Open letter to
Senator Barack Obama,
possible Democratic Party of America Presidential nominee & some say next
Commander-and-Chief of the United States & Moral Leader of the Western World.
April 21, 2008
Dear Senator Obama,
My name is Leon Weinstein. I immigrated to the United States
in 1986, and since I became a citizen, I was voting either republican or democrat, depending on issues and personalities. In fiscal and international areas I am conservative, on many social issues I am a liberal. I am pro-choice, pro-legalization of marihuana, pro-amnesty for illegal emigrants (with however a good solid wall constructed to regulate this issue in the future), pro-staying in Iraq until the situation stabilized, pro-getting our hundred billion dollars investment in Iraq back from sales of Iraqi oil, and with a strong stance against Muslim extremists and other aggressive countries and organizations. I would also want to disassemble the United Nations, this joke of a forum where human rights committee members are Iran
& Syria
.
I found some surprising and troubling words in your books and speeches, and found a profound luck of experience that you are proposing to substitute with judgment. You are saying that you have “good judgment” and this statement is based on one quote regarding war in Iraq
. The truth, of course, is that you were not in the US
senate at that time and didn’t have an access to the intelligence they had (you yourself said it several times prior to the Presidential race). But OK, let’s play by your rules and examine your judgment on other issues and situations. Below is an account of my findings regarding your words, actions and judgments.
Let me stat with a little historical observation. My great grandparents were Jewish and lived in a small village, with no legal right to move to a larger city, being prohibited to enter Universities, denied elementary human rights and frequently being subjected to pogroms. They were killed, humiliated and raped. This was occurring so often that my ancestors decided that we will call our children’s race by their mother’s. Thousands upon thousands of those children of rape were proudly calling themselves Jews, and joined their brothers and sisters in their faith and destiny. It was very easy to blend into a non-Jewish environment and abandon your race and fate. Some did, most stay. Let me honestly say to you that the very first thing that struck me in your book DREAMS OF MY FATHER were words: “I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s race”.
As you may know, in a Jewish tradition a boy becomes a man at age 13. This is the age we Jews believe that a person can’t hide any more behind his parents, his ignorance or age, has to start choosing his path in this world and has to answer for his own words and actions. This is another quote from your book: “I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites”. You were not ready to stood up for people who raised you, fed you, schooled you and loved you. Those people where “whites”. I am white too. Will you be ready to stand by me if you are our next President?
Every year about one million people legally immigrate to the US
. Another million coming every year as illegal immigrants. They work, build their nests and stay here. There are millions of others who would give anything to be able to come and stay in America
. When I was receiving my citizenship, the ceremony was conducted in a huge hall with some five thousand emigrants receiving their citizenship at the same time. I remember those five thousand people singing the American hymn and crying. They came from different countries and they all remembered how they lived over there. They had tears of joy in their eyes. Millions of people who came here as emigrants (believe me emigration is a very painful and difficult process) are grateful and love the same country your wife, your pastor and your friends hate so much. Did you do anything to stop this wave of hate against your mother’s race? Not when you were 12 or 13, but when you were 25… 35… 40? I have a feel that you do not know how lucky and privileged you are, how blessed your children and your wife are. I wanted to tell you that every time my friends, emigrants from Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia celebrating any (ANY!) holiday, they raise their first toast for this great country. I know you will not believe it, but “God bless America
!” we say, and we mean it.
In my old country we had a saying “tell me who your friend is and I will tell you who you are”. Obviously you do not agree with this millennium-old wisdom. OK, you do not want to be judged by association with your friends. Let’s then see what’s going on in your own home. This is what your wife said: “…for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country!” and “America
… is a mean country”. Really? Is that why so many people come here any want to raise their children and grandchildren? Because America
is a mean country? Because there is nothing to be proud of here?
I was told that this is your wife’s words, not yours. I was told that you do not feel or think like you wife does. I understand, I argue with my wife a lot. But if this is true, why didn’t you argue with her in front of all of us? You are in the spot light, it is easy to do. Why didn’t you say that you do not share those views, that you are proud of your country, that you love your country, that you teach your children to be proud of this wonderful country of ours, and that there is no country better then this one in the entire world!
