A Big Mag Disses a Small Blog for not Liking Obama

We’ve known our blogger friend, LHM, for several years now - probably since the first few months we started up Gates of Vienna.

He has always seemed exotic to me: a Texas expatriate dwelling in Southeast Asia for many years. I both envied such adventurousness and projected onto Larry the loneliness I would feel in such a situation.

Now he’s not LHM anymore. Larry Martin, proprietor of a very small blog in Malaysia, has been outed by a main pillar of the LSM - Time magazine, of all places.

Why are they interested in An American Expat in Southeast Asia all of a sudden? What could a small blog have that would interest a member of the Bos-Wash elites?

Well, for one thing Larry loathes Barry Obama. He thinks voting for Obama is "A Vote for Servitude":

"In America," Obama says, "we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient."

You are reading the words of a man, a man vying for the presidency of the United States of America and who does not have the faintest clue of what America stands for.

Barack Obama’s call for sacrifice is the direct opposite of what America stands for, of why America has became a beacon of hope for the oppressed throughout the world. They have come here to escape poverty and dictatorship; they have come here to live their own lives, where they can exist by right and not by permission of the government, the community or any collective. Obama’s philosophy of duty, obligation and sacrifice that which he calls "change " differs little from that of countries like Iran or Venezuela.

To quote Ayn Rand, "America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to "the common good," but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes." That includes the free men and the shareholders of companies like Exxon Mobil or General Electric and of men like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.

It was John Adams who once said, "The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If "Thou shalt not covet" and "Thou shalt not steal" were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free."

Dick Durban’s veiled threat to the oil companies that there is a limit to the amount of profit they can make should give an indication to all of what this "change" is that Obama speaks of. Today it will be the oil companies and then who will it be tomorrow...?

The right to liberty and freedom gives us the right to act on our own judgment, the right not to have a gun pointed at our heads, forcing us to part with our property for the collective good or to just simply exist as a mere tool to serve the goals of others.

Transformed by the language of conflict and coercion, Obama’s philosophy of "change" not unlike Marxism or Islamic totalitarianism has become an ideology of violence to be resisted uncompromisingly by those among us who value property above fraternity and liberty above equality.

There. We’ve established what American Ex-Pat thinks of Obama. But why would Time magazine give a hoot?
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Because of Jerome Corsi, that’s why. You see, Corsi has written a bash-Obama book, Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. And Corsi’s book is at the top of the best-seller list. Currently it is #29 on Amazon’s listing. Interestingly, there are over a thousand reviews by readers on this page. Or rather, purported readers; since the book garners only 2.5 stars out of a possible 5, you can guess that there is much fulminating from the left in the review section. When this happens, it often means that the frothers have gotten on the page to bad-mouth a book they probably haven’t read. However, since it is a book that others are buying up quickly the alarmed followers of Obama want to warn them of their folly. Or maybe they just need a safe place to vent.

Amazon has a good feature - or it can be a good feature when you’re not dealing with a deeply polarizing figure like Barry Obama. This feature permits users to "tag" a product with labels that might be of interest to other users. Just estimating from my own use, most merchandise has ten or twelve tags which alert people as the value or content of what they’re researching. To give you a clue how high the level of contention is, 745 tags have been created for this book by its more than one thousand reviewers. Here are the top few (the numbers in parenthesis are the number of readers who agree with the particular tag):

lies (438)

propaganda (414)

idiocy (298)

racism (293)

typical republican smear campaign (251)

truth (198)

political truth (162)

obama (160)

obama truths (155)

wingnut welfare (121)

corsi needs a corset (92)

I think I’ve established here that Corsi’s book is reviled by the Democrats and by the Lame Stream Media who are so devoted to Obama’s nomination and eventual - they hope - election.

It is at this juncture that Time and Larry’s blog intersect, because Jerome Corsi cites Larry’s research on Barry Soetoro’s school records. Barry Soetero is now Barack Hussein Obama, but back in his school days he was Barry Soetoro, stepson of a Muslim, and listed as a Muslim on his school records. How do we know this? Larry simply went to the school, told them he was a blogger and asked to see the records. He saw for himself the registration of Barry Soetoro as a Muslim and he reported this in his blog.

