What Maureen Dowd Doesn’t Write
In her New York Times column this past weekend, Maureen Dowd quotes Barack Obama’s boss at his 1980s community organizing job in Chicago, one Jerry Kellman. Dowd, however, failed to note that in his book, Dreams From My Father, Obama disguised Kellman’s name by using a so-called composite character, a fictional “Marty Kaufman,” to depict his former boss.
Obama may have masked Kellman’s name because, it turns out, Kellman is an Alinskyite who may have been the person who introduced Obama to Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers.
The title of Dowd’s column, “Dreaming of a Superhero,” channeled the namesake of Obama’s book. In it, Dowd quotes Kellman’s observation of Obama: “He was not unwilling to take risks, but was just this strange combination of someone who would have to weigh everything to death and then take a dramatic risk at the end.”
Kellman was the chief of the Developing Communities Project, or DCP, an institutionally based community organization on Chicago’s South Side. He brought in Obama in 1985 to serve as the DCP’s director and a lead organizer. It was Obama’s first job in Chicago.
In Obama’s own autobiography, he writes of his first job in Chicago as a community organizer and claims the name of his boss at DCP was “Marty Kaufman.” Kaufman doesn’t exist. The DCP chief at the time was Kellman, who was reportedly trained by Saul Alinsky himself.
While Obama was at the DCP, in 1988, he was brought in to the coalition of an education project founded by Ayers’s father. Bill Ayers himself was the coalition contact at the time. Obama’s DCP position was instrumental in his joining the Ayers’s education coalition, the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools.
Who Is Behind P.S. 368’s Mandatory Arabic Program?
A flurry of news media reports last week highlighted a Harlem public elementary school that will become the first in New York to require students to study Arabic.
Entirely unreported is that the organization that co-created and funded the Arabic language program for the New York school, this column has found, maintains close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood while the group’s founder also started the Al Jazeera television network.
The Qatar Foundation International, or QFI, a nonprofit group financed by the government of Qatar, gave Harlem’s Hamilton Heights, a K-5 public school, a $250,000 grant to support the Arabic program for three years. The school’s Arabic language program was reportedly developed by QFI and the Global Language Project.
QFI, based in Washington DC, is the U.S. branch of the Qatar Foundation, founded in 1995 by Qatar’s ruling emir, Sheikha Hind bint Hamad Al Thani. Thani is still the group’s vice-chairman. Thani also launched Al Jazeera in 1996 and served as the television network’s chairman.
The Qatar foundation is close to the Muslim Brotherhood. This past January, it launched the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics under the guidance of Tariq Ramadan, who serves as the center’s director. Ramadan is the grandson of the notorious founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al Banna. Ramadan was banned from the U.S. until 2010 when the Obama administration issued him a visa to give a lecture at a New York school.
The Qatar Foundation named several institutions after Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Many regard Qaradawi as the de facto spiritual leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The foundation instituted the Sheikh Yusuf Al Qaradawi Scholarships and in 2009 established a research center named the Qaradawi Center for Islamic Moderation and Renewal.
Qaradawi has personally attended scores of Qatar Foundation events, including conferences at which he served as a keynote speaker. Qaradawi achieved star status because of his regular sermons and interviews on Al Jazeera.
Two weeks ago, Qaradawi was in the news after he told Egyptian Muslims it was their religious duty to vote for one of three Islamic candidates in the country’s presidential election, describing them as the “best for Egypt” because they will “apply the Islamic Shariah and achieve justice.”
The Investigative Project on Terrorism documents that Qardaqi openly permitted the killing of American troops in Iraq and praised the “heroic deeds” from “Hamas, Jihad, Al-Aqsa Brigades, and others.
Jackie Mason Slams Obama
Comedian Jackie Mason ripped President Obama’s reported remarks that he “probably knows about Judaism more than any other president, because he read about it.”