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Obama and wealthy Pakistani roommate Mohammed Hasan Chandoo
John Drew writes today in the American Thinker…
But before I get to that, Dr. Drew was a guest on my radio program a year ago, and said this about meeting and getting to know Obama while at Occidental:
“Obama was into Frantz Fanon, a french revolutionary who believed in violent resolution, and wrote a book “Wretched of the Earth.” Obama was definitely a Marxist-Leninist then in that he believed that the union members and the working class would revolt and overthrow the capitalist system. And that you needed to have this intellectual elite vanguard leading that movement and educating the working class so it could take over the government.”
Drew added that what he found particularly chilling was Obama’s charisma. He said one of the themes of charismatic leaders is the sincerity of their beliefs. He said, “They don’t put you in charge of a country if you don’t really believe in that core ideology, so I think it was Obama’s sincerity that won him the trust of Alice Palmer (former Illinois state senator) and Bill Ayers. And it’s winning him the trust of Andy Stern.
Here’s what Dr. Drew wrote in today’s American Thinker. It squares with what he told us during our interview.
When I first saw Obama, I remember I was standing on the porch of Boss’s parents’ impressive home as a sleek, expensive luxury car pulled up the driveway. Two young men emerged from the vehicle. They were well-dressed and looked like they were born to wealth and privilege. I was a little surprised to learn they were Boss’s friends from Occidental College until she articulated the underlying0 political connection. “They’re on our side,” she said.
The taller of the two was Obama, then only 19, who towered over his five-foot-five companion, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo – a wealthy, 21 year old Pakistani student. Chandoo had a full dark black, neatly trimmed moustache, and was dressed in expensive clothes. Nevertheless, Obama was the more handsome of the two. At six foot two, Obama carried himself with the dignity and poise of a model. The diminutive Chandoo, in contrast, came across as more of a practical, businessman type. Obama displayed a visible deference to Chandoo when they were standing together at the vehicle.
Chandoo was vaguely familiar to me as a participant in the earlier anti-apartheid rallies on the Occidental College campus. In David Remnick’s book, The Bridge, Chandoo’s bona fides as a committed Marxist were well-known to those close to him. Chandoo’s girlfriend at the time, Margot Mifflin, told Remnick that “[I]n college, Hasan was a socialist, a Marxist, which is funny since he is from a wealthy family.” (See, Remnick, David, The Bridge, Alfred A, Knopf, 2010, page 104.) Young Obama, on the other hand, was completely new to me.
“This is Barack Obama,” Boss said.[ snip ]
My first meeting with young Barack Obama raised strong feelings and left me with a positive first impression. At the time, I felt I’d persuaded a young man anticipating a Marxist-Leninist revolution to appreciate the more practical alternative of conventional politics as a channel for his socialist views.
I met Obama in December of 1980, a couple of days after Christmas, in Portola Valley — a small town near Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. I was a 23 year old second-year graduate student in Cornell’s Government Department, and had flown to California to visit a 21 year old girlfriend, Caroline Boss. Boss was a senior at Occidental College, where she had taken a class in the fall of 1980 with political theorist Roger Boesche. She met and befriended Obama in that class.
Inside the house, Mrs. Boss prepared snacks for everyone. All four of the students lit up after-dinner cigarettes in the dining room of the Boss’s home. Caroline Boss sat at the head of the table to my left. Obama sat directly across from me. Chandoo sat on the other side of the table on Obama’s left. Naturally, our conversation gravitated towards the coming revolution. I expected that my undergraduate friends would be interested in hearing my latest take on contemporary Marxist thought. I was in for quite a bit of a shock.
My graduate studies that fall had tempered my earlier Marxism with a more realistic perspective. I thought a revolution was not in the cards anymore. There was no inevitability, in my mind, to the old idea that the proletariat would rise up and overthrow the ruling classes. Now, the idea that we could entirely eliminate the profit motive from an advanced industrialized economy seemed like a childhood fantasy. The future, I now thought, would belong to nations with mixed economic systems — like those in Europe — where there was government planning of the economy combined with a greater effort to produce a more equitable distribution of wealth. It made more sense to me to focus on elections rather than on preparing for a coming revolution.
Boss and Obama, however, had a starkly different view. They believed that the economic stresses of the Carter years meant revolution was still imminent. The election of Reagan was simply a minor set-back in terms of the coming revolution. As I recall, Obama repeatedly used the phrase “When the revolution comes….” In my mind, I remember thinking that Obama was blindly sticking to the simple Marxist theory that had characterized my own views while I was an undergraduate at Occidental College. “There’s going to be a revolution,” Obama said, “we need to be organized and grow the movement.” In Obama’s view, our role must be to educate others so that we might usher in more quickly this inevitable revolution.
I know this may be implausible to some readers, but I distinctly remember Obama surprising me by bringing up Frantz Fanon and colonialism. He impressed me with his knowledge of these two topics, topics which were not among my strong points — or of overwhelming concern to me. Boss and Obama seemed to think their ideological purity was a persuasive argument in predicting that a coming revolution would end capitalism. While I felt I was doing them a favor by providing them with the latest research, I saw I was in danger of being cast as a reactionary who did not grasp the nuances of international Marxist theory.