World Net Daily has the story in an essay, "Obama’s childhood records vindicate Corsi book". Accompanying the article is a picture of the school records that Larry saw when he visited there.

An AP photo that recently surfaced showing Barack Obama registered for school as an Indonesian citizen of the Muslim religion provides tangible evidence for some of the claims made by author Jerome Corsi in his best-selling book, "The Obama Nation."

"The Associated Press document provides additional evidence suggesting the Obama campaign’s insistence that Obama was never trained in Islam and he never lived as a Muslim is not accurate," author and WND staff reporter Jerome R. Corsi said.

"Moreover, the document indicated that Obama may have been an Indonesian citizen when he lived there," Corsi continued. "This is an issue the Obama rebuttal fails to address at all, evidently conceding the accuracy of the claim."

[...]

The existence of the school registration was first revealed on the Internet by "An American Expat in Southeast Asia" on Jan. 24, 2007.

Since then, the issue has been widely discussed, but without the documentary proof the Associated Press photo has now provided.

Corsi told WND that until the AP photo surfaced, he did not have in his possession a copy of the original.

In the 40-page rebuttal to "The Obama Nation" issued last week by Obama’s presidential campaign, the "reality" asserted by the campaign was the school registration only listed the religion of the father, implying the registration established nothing about the religion of Barack Obama, then known as Barry Soetoro.

"The Obama rebuttal misses the point in claiming my statements about the school registration are a lie," Corsi said. "It is clearly true that the ‘An American Expat in Southeast Asia’ blog did state the registration listed Obama as an Indonesian citizen and a Muslim. That is not a lie."

"Now that we have the AP photo, we see the blog was correct in describing the registration," Corsi continued.

[...]

"The most convincing evidence Obama was living in Indonesia as a Muslim, not simply registered as Muslim because his father was Muslim, comes from Obama’s experience at the government-run public school at SDN 1 Menteng, Jakarta, not from his time at the Catholic Assisi School in Jakarta," Corsi argued.

On pages 59-60 of "The Obama Nation", Corsi cites a Kaltim Post interview with Tine Hahiyary, one of Obama’s teachers at the public school.

Tine Hahiyary affirmed that Barry Soetoro had been registered as a Muslim and took part actively in the Islamic religious lessons during his time at the school.

"I remembered that Barry studied ‘mengaji,’" she told reporters.

"Mengaji" involves recitation of the Quran.

"To put it quite simply, ‘mengaji classes’ are not something that a non-practicing or so-called moderate Muslim family would ever send their child to," wrote the ‘An American Expat in Southeast Asia’ blog.

But Time magazine isn’t impressed with Larry’s expertise as someone who has lived in Malaysia for most of his adult life. As a result of his years of experience there, Larry understands the context of Barry Soetoro’s childhood far better than Time can. As I said yesterday regarding the story of the impact of illegal immigration on a small community, go local: ask the people who live there. That’s what Corsi did, and thus brought Sauron’s Eye to fix its gaze on American Ex-Pat without ever having the courtesy to provide a link to his blog. Note their tone of dismissal:

Larry Martin owns Frontera Bar and Grill, a Tex-Mex restaurant in Kuala Lumpur. He imports mesquite charcoal from San Francisco and, he says, "serves peace love and American hegemony, one plate of tacos at a time" to Malaysian customers. In his spare time, he writes a semi-anonymous blog, An American Expat in Southeast Asia, on which he rails against mainstream American media, multiculturalism - and Barack Obama. And that is how Martin has come to the attention of a broader audience. His blog is repeatedly cited as a source in Jerome R. Corsi’s best-selling anti-Obama book, Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality.

That is what really annoys Time. How dare a lowly blogger be used as a source for material about The One’s early life? Especially a blog which "rails against mainstream American media"?

Time, of course, has no agenda. Being Journalists, they are above the fray, simply reporting objectively. Much of their story, "The Blogger Behind the Obama Hit Job" (how’s that for an objective title?) is devoted to trashing the accuracy of Jerome Corsi’s book and using Larry’s posts as their baseball bats. They end with this:

As for Larry Martin, he remains at his restaurant in Kuala Lumpur. He tells stories about Malaysian patrons who have never seen refried beans and who try to eat tacos with a fork. He likes writing on his blog and investigating Obama. Martin says he had never heard of Corsi and was unaware that he was going to be a source until just before the book was published. "[Corsi] sent me an e-mail about a month before the book came out, and then we talked on the phone. He said he would send me an autographed copy, although we’ll see if that actually happens," he says. In any case, Martin thinks he might like to write a book himself one day. "Or maybe," he says, "I’ll get a job at a think tank."

