May 28, 2008

By Ted Belman

My article Obama’s Communist Connection attracted a lot of interest and many hecklers. For the most part the hecklers did not read the article and the links and were dismissing whatever it said out of hand. In essence they weren’t looking for the truth preferring to turn a blind eye to it.

After publishing that article I discovered Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro on One Man’s Thoughts

In an interview, Barack Obama referred to his mother as

‘the dominant figure in my formative years… The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics.‘

Since this man wants to lead the greatest nation on earth, it only makes sense to learn something about his mother and the values that are so important to him.

[..] During Obama’s campaign for the 2008 presidential election, he portrayed his mother as a conservative girl from Kansas; however in reality she was a radical leftist and cultural Marxist. She lived in the Seattle area; spending her teenage years in Seattle coffee shops with other young radical leftist. Obama claims his mother’s family were conservative Methodists or Baptists from Kansas. However his mother’s parents were members of a left-wing Unitarian church near Seattle. The church located in Bellevue, Washington was nicknamed ‘the little red church,’ because of its communist leanings.

The school Ann attended, Mercer Island High School, was a hotbed of pro-Marxist radical teachers. John Stenhouse, board member, told the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he had been a member of the Communist Party USA and this school has a number of Marxists on its staff. Two teachers at this school, Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman, both Frankfurt School style Marxists, taught a critical theory curriculum to students which included; rejection of societal norms, attacks on Christianity, the traditional family, and assigned readings by Karl Marx. The hallway between Foubert’s and Wichterman classrooms was some times called ‘anarchy ally.’

Dunham has been described by her friends as ‘a fellow traveler’ meaning ‘a communist sympathizer.’

Before she died, Ann Dunham wanted to adopt a mixed-race Korean baby fathered by a Black American stationed in South Korea.

The American Thinker published Obama, Black Liberation Theology, and Karl Marx by Kyle-Anne Shiver. Here’s an extract on the issue.

Having been a practicing Christian for more than 40 years now, and a practicing Catholic for 26 of those years, I have visited perhaps 100 various Christian bookstores, both Protestant and Catholic. In all of those places, one thing tied together the books for sale: Christianity.

Not so in Obama’s church bookstore.

I spent more than an hour perusing available books, and found as many claiming to represent Muslim thought as those representing Christian thought. Black Muslim thought, to be specific.

And the books claiming to support Christianity were surprisingly of a more political than religious nature. The books by James H. Cone, Wright’s own mentor, were prominent and numerous.

Now that I have read a number of the books that presumably Wright’s congregants (including Barack Obama) have also read, I can only conclude that the thing tying these volumes together is not Christianity, nor any real religion, but the political philosophy of Karl Marx.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” (emphasis mine)
– Marx and Engels; The Communist Manifesto; 1848

If Marxism can be summed up in only a couple of phrases, now familiar to nearly every modern person, they would be “class struggle” and “oppressed vs. oppressors.”

James H. Cone, the unquestioned modern-day mentor of all the black power preachers, claims to have created a new theology, uniting the Muslim black power tenets of Malcolm X and the Christian foundations of Martin Luther King, Jr.

All he has really done, in my opinion, is take original liberation theology from Latin America, developed in the early 1960s by Catholic priests, and painted it black.

Liberation Theology vs. Traditional Christianity

The teaching authorities of the Catholic Church, have for more than 20 years now, been attempting to stamp out these heretical liberation theologies, denouncing them as vehemently antithetical to the Catholic Christian faith, and have been strenuously combating this Marxist counterfeit Christianity on many fronts within the Church herself.

Of course, the Medieval, iron-fisted clamp of the Catholic Church’s authority, even within the Church herself, is routinely overstated, and there are renegade priests all over the place (more on another of Obama’s spiritual mentors, a liberation theology Catholic priest in Chicago, in Part Two next week).

Not to mention the fact that the Catholic Church has no authority whatsoever over those claiming to represent protestant interpretations of the Christian faith, such as Cone and Wright.

But it is important to note here that liberation theology, including black liberation theology, has not gone unnoticed by the learned biblical scholars within the Vatican, and liberation theology has been roundly denounced as both heretical and dangerous, not only to the authentic Christian faith, but even more so to the societies which come to embrace it.

Just one nugget from the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’:

“…it would be illusory and dangerous to ignore the intimate bond which radically unites them (liberation theologies), and to accept elements of the marxist analysis without recognizing its connections with the (Marxist) ideology, or to enter into the practice of the class-struggle and of its marxist interpretation while failing to see the kind of totalitarian society to which this process slowly leads.”
– (Author: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect, now Pope Benedict XVI; written in 1984)

Understanding that black liberation theology is Marxism dressed up to look like Christianity helps explain why there is no conflict between Cone’s “Christianity” and Farrakhan’s “Nation of Islam.” They are two prophets in the same philosophical (Marxist) pod, merely using different religions as backdrops for their black-power aims.

As Cone himself writes in his 1997 preface to a new edition of his 1969 book, Black Theology and Black Power:

“As in 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. God’s reality is not bound by one manifestation of the divine in Jesus but can be found wherever people are being empowered to fight for freedom. Life-giving power for the poor and the oppressed is the primary criterion that we must use to judge the adequacy of our theology, not abstract concepts. As Malcolm X put it: ‘I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won’t let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion’.” (p. xii; emphases mine)

And, to drive his Marxist emphasis even further, Cone again quotes Malcolm X:

“The point that I would like to impress upon every Afro-American leader is that there is no kind of action in this country ever going to bear fruit unless that action is tied in with the overall international (class) struggle.” (p. xiii)

(Ironically, considering the formal Church teaching regarding liberation theologies, this book of Cone’s was published by Orbis, owned and managed by The Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, a Maryknoll religious entity. So much for the totalitarianism of the Catholic Church.)

It is this subjugation of genuine Christianity to the supremacy of the Marxist class struggle, which marks the true delineation between traditional Christianity and black liberation theology, as Pope Benedict XVI (writing in 1984 as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) sums up thusly:

“For the marxist, the truth is a truth of class: there is no truth but the truth in the struggle of the revolutionary class.”

Which is precisely why Cone and his disciples are able to boldly proclaim that if the Jesus of traditional Christianity is not united with them in the Marxist class struggle, then he is a “white Jesus,” and they must “kill him.” (Cone; A Black Theology of Liberation; p. 111)

And Cone brings it all the way home with this proclamation of liberation from traditional Christianity itself:

“The appearance of black theology means that the black community is now ready to do something about he white Jesus, so that he cannot get in the way of our revolution.”

Move over Jesus and make way for Cone, Wright and Obama.

The revolution is at hand.

Obama Ran on a Marxist Party Lin in 1996