Moral indictment filed against Columbia University in quest for Obama’s records

PLANS PROTEST AND MOCK TRIAL AT OBAMA’S “ALMA MATER”

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jan. 24, 2010) — Dr. James David Manning, founder and pastor of ATLAH World Ministries in Harlem and outspoken Obama critic, contends that Barack Hussein Obama never attended Columbia University’s undergratudate institution,  Columbia College, as he claims, that Columbia “sold” Obama a degree in Political Science, and that these allegations will be proven in a court of law in New York State.  He also believes that Obama is ineligible to hold the office of President of the United States due to his failure to meet the “natural born citizen” requirement set forth in the U.S. Constitution.

Dr. Manning grew up in Red Springs, NC, and is chief pastor at the ATLAH World Missionary Church in New York City.  In 1992, Pastor Manning began a Christian radio program which expanded to a weekly television broadcast on several networks.  He has sponsored numerous educational programs intended to “denounce racism as the catalyst for the problems facing the Black population” and to encourage “young people to become the leaders who will bring restoration to the broken and disshelved African- American population.”

He currently can be heard on “The Manning Report” Monday through Friday here from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET or by podcast on demand.  For more information, please visit www.atlah.org.

Today, I interviewed Dr. Manning regarding his plans and strategy to uncover the truth about Obama’s Columbia University degree and other information that has been hidden from the American people.

MRS. RONDEAU: You have stated on video that Obama never attended Columbia University.  When did you first become convinced of that?

DR. MANNING: Through Fox News, back in the primary of 2008; they did an in-depth intensive investigation and interviewed more than 400 people at Columbia. We’re talking about students, professors, custodial staff, librarians and shopkeepers and merchants in the environs of Columbia University where Fox News did this interview, and they were not able to find one person who remembered Obama ever being at Columbia or in any of the classes that would have led him to a Political Science degree. This happened back in 2008.

MRS. RONDEAU: Do you have any knowledge as to why Fox News did not investigate further?

DR. MANNING: I don’t know; I never asked them that question.

MRS. RONDEAU: At this point, on one of your videos, you said that an indictment has been filed against Columbia University. When was that filed?

DR. MANNING: Well, when I say “indictment,” I mean in the moral community sense; I have not filed one with the State of New York. I do plan to bring charges officially, civilly, in the State of New York Supreme Court against Columbia. That I will do. Right now we’re talking of a moral, social community indictment which has been filed.

MRS. RONDEAU: I know you’re calling for a march against Columbia.

DR. MANNING: Exactly. We plan to do that in May during the graduation exercises at Columbia.

MRS. RONDEAU: And is Columbia aware of any of this, do you think?

DR. MANNING: I’m sure that they are.

MRS. RONDEAU: And have you received any response from anyone at Columbia?

DR. MANNING: No, but I have several letters that have gone out to the New York State Board of Accreditation that has accredited Columbia requesting information about their procedure in issuing degrees. I’ve sent letters to Columbia asking them for the roster of criteria to receive a Political Science degree during the years in which Obama allegedly received his degree and all of the professors and teachers that would have been a part of that program, and we’re waiting for that response.

MRS. RONDEAU: I see. So no response as of yet?

DR. MANNING: No; we expect one, though.

MRS. RONDEAU: On one of your videos, you stated that during the time when Obama was supposedly at Columbia, he was actually in the Middle East; I think you mentioned Afghanistan specifically. Is there proof of that, and if so, where did you find that proof?

DR. MANNING: Well, I’d like to reserve my elucidation on that question to these remarks, which is that it has been demonstrated and widely posted that in 1981, Obama did travel to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He traveled to Pakistan. A number of people, including the attorneys who are pursuing the Supreme Court matter of Obama’s birth certificate, have tried to get information on which passport he used: was it an American passport, was it a Pakistani passport, was it an Indonesian passport?  We don’t know. It has been documented, and there is court-documented proof, that he did travel in 1981 to Pakistan. What I intend to prove is that during the years that he allegedly attended Columbia, between 1981 and 1983, he actually spent those years in Afghanistan. As you know, traveling to Pakistan, you only had to cross over a very porous border into Afghanistan. It was during those years of the Russian invasion into Afghanistan that I believe Obama became associated with the Taliban; not so much Al Qaeda, but the Taliban.

MRS. RONDEAU: I remember reading about Obama that he was a student of something called “Sovietology” when he was at Occidental, that he had this interest in the Soviets. Is there any idea that perhaps his interest in Sovietology was what made him go to Pakistan and then enter Afghanistan and perhaps get involved in what was going on with the Russians? Have you found any connection there?