Time no doubt missed the irony. Being so focused on their own agenda, they don’t have much room for subtlety. Because they were rude not to provide a link to Larry’s blog, I will omit the link to their snarky screed.

In one of his many posts about Obama (thirty to date), American Ex-Pat talks about The One’s own "Inconvenient Truth":

Almost a year ago there was an Indonesian story on Senator Barack Obama that never really received much notice from the US media. The story was first translated here at "An American Expat in Southeast Asia" in a post entitled Tracking Down Obama in Indonesia - Part 5

While the photo from the story has now made it’s way across the web, the actual story and interview hasn’t. It’s understandable really, much of the Indonesian media reports on Obama have for the most part been ignored by America’s main stream media especially stories that focused on Obama’s religious upbringing in Indonesia.

The story is an interview with a woman named Tine Hahiyary who was a former teacher and principle of Besuki Primary school, during the time when a young Barry Soetero attended classes there. Revisiting Obama’s childhood school the author notices the children in the school yard dressed in Western-Style clothing, but then reminds the reader that on Fridays, all the school children must wear Muslim clothes and that also includes children who are non-muslim. An inconvenient truth that CNN and the rest of America’s main stream media conveniently omitted.

What struck me the most odd from the story was Tine Hahiyary’s recollection of a young Obama who was quite religious and actively took part in mengaji classes. A claim that would seem to differ from Obama’s much publicized statements that he was not raised in a particularly religious household.

While the word "mengaji" means to either learn or study, however, the actual usage of the word "mengaji" in Indonesian and Malaysian societies means the study of learning to recite the Quran in the Arabic language rather than the native tongue. "Mengagi" is a word and a term that is accorded the highest value and status in the mindset of fundamentalist societies here in Southeast Asia. To put it quite simply, "mengaji classes" are not something that a non practicing or so-called moderate Muslim family would ever send their child to. To put this is perhaps a Christian context, this is something above and beyond simply enrolling your child in Sunday school classes.

The fact that Obama had attended mengaji classes is well known in Indonesia and has left many there wondering just when Obama is going to come out of the closet.

As I’ve stated before, the evidence seems to quite clearly show that both Ann Dunham and her husband Lolo Soetoro Mangunharjo were in fact devout Muslims themselves and they raised their son as such.

In a recent article entitled "Confirmed: Barack Obama practised Islam", Daniel Pipes comes to the conclusion that Obama was an irregularly practicing Muslim who rarely or occasionally prayed with his step-father in a mosque." and "that for some years had a reasonably Muslim upbringing under the auspices of his Indonesian step-father." Needless to say, I will respectfully differ with Daniel Pipes conclusion. So will most Indonesians.

Larry, the American ex-Pat, has walked the walk of Malaysia. He speaks the language, he interacts with the native-born. As an American, he is concerned that our country is considering electing someone who thinks so little of the U.S:

Herodotus once said that "If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably - after careful considerations of their relative merits - choose that of his own country"

A young mulatto abandoned by his black Kenyan father and cared for by his white American mother, an anthropologist and Islamophile who hated America and subsequently went native. We may never completely understand the pathological self-criticism that Obama holds deep down in his soul, the overwhelming guilt that consumes him or the messianic aspirations that he now seems to revel in.

What we do know is that in Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates would advance argument that piety to many gods, who all want conflicting devotions is impossible. Something the Democrats and their Golden Calf have yet to realize.

I would change only the part about his father being a black Kenyan. Yes, he was partly black. But he was much more an Arab, a Muslim Arab who was ambitious to rise in his own country.

Barack Hussein Obama is half white, then Arab, with a smaller mixture of black African ancestry.

Barack Hussein Obama is an Arab-American disguised as a black in order to win the black vote. If there were a larger contingent of Arab Americans here, The One would be professing his Arabness to all and sundry. There would be photo ops with him carrying the Koran.

But at this moment in America’s racial politics, that wouldn’t gain him the Oval Office, would it?