I am sure you are a busy man and you do not have much time for your kids during weekdays. And that Sundays are your great opportunity to communicate those thoughts to your wonderful daughters. Did you communicate those thoughts to your daughters? Or you take them Sunday after Sunday, month after month, year after year to sermons by Jeremiah Wright, filled with venom and hate?
As a mater of fact I personally do not believe that your never heard your pastor and mentor saying that AIDS were created by Americans to wipe out all Africans, or that Christ is black, or that America
is a KKK country. This was on CDs and DVDs that were distributed by your church. I have heard you donated large sums of money to this church.
What else do I know about you? During student years you felt close to radicals and Marxists. It is perfectly OK at certain age to think that things can be easily and radically changed. Winston Churchill once said (or someone else equally smart) that if at the age twenty you are not a socialist, then you do not have heart. But if at age forty you still a socialist, you do not have brain. Are you still under a spell of Che Gevaras, Karl Marxes and Leo Trotskis? In Chicago
you joined this America
bashing church. Then you went to ask for political support of the leader of Weather Underground. And got it. And became friends with him. So you probably did or said something that this guy who bombed fellow Americans liked. What did you do or say that he liked so much?
Then you were elected to the Illinois Senate. You were present but didn’t want to express your opinion on some 129 subjects during your time in the state senate. What were the subjects? May be they were unimportant? One of them was an attempt to restrict the location of pornographic video stores & strip clubs within 1,000 feet of schools, churches and kindergartens. You refused to vote on this one. You were the only senator to be “present” but not expressing opinion on a bill that required teaching “respect for others” at schools. You voted NO on a bill that would require prisoners to pay court costs for frivolous lawsuits against the state. You were the ONLY vote in the Illinois Senate against prohibiting softening prison terms for sex offenders if they behaved well while in the prison. You voted NO on a bill requiring school boards to install software on public computers accessible to minors to block sexually explicit material. Why would you want the school age kids be able to watch porno on school computers? You voted YES to allow the purchase of hypodermic needles from pharmacies without a prescription.
Let’s also take a look on how you voted on fiscal issues. When tough was going tougher and tougher in your state, you supported … raising taxes. Not trimming expenses, but raising taxes. The state needed money and it was so simple to take them from the hard working people. You supported raising of more than 300 taxes and fees on businesses in 2004 to help solve a budget deficit. I will let your constituency to guess what you would do as a President every time we have fiscal problems in the US
.
But may be you are very trustworthy person? May be we shall rock solid believe in every word you say? Let’s examine this as well. Let’s call this part of my letter “Obama said”:
Obama said in a speech in a church in Selma (Alabama) that when John Kennedy offered all suffering people in the world to start believing in their own powers and come to study in the US, his grandfather in Africa heard it and sent Barack’s father to study in the US. When his father came (with the help of the air-bridge that was organized by JFK), he met his future bride to be, Barack’s white mother, on one of the civil rights meetings, actually on the historical civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.
Hmmm: (a) March from Selma
to Montgomery
started on Match 7, 1965. Barack Obama was born in August 1961, four years earlier, (b) In order to be Barack’s father, the Obama senior came to America the latest in November of 1960, and at that time America’s president was republican Dwight Eisenhower (not democrat JFK). Interesting.
Obama said that he would not tolerate power brokers and lobbyists in Washington
. He calls himself a fighter against corruption and large corporate influence on the policymakers.
Hmmm: At least three of his main campaign advisors registered as lobbyists for British Petroleum, Lockheed Martin and Wall-Mart.
Obama said that he would clean Washington
and the politics from special interests. When asked about his relations to a shady businessman Tony Resco (an alleged Chicago
mobster now being sued in Chicago
), Obama said that he hardy knew the guy. Then he said that he knew him, but never took… then he said that he took, but not a lot… and immediately returned… even more then took… Sounds like Bill Clinton, right?
Hmmm: In June 2005 Obama family purchased a 2 million house in Chicago
. On the same day, Tony Resco’s wife purchased an adjacent lot and immediately sold part of it to Michele Obama, Barack’s wife. The remaining part of the lot remained empty and the Obama family conveniently uses it “temporarily” as their backyard. The picture seen on the Google Earth shows that from the air it is now one property with no boundaries separating the two lots. On top of this “small token” of several hundred thousand, Tony was one of the main Obama’s financial supporters and gave him over $150,000 in donations. Hardly a person whom Obama hardly knew. But the biggest question is – what Obama was paid for? What services he performed to this alleged Mafiosi that were worth purchasing a property and donating so much money to the Illinois
senator?
