Beth Fouhy of the Associated Press (AP) has reviewed Dinesh D’Souza’s popular conservative film, “
2016: Obama’s America,”
attacking its central claim that Obama’s alleged philosophy of
anti-colonialism stems from the influence of the Kenyan Obama who was
mostly absent from the President’s life.
The AP is one of the most influential news organizations in the
world. Her article is running in literally hundreds of papers here and
abroad and conveys the impression that D’Souza, a popular conservative
author and scholar, and president of a Christian college, is
deliberately misleading the public and distorting the facts about
Obama’s background and history.
However, Fouhy completely ignores the part of the film that features
an interview with Professor Paul Kengor, an accomplished author who
discusses Obama’s mentor in Hawaii, Communist Party member and writer
Frank Marshall Davis. This is the relationship that the media continue
to regard as taboo. The failure to talk truthfully about Davis,
identified merely as “Frank” in Obama’s memoir, constitutes one of the
most important and insidious cover-ups in presidential history.
Exhibiting her service to the Obama campaign, Fouhy doesn’t want to
blow the lid off this scandal and clearly prefers that the cover-up
continue. Her movie “review,” as such, appears to be designed to warn
people not to take any critics of Obama seriously when they raise
questions about his foreign connections.
However, she knows that the truth is available because it was in the
film that she supposedly saw. She cannot refute it. Obama was heavily
influenced by a member of a Communist Party controlled and funded by
Moscow. Frank Marshall Davis was even a supporter of mass murderer
Joseph Stalin.
As AIM has
documented,
D’Souza in his film and book claims that “anti-colonialism” is behind
Obama’s beliefs and policies. But anti-colonialism was a tactic of the
international communist movement, which attempted to create the Soviet
Union’s own colonial empire.
AIM has argued that Obama’s Marxist connection is far more newsworthy
and significant than whatever “anti-colonial” views he may have had.
Communist parties that engage in subversion and espionage against the
United States, and use agents of influence to manipulate U.S. policy,
still exist and operate against the United States, sometimes in
collaboration with Islamist movements.
A communist writer by the name of Frank Chapman once referred to
Obama himself as a revolutionary mole, while Marxist historian Gerald
Horne
spoke of Obama
being influenced by Frank Marshall Davis during an event at the
Tamiment Library in New York where the archives of the Communist Party
were put on display. These remarks were delivered on March 23, 2007, and
published on April 6, 2007—more than five years ago.
Fouhy, an AP political reporter covering the 2012 presidential campaign, has written her review, “
Fact Check: ‘Anti-colonial’ Obama not plausible,”
in a way that suggests she has ascertained the ultimate truth about the
film and Obama. This is laughable. She blatantly ignores the facts
about Davis mentioned in the film.
Focusing on the movie’s faulty claims of Obama’s anti-colonialism,
Fouhy writes, “…it’s difficult to see how Obama’s political leanings
could have been so directly shaped by his father, as D’Souza claims. The
elder Obama left his wife and young son, the future president, when
Obama was 2 and visited his son only once, when Obama was 10. But
D’Souza portrays that loss as an event that reinforced rather than
weakened the president’s ties to his father, who died in an automobile
accident when Obama was in college.”
She is correct that there is no hard evidence the Kenyan,
who may not in fact have been Obama’s real father, had any significant influence over Obama.
However, Fouhy ignores the fact that D’Souza attempts to make up for
this deficiency in his film by including the interview with Cold War
historian Paul Kengor, who had access to Davis’s 600-page FBI file and
his writings for Communist Party papers. His new book is
THE COMMUNIST Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor.
Davis guided Obama’s thinking for about eight years in Hawaii, before
Obama went off to Occidental College. Obama’s classmate John Drew says
Obama was a Marxist at that time.
Kengor makes the well-documented assertion that it was Davis who most
heavily influenced Obama as he was growing up in Hawaii. The interview
with Kengor in the D’Souza film, which is showing in hundreds of
theaters, gets on the record many of the long-neglected facts about
Obama’s relationship with a communist.
While D’Souza’s film is flawed in terms of the anti-colonialism
angle, Fouhy’s strange omission of the Davis matter makes her review
even more questionable. D’Souza at least included the Kengor interview,
which seems to represent his awareness that there is an alternative view
of how Obama turned out that is more consistent with the facts as we
have come to know and appreciate them.
The Fouhy review is the latest in a series of examples of how the
major media have refused to address the facts, known by them for more
than four years, about how Obama was influenced by a key member of the
Communist Party member in Hawaii, and how Obama and his campaign tried
to cover it up.
Four years ago,
AP ran a story
about Davis without mentioning the smoking-gun evidence that Davis was a
Communist Party member. AP then called Davis a “left-leaning black
journalist and poet” known for “leftist politics” and someone who might
be accused by some of having “allegedly anti-American views.”
Fouhy could have set the record straight, by citing the Kengor
interview in the D’Souza film, and she could have written about the
600-page FBI file on Davis. But she decided not to. Perhaps she realized
that the facts about Davis and Obama are not in dispute and that her
best approach was simply to ignore them. This is not real
“fact-checking,” but dishonest journalism designed to guarantee a second
term for Obama.
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Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.
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