September 12, 2010: Conservative Author: Obama’s Foreign Policy Driven by ‘Kenyan Anticolonialism’

A portion of the Forbes magazine cover featuring Dinesh D’Souza’s article on President Obama. [Source: Forbes magazine / PBS]In a cover story for Forbes magazine, conservative author and pundit Dinesh D’Souza claims that President Obama is using the Oval Office to pursue Kenyan anti-colonial policies once advocated by his father, Barack Obama Sr., a Harvard-trained economist and Luo tribesman from Kenya. D’Souza has a long history of race-baiting and using inflammatory rhetoric (see March 15, 1982, October 1982, October 4, 1990, and June 5, 2004). [Forbes, 9/27/2010] The story is loosely based on D’Souza’s upcoming book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage. [Washington Post, 9/16/2010] It is dated September 27, 2010, but is published on the Internet two weeks earlier. After tarring Obama as “the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history” and a strong advocate of expanding the federal government into all aspects of America’s commercial existence, D’Souza turns to his perception of Obama’s “strange” foreign policy. He cites several instances of Obama’s stated intention to reach out to Muslims across the globe, calling these initiatives “anomal[ies],” and proposes an explanation: Obama does not hold to the American dream, in any form, but instead hews to what D’Souza characterizes as the “Kenyan” dreams of his father, who D’Souza says was a champion of anticolonialism. The elder Obama advocated that native Kenyans “control the economic means of growth” in their country, D’Souza quotes him as writing in 1965, and also wrote, “We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now.” Obama, D’Souza writes, is following his father’s policies in his governance. “It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the president of the United States,” D’Souza writes. “That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet. For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.” D’Souza cites Obama’s support for offshore oil drilling in Brazil, his support for repealing the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, and his refusal to consider nationalizing American financial or health care institutions as “evidence” that he intends “to decolonize these institutions, [to bring] them under the government’s leash.” D’Souza goes even farther, accusing Obama of idolizing the 9/11 terrorists as anticolonial heroes whose acts were justified by their ideology; D’Souza cites Obama’s support for the building of a Muslim community center several blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, and his support for the release of one of the Lockerbie bombers on medical grounds, as “evidence” of his favoring of Islamist terrorists. Finally, D’Souza cites the statements of one of Obama’s grandfather’s wives, Sarah Obama, and Obama’s own writings about weeping at his father’s grave in Kenya as conclusive evidence of Obama’s secret anticolonial ideology. “Obama takes on his father’s struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause,” D’Souza writes. “He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.‘s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.‘s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son’s objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father’s struggle becomes the son’s birthright.” D’Souza calls colonialism a “dead issue,” and terms Obama “the last anticolonial.” [Forbes, 9/27/2010] Many conservatives have long accused Obama of being un-American because of his Kenyan ancestry (see February 25, 2008, August 1, 2008 and After, October 8-10, 2008, June 25, 2009, June 29, 2009, and August 11, 2009). D’Souza’s article will be lambasted by a wide swath of media figures (see September 12, 2010 and After) and will be shown to be riddled with factual errors (see September 16, 2010). It will be praised by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is widely believed to be pursuing the 2012 Republican presidential nomination (see September 12, 2010 and After). [Media Matters, 9/12/2010]