DR. MANNING: We intend to prove that he was there; we intend to prove that he spent those years involved in the process of the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan and that there was a sponsor who sponsored him in going to Afghanistan. We intend to prove that in court.

MRS. RONDEAU: In which court will this eventually be heard?

DR. MANNING: Initially, we will go through the New York Supreme Court regarding Freedom of Information about Obama’s actual presence in Columbia University. We have that within the present New York State judicial system. From there we will then decide how to proceed with charging Columbia with issuing fraudulent degrees, etc., and we also plan to hold a march and protest and mock trial during the days of the 14th through the 19th of May if we don’t receive the opportunity to go into the New York State Supreme Court.

MRS. RONDEAU: So if for some reason it hasn’t come up yet by that time, you will hold the mock trial during that week.

DR. MANNING: Absolutely.

MRS. RONDEAU: If your case is heard before then, would you still have the mock trial, or would that be a moot point?

DR. MANNING: That’s a question I really can’t answer. I suspect that Columbia is not going to fold and simply start confessing and asking for a plea-bargain deal. They’re going to fight this as vigorously as they possibly can. We simply want to demonstrate that they’re hiding information and that they will not be forthcoming, and the information that we want to demonstrate that they’re hiding – we don’t want them to ask about Obama’s presence – which I don’t believe they will do, not on their own. We simply want to know who the professors were who taught him, or who would have been the professors, and how was he graded, and how they allowed him to receive a degree, and what  the requirements were for receiving the degree. That’s all we want to know from them.

Mrs. Rondeau: Has there been any response from Columbia?

DR. MANNING: The letters have gone out, but on a matter like this, there is obviously something unethical about what has taken place.  We don’t know exactly what it is, and whatever it is, they’re going to want to protect it, and the better way to protect it is to stonewall as long as you possibly can, and I expect that from them.

MRS. RONDEAU: And if they can’t or won’t answer that, then…

DR. MANNING: Then we would wonder why.

MRS. RONDEAU: If I may, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions regarding Obama and the black community. I realize your contention is that he is an illegitimate president because he is not a natural-born citizen.  Seeing as he is occupying the office and ran on being the “post-racial” candidate, what do you think has been his impact on the black community thus far?

DR. MANNING: The black community, for the most part, is stunned and they are embarrassed by him on several levels. On the political civil-rights level, which has been the way in which black communities have been able to identify themselves in American politics and economics in America, early on, people like Lani Guinier, Tavis Smiley, Al Sharpton, Cornell West and a number of others who met in the State of the Black Union last year, in June 2009, and other notable black political leaders were saying, “OK, during the campaign, Obama hid us like a stepchild.  He didn’t come to our communities, he didn’t really focus a lot on us, and we were willing to swallow that, understanding that he did not want to appear overly racial. We allowed that to happen, knowing that he would have to appeal to a broader audience.”  And this was the general consensus of people like Lani Guinier, Cornell West and others during that State of the Union meeting last year.

But then they stated that after he had sealed the nomination and the election, he still has not reached out in any credible way to demonstrate in any possible way, in the most minute way, any concern for the black community. There was a division among the black leadership at that point. One view was to give him more time, and this was June of 2009.   And others were stating, “He’s had enough time, and perhaps he is totally insensitive to us.” More specifically, he has wiped out our ability to be effective because he has essentially destroyed their bread and butter: the civil rights movement as a post-racial candidate, that the civil rights movement would be a moot point after that. And he has destroyed their bread-and-butter operations. So that was going back and forth.

The Black Congressional Caucus met recently, I believe in late November/early December, and charged Obama with being insensitive and had planned to march on the White House, had planned to have a civil rights march against Obama.  This was led by the leader of the Black Caucus and one of the Congressional leaders out of Chicago; I forget his name right now. I haven’t heard anything more about that since, whether the Chrismas holidays just absolved it and there’s been no further action.  But the Black Caucus last year stated that Obama had not reached out to the black community, unemployment in Detroit and Chicago was off the charts; and he was saying nothing, doing nothing. They were very disturbed at his response to black people and the black community.

MRS. RONDEAU: I wasn’t aware of that. If he is proven illegitimate, it will obviously have a huge impact on the entire nation. Do you think many blacks voted for him because he was black?

DR. MANNING: Absolutely, no doubt about it.

MRS. RONDEAU: What impact do you think this will have if it is proven that he won the presidency through completely false circumstances?

