April 17, 2015 – 7:03 PM
Commentators on two different Arabic television programs claimed that President Barack Obama is pushing a nuclear deal with Iran because his father, Barack Obama Sr., was a Shiite Muslim, and President Obama apparently wants the Shia-run government of Iran to be victorious in the region.
The commentators made their remarks on the UK channel Al-Hiwar TV on March 25 and on 4Shbab TV in Saudi Arabia on April 10; the segments were recorded and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute TV Monitor Project (MEMRI).
“There is one thing we must not forget,” said Syrian writer Muhydin Lazikani on Hiwar TV. “I am not peddling some theory, and I am not being racist. But Barack Hussein Obama is the son of a Shiite Kenyan father.”
“He spent much of his childhood in Mombasa, south Kenya,” said Lazikani. “I visited this very area, and I can tell you that it is mostly Shiite. All the childhood memories of the man who rules the White House are Shiite memories.”
“This is why the Iranian issue is so important to him and why he is so anxious for Iran to emerge victorious, and for Syria and all the countries of the Arab Gulf to be shattered,” said Lazikani.
President Obama’s father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (1936-1982), was born in Nyang’oma Kogelo, which is in the southwest region of Kenya. His own father, Hussein Onyango Obama (1895-1979), had converted from Christianity to Islam. Barack Obama Sr. was raised a Muslim but his son, President Obama, said at the February 2009 National Prayer Breakfast, “I had a father who was born a Muslim but became an atheist.”
No, say it not true
We need to debate politics in the real world. The president is not the “Manchurian Candidate”.
Children who can’t cope with the world develop a fantasy world. When they become adults they are political pundits.
It’s not true that Obama spent his youth traipsing about the streets of Mombasa. However, it actually was not generally known that his father was Shiite Muslin versus Sunni. The Syrian writer is struggling, as we all are, frankly, to understand where Obama is coming from, what he may be thinking at any given moment, what motivates him, and what he is going to do next. This absolutely must be the polar opposite of what the framers of the Constitution were aiming at when they specified that the offices of President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Armed Forces should devolve on none but natural born citizens of the U.S.