Read the entire thing. Or listen to the interview.
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I have said and written for almost three years that Obama was groomed from youth to become what he is: “the Mansourian candidate”. (great-big hat tip to Jack Cashill)
This report confirms that, at age 19, Obama was a more dedicated and better-informed Marxist than a 23-year-old graduate student at Cornell. (And, if you know anything about Cornell University and its home city of Ithaca, NY, then you know that it would take a LOT to be more Marxist than almost ANYone from Cornell — but especially a graduate student in political science.)
Two points are worth noting.
First, the report specifies that Caroline Boss met and befriended Obama in a class that started in the Fall of 1980 at Occidental College. That means that Obama could not have been residing in Hawaii at the time of his draft registration, as he claims to have been. That is a felony. (click here)
tomkovach.us/blog/2008/11/obama_draft_scandal_deepens.html
Second, for a young man that wants to make political friends, and who was raised as a Muslim in the most populous Muslim country on Earth (Indonesia), it is quite telling that Obama’s body language in the photo is insulting to Chandoo. He leans back (superiority), while Chandoon leans forward. More importantly, though, is that Obama is pointing the sole of his boot toward Chandoo. That is a huge insult in the Muslim world. There is no way that Obama can claim ignorance. So, it would appear that Obama “showed deference” to Chandoo when it was to Obama’s advantage, but when relaxing for a photo-op he insults those that he is supposedly there to honor. (Sound familiar? He does the same with our troops, when he uses them for props in his publicity photos. Grrrrrrrrr!)
Lovely couple I could have sworn Drew ask his girlfriend if they were lovers because they both wore wedding bands (is that why he is pushing for gay marriage)Larry Sinclair would be proud.
Seeing the current situation in Wisconsin, it is more clear than ever that Obama (peace be on him) is a violent revolutionary, and wants to support others who share this view and act out on it.
Just a few thoughts on John Drew’s article:
1. Drew writes in his \”article\” that the \”Obama\” he met was 6’2\”. Well, President Obama must have shrunk in the intervening 30+ years. The President’s actual height is 6’1\”.
2. How come Drew didn’t write about his encounter with \”Obama\” and his views earlier in time? Not shortly before Obama was elected President in 2008, but years earlier, for example, 2004 when Obama first came on the national scene giving his inspiring keynote address at the Democratic National Convention to a national audience, or that same year when Obama ran for Senator from Illinois against interloper Alan Keyes, one of the heroes of the conservative right? Or 2007 when Obama announced he was running for president? Or early 2008 when Obama began winning Democratic caucuses and primaries?
3. The \”article\” reads like a work of fiction. It’s as if Drew read Obama’s \”Dreams of My Father,\” discovered that Obama briefly attended the same Occidental College that Drew had attended, and seized on that common denominator to shape and craft a fictional account of encounters and conversations between Drew and Obama, much like Edmund Morris did of Reagan in his memoir, \”Dutch\” – the purpose of the fictional Edmund Morris was to give us his impressions of Reagan as he encounters Reagan along the way from his youth, through his life. The genre really didn’t work for Morris, and it certainly doesn’t work for Drew.
4. Drew describes other people involved in the \”encounter\” – Caroline Boss (youthful Auggie’s former flame), Boss’ adoptive parents, and Mohammed Hasan Chandoo. Why haven’t one of them corroborated Drew’s story?
5. It’s also amazing to me that Drew recalled so many specific details of his \”encounter\” with 18- or 19-year old Obama from more than 30 years ago – exact words, actions, dress, looks, etc. – when no one (not even Drew) knew or even thought at that particular instance that Barack Obama was going to become President of the United States. Quite frankly, at that point Obama – like most of us -was a nobody then attending a relatively obscure college. Why would Drew retain and remember so much detail of a then nobody from more than 30 years ago? Which is why Drew’s vivid imagination has filled in the gaps and come up with a fictionalized account of an encounter with Obama.
Perhaps Drew perceives himself as the next Edmund Morris, E.L. Doctorow or Philip Roth. Probably not – to much use of \”I\” and \”me\” throughout his entire \”article\”.
Just a few thoughts on the above comment.
1. Perhaps it is possible that Mr. Drew did not write his observations sooner, because he feared becoming like the 57 dead people that came forward with negative information about Bill Clinton.
2. Perhaps Mr. Drew writes now, because he sees that the country is in such bad shape, and he feels guilty for not having warned the country sooner.
3. I can still recall the specifics of a number of conversations that I had with my youthful peers in the Air Force, even though some of those conversations were more than 30 years ago (and even though some of those conversations were in other languages).
4. I would think that it would stand out in someone’s memory if someone said with total confidence that there WILL be a revolution in the United States. Even amongst the starry-eyed “young skulls full of mush” at some Commie-Lib party, even if they are hopeful of such a revolution (be careful what you wish for…), the described level of confidence would certainly stand out. Besides, for all of his Commie-Lib, Muslim-Marxist faults, Obama does have a memorable speaking voice.
Besides, if the conversation was so lackluster as to be forgotten over a period of 30 years, then why did he keep the photo?!