeking their respective nominations, both Ellison and Obama found support among Hamas and friends. The Hamas-related support for Ellison and Obama is indicative of the melding of the left with Islamist forces at home and abroad. It is an alliance that Ellison embodies.
As Joel Mowbray reported on Power Line, in Ellison's case the support came in bundled contributions from CAIR executive director Nihad Awad. Awad headlined an August 2006 fundraiser for Ellison that netted $15,000 to $20,000. Awad also bundled contributions totaling just over $10,000. (CAIR is the Hamas front group that was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the government's prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation. The Ellison campaign issued a terse denial regarding Awad's bundling of contributions to Ellison, though it refused to explain away overwhelming evidence to the contrary.) The Minneapolis Star Tribune did not get around to reporting on the Ellison fundraiser featuring Awad until after the Democratic primary the following month.
Hamas itself has expressed support for Obama. Hamas spokesman Ahmed Yousef expressed Hamas's support for Obama in April of this year. Al Jazeera reported an even more striking expression of support for Obama from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. According to Al Jazeera, Obama supporters operated a phone bank supporting Obama in the primaries out of an Internet cafe in the Gaza Strip.
Another Hamas-ian endorsement, as I wrote in last week's column about Obama's Muslim outreach efforts, came from the National Association of Muslim American Women. This group is led by Hamas activist Anisa Abd el Fattah, who, as Patrick Poole has reported, has co-authored two books with Hamas spokesman and political advisor Ahmed Yousef. Indeed, both Fattah and Yousef worked together at the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), which was founded by Hamas chieftain Mousa abu Marzook and once described as "the political command of Hamas in the United States." UASR was named an undicted co-conspirator by the goverment in the Holy Land Foundation terror-finance trial.
Back to Scott's post:
Like Ellison's relationship with CAIR, Hamas's support for Obama has received little interest from the mainstream media.
What else is new?
More similarities:
Both Ellison and Obama have friends among home-grown terrorists. Ellison was a vocal supporter of Kathleen Soliah/Sara Jane Olson, the former Symbionese Liberation member who was apprehended in St. Paul in June 1999. We reported Ellison's support for Olson here and here. (Olson ultimately pled guilty to two counts of possessing explosives with intent to murder Los Angeles police officers in 1975 and to the murder of Myrna Opsahl in the Crocker National Bank robbery the same year.)
By the same token, Obama's friends in Chicago include former Weather Underground terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. We discussed Obama's friendship with Ayers and Dohrn here and here. Ayers and Dohrn spent 10 years in the terrorist group that bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and other government buildings in the 1970's.
Finally, both Ellison and Obama were the leftward-most viable candidates running for the Democratic Party endorsement, and both won endorsement against heirs apparent. In Ellison's case, the presumptive nominee was Mike Erlandson. Erlandson was the chief of staff of 14-term incumbent Martin Sabo, and he was Sabo's handpicked successor. At the Fifth District convention in May 2006 Ellison presented himself as the serious radical alternative to Erlandson. (Dennis Kucinich's counterpart at the Fifth District convention was "peace activist" Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer.) Fifth District delegates rejected Erlandson, instead choosing to take the plunge with Ellison. In the multicandidate primary that followed in September, Ellison won with 41 percent of the vote.
Similar dynamics propelled Obama over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary contest. Until the Iowa caucus, she was the prohibitive frontrunner and heir apparent to Bill Clinton. Opting for a candidate untainted by support for the war, Democrats ultimately settled on Obama. Obama staked his campaign on the proposition that he was the Ivory Soap candidate on the issue of Iraq. His opposition to the war was deeper and purer than that of the other serious candidates among the multicandidate Democratic field. His position at the far left of the party proved to be a powerful asset against Hillary Clinton.
As they say, read it all (links in the original). I will have more to say about Scott's conclusion coming up.