Quick Takes: News You May Have Missed (JEWISH PRESS OP-ED) By: Aaron Klein 06/07/12)
Source: http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/aaron-klein/quick-takes-news-you-may-have-missed-136/2012/06/06/
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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.”
Obama reportedly made the statement in a meeting last week with about
20 conservative Jewish community leaders.
Mason sounded off about Obama’s Judaism claim in an interview
on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on New York’s WABC Radio.
Stated Mason: “Let’s say I know more about murderers than anybody in
the world. Does that make me sympathetic to murderers because I know
more about them than anybody else? “If you live in New York, you know
more about muggers and killers and degenerates and pimps and
hookers,” Mason continued. “Does that mean that you are on their side
just because you know about it?”
Mason asserted “What he knows about Judaism means nothing compared to
what he feels about Judaism. That’s the question. I might know a lot
about pastrami. That doesn’t mean that I have the right to neglect
the fact that it’s bad for you.” (© 2012 JewishPress. 06/06/12)
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