Obama said that tax burden in recent years became lighter for rich (Bush tax cuts help rich people to pay less) and heavier of poor.
Hmmm: According to the Congressional Budget Office and the Census Bureau information, the top 1% earners pay now 31.25% of the tax burden (up from 27.7%) and poor pay now 4.3% (down from 9.1%).
Obama said that the US defense spending is soaring through the roof, that they are historically high under Bush administration & it is a terrible and unprecedented burden on the US population.
Hmmm: Defense spending, even with the war in Iraq
cost factored in, is well below their historical average. Currently we are spending less then 4% of the gross domestic product (GDP). During cold war we spent 6.2% of the GDP, and at the height of Vietnam War we spent 9.5% of GDP.
Dear Senator Obama, you probably a very good hearted man. Not very honest, although. Che Guevara was a good man as well. Leon Trotsky was a very very good man. Mao Tze-Tung was probably a good man. I am sure many people think that Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez are good man. Those are very good man… but not for us. We need a good man with the clearly American values, with an ability to defend our nation against all attacks (as Bush did as a mater of fact), with an ability to reach across the aisle and unite the nation. We need one that doesn’t lie to us. Your autobiographical "Dreams From My Father" is not a story of reaching across the isle but of developing an African identity. Where is our dream of the melting pot? Instead of White Supremacy that I sincerely hope is already in the past, we are now facing Black Supremacy? Black Values? What the hell is that? Why simply not American values?
Do you know who said this: "There was no doubt in my mind that as a member of the black community, I am obligated to this community and will utilize all of my present and future resources to benefit the black community first and foremost“. Your wife said that. What did you do or said in public to counter this wonderful pledge of hers?
There is one more issue I would want to raise in my letter to you:
In 2003 you said according to The Boston Globe the following words: “The United States
had an absolute obligation to remain in Iraq
long enough to make it a success”. You stated that: “… failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster and would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective".
In 2004 in your interview to The New York Times you said: “I'm always careful to say that I was not in the Senate, so perhaps the reason I thought [the war] was such a bad idea was that I didn't have the benefit of U.S. intelligence,"
In the same 2004 in an interview to the Chicago Tribune you said: "… here's not that much difference between my position [on the war] and George Bush's position at this stage."
And again in the same 2004 on the Charlie Rose Show, when Charlie asked you if you would have voted against the Iraq
War resolution had you been in Congress, your answer was already a simple, "Yes." Hmmm?
On November 2005 you made a speech and called for a gradual withdrawal of forces. You said: "Notice that I say ‘reduce’, and not 'fully withdraw'”.
Today, you vow to "immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq
."
How easy you turn your back on something you proclaimed as an "absolute obligation". I clearly remember that you made similar promises regarding the safety and security of Israel
. How long will those promises last? Until January 2009? No wonder Hamas want’s you to become America
’s next president. And what other promises you are not intending to keep? In strict adherence to your policy of double-talk, your top foreign policy adviser Samantha Power admitted in an interview that a President Obama may very well not keep the commitments regarding withdrawing from Iraq
made by Senator Obama while campaigning.
Let’s add to that when you called for renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, your key economic adviser Austin Goolsbee was reported to have told the Canadians that this was just campaign pander. What else you tell us, but do not mean? What else you promise that you do not intend to do? Are you that arrogant that you think that Americans are that stupid? For a politician who promises to tell voters "not what they want to hear but the truths they need to hear" this is a jarring degree of hypocrisy.
Dear Senator, I am sorry to say but you lost me as a potential supporter. You represent so many things that I despise, that I am very much concern now that you might be nominated and (God forbid) elected to become the United States President. I can assure you that I will work hard to stop you from becoming our next Commander-in-Chief. From this moment on and until November I am fighting against you as hard as I can. I will write letters, I will organize meetings, I will talk to as many people as I can, I will send money as much as I can to those who as myself will be feverishly working to stop you from changing this wonderful country of ours into the Union of Socialistic States of America
.
Sincerely,
Leon A.Weinstein
Los Angeles
, CA
leonweinstein@hotmail.com
