-By Frank Salvato
Much is being made of Barack Obama’s oratory skills. True, he is quite good when it comes to captivating a crowd of sycophants and this includes the lemmings in the mainstream media. But if words matter, as Obama (and surreptitiously Duval Patrick) claims they do, then we must acknowledge that in this case words do make the man, in this case Mr. Obama must be judged in his words and in the deeds that back-up those words.
Ironically, I agree with Mr. Obama when he says that words matter. One of the harshest criticisms I have had of the Bush Administration is that communication between the presidency and the American people has been, at best, horrible. While I can lay much of the blame on a hateful mainstream media who wouldn’t cover the White House if it was on fire, a gaggle of journalistic abortions hell-bent on achieving an anti-Bush/anti-Republican agenda, so too blame must be laid at the feet of an administration that failed to use all the tools available to the bully pulpit to get its message across.
Words do matter. In a society that has grown so delinquent in teaching its populace critical thinking skills, words — and the choice of words — have become the upper-tier chess pieces in the tactical game of attaining and holding on to power. Of course, this is nothing new.
Great people through time have understood the importance of words, their meaning and their successful communication. Cicero, Aristotle, Plato, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes certainly knew the importance of words. Through their philosophy the seeds of our uniquely American ideology were planted. Those who understood the importance of their message, their words — Franklin, Adams, Jefferson and Madison — were able to manifest the American experience, to motivate a people to the quest of freedom and liberty. These great men — our Founders and Framers — also had a penchant for words as is evidenced by the Charters of Freedom, which stand alone in their ideology of liberty.
But just as there were great people who used words to move humanity to good, so too were their very evil, narcissistic men who used words to manipulate masses of people into ideologies of oppression and inequity, who used words to capture power from people, who used words to steal liberty, usurping the Natural Law of man.
Adolph Hitler used words to cajole a nation into ceding their collective will to a tyranny that would affect a litany of horrors perpetrated on the innocent, simply because of their religions, their skin colors and their birth origins. Josef Stalin used words to motivate an oppressive class to — as we now understand — eclipse the horrors of Hitler. And the totalitarian rhetoric of Pol Pot and Chairman Mao Zedong served to ideologically and physically imprison generations of people from freedom while filling graves beyond capacity.
While the tyrants and murderers listed above left their legacies in blood, slaughter and the destruction of humanity, still other despots — ideological despots — worked to enslave the minds of million of people.
One such ideological despot is Karl Marx, whose code of belief culminated in the Marxist-Leninist dogma of Communism, commonly considered a faction of the broader Socialist Movement . This oppressive ideology brutally discouraged liberty of the individual, many times to the point of torture and execution, and placed the State above all else. The goal of this oppressive and maniacal creed, a socio-political system in which property, the rights of the individual and the distribution of wealth were subject to control by the community; “It takes a village to raise a child.”
Today, we experience the pain of Marxist-Leninist ideology in the unlegislated tenets of political correctness, a belief system that has crept into the mainstream thinking of the Democrat, Progressive-Left political community.
Yes, words — and the deeds that ratify words — do matter. It is because of this truth that two issues surrounding the life and candidacy of Barack Obama strike me as disturbing.
Let me reiterate something that I stated in a recent piece, Can an American President Be a Muslim Apostate. I believe Barack Obama when he says that he is a Christian. I do not subscribe to the idea that he is a “clandestine jihadi” just waiting to be inaugurated so that he can hand the country over to Wahhabism. That said, it really doesn’t matter what Barack Obama declares at all. What matters is what the fundamentalist Islamists believe. What matters are the words of their belief system.
To a fundamentalist Wahhabi — the belief system of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi royal family — Barack Obama is a Muslim apostate and, therefore, lower than any other form of human life. In the ideology of Wahhabism Obama’s punishment for leaving his Muslim birthright is death and he is not to be seen as an equal under any circumstances. Further, by the Wahhabist tent of al Taqiyya, it would be permissible for a fundamentalist Islamist, i.e. the Saudi royals, etc, to disregard any accords or treaties made with Obama. It would be permissible and, in fact, encouraged, to deceive the “infidel” in an effort to promote the well being of Islam and Muslims anywhere and everywhere.
That said, the words of the Wahhabists matter more than Barack Obama’s declaration of Christian faith.
To remain in the realm of religion, we need to address Barack Obama’s own words when it comes to his past, specifically his declaration that he was not influenced by his “brief” Islamic indoctrination.
Recently Jonah Goldberg wrote about a 2007 New York Times interview of Barack Obama with Nicholas Kristof, who documented,
“Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated…Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as ‘one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.’”
For someone who wasn’t “influenced” by his “brief” stint in the Islamic faith, Mr. Obama certainly has command of a difficult language (words) and fond memories of a prayer that translated literally means,
“Allah is the Greatest, Allah is the Greatest. Allah is the Greatest, Allah is the Greatest. I bear witness that there is none worthy of worship but Allah. I bear witness that there is none worthy of worship but Allah. I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. Hasten to the Prayer, hasten to the Prayer. Hasten to real success, hasten to real success. Allah is the Greatest, Allah is the Greatest. There is none worthy of worship but Allah.”
Of course, these are “just words,” like, “I have a dream…” and “…We hold these truths to be self evident…”
Another disturbing element to Barack Obama’s past is his loose association with William Ayers, a former member of the domestic terror group the Weather Underground. Ayers and his Weather Underground terrorists bombed the US Capitol building, The Pentagon and the US State Department building. The group literally declared war on the United States. In a September 11, 2001 New York Times interview (strange how these “words” always grace the pages of the New York Times) Ayers said of the bombings,
“I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough.”
In 1995, Barack Obama, in the Chicago tradition of paying respect to political “Godfathers,” paid homage to Williams Ayers, doing so at Ayers’ residence on the commencement of Obama’s political career. In essence, Barack Obama courted the political blessing of a self-avowed domestic terrorist who holds no regrets that he declared war on his own country; “I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Of course, these are “just words,” just words like ,
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
Or…
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain–that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Yes, words matter, Mr. Obama, they matter quite a bit…and so far your words — through your speech and your deeds — ring hollow of substance. They lead me to believe that you are dangerous for our nation.
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Frank Salvato is the managing editor for The New Media Journal . He serves at the Executive Director of the Basics Project, a non-profit, non-partisan, 501(C)(3) research and education initiative. His pieces are regularly featured in over 100 publications both nationally and internationally. He has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor, and is a regular guest on The Right Balance with Greg Allen on the Accent Radio Network, as well as an occasional guest on numerous radio shows coast to coast. He recently partnered in producing the first-ever symposium on the threat of radical Islamist terrorism in Washington, DC. His pieces have been recognized by the House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict. He can be contacted at oped@newmediajournal.us