DR. MANNING: Initially, it will set the movement of black people back, and I think it will set the racial problem back a few steps when the news finally becomes a reality. What is happening now is that most people in America, at least 49-51% of Americans, have some idea about his being an ineligible candidate, and so it would not be a total shock. It isn’t as if they’d heard it for the very first time. They’ll be prepared to some degree, and by the time it finally does filter out, there will be a campaign to prepare people to receive it. I think that what it will do is it will first set the relationships back a bit; the civil rights leaders will pick up again. Jesse Jackson will get steam again. But then they will lose it, and I think it will then advance the racial problems in America ahead 100 years. By that I mean black people and white people will finally recognize that it was the epitome of racism to have voted for Obama and that they will ultimately repent of it and stop dividing America along racial lines. It was just the worst thing to have done, to continue to promote racism, and I think after Obama, black people and white people can begin to legitimately lose their black and white identities and move forward as Americans.

MRS. RONDEAU: Was it racism that actually got Obama into the White House?

DR. MANNING: Absolutely, pure unadulterated racism. No doubt about it.

MRS. RONDEAU: Are there other black pastors that you know of doing what you’re doing and taking the position that you have against Obama?

DR. MANNING: No.

MRS. RONDEAU: None that you know of?

DR. MANNING: No, absolutely.

MRS. RONDEAU: Do you think there’s a reason that they’re not speaking out?

DR. MANNING: I’m confident that there are a number of black pastors who recognize that Obama is indeed a fraud on so many levels. They are very much aware of that. They are very much aware of his Muslim leaning, his anti-Christian presentation. They know that spiritually and sensitively. Many of them have not found the will to stand up to their congregations or to their race and make this plain; they just have it as a private observation. And coupled with that, they may not have the platform from which to speak. For whatever reason, I began speaking out early, which has allowed me a continued platform to make such statements. I think ultimately, the black pastors who do know are afraid of their congregations and afraid they will lose their place in the racial scheme of things.

People like Armstrong Williams, a black commentator, who’s a very conservative conservative,  came out during the early part of the campaign and said “I’m going to vote for Obama and support him because I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history.” And that’s where a lot of black leaders are.  They don’t necessarily believe in Obama; they just don’t want to be black and have missed the opportunity to support the allegedly first black president. So it’s a quandary.

MRS. RONDEAU: In your opinion, why did whites and others vote for Obama?

DR. MANNING: I think, first of all, many white people, because of racism, have a sense of guilt when they look at the black community and they recognize that it seems to be retrogressing.  The amount of misery in the black community in America is only two degrees higher than what is presently happening in Haiti right now. And it just seems such a paradox that black people are struggling the way they’re struggling after all of these years. While some blacks are doing well, for the most part, the rank and file community of blacks is doing terribly and getting worse in the most prosperous nation on the planet. I think that some whites felt that “Well, let’s give this black person an opportunity, and perhaps it will be a major uplift for the black community.”

But it has not; it did not happen.  It could not happen that way, because that is racist.  Whether you consider it empathetic racism or not, it was still racism, because when you’re talking about the president of the United States, you need to vote for him based on qualifications, not based on race, and race should not be a qualification for being the president. Otherwise, you could then exclude people because of race. So it was a racist statement. There were some others who voted for him because they were just ticked off at George Bush whom they believed  in his eight years had mangled the American government.  But basically, it was a 99% racist vote up and down, even in the black community.  Ninety-seven percent of the black community voted lock, stock and barrel for Obama. Pure racism.

MRS. RONDEAU: Regarding your own congregation, would you say that most of them agree with you and your views about Obama?

DR. MANNING: Initially, for the most part, they probably disagreed with everything I said. The only reason why they continued to be members of the congregation was because of my longstanding input into their lives.  For some of them, I’ve been their pastor for over 20 years and had married their children, blessed their babies, buried their mothers and their fathers and had been a faithful pastor to them where their lives had been markedly different because I had been a pastor to them. The Obama thing was out of the blue, and they, for the most part, were given to relate “black,” and all they could see was a black man running for president who had a possibility of winning it. So at first they were not so agreeable. Some of them left, as a matter of fact. But the ones who are here now, for the most part, have come around to see that I spoke the truth.  They just didn’t realize how clearly I was on target about this man, because, as you know, Obama is 100%, 180 degrees away from where he was over a year ago when he was riding such a high wave of popularity.  They now see that I was telling the truth, not only the ones who are here, but the ones who left and others who disagreed with me as well.

MRS. RONDEAU: What do you think young black people can do politically, those who perhaps never thought about being involved in the political process?  What can they do to become active and to educate their peers about what to look for in the next presidential candidate?

DR. MANNING: If we’re talking about young blacks in particular, the single-most need among young blacks is the removal of the incident and the opportunity to hate white people. Let me tell you what I’m talking about. The generation between the late ’70s and present that gave advent to the hip-hop gangsta rap or rap music industry took a people who were, for the most part, moving out of racism on the part of black people through the ’50s and ’60s and the civil rights era, and then caught young and impressionable ten-year-old, 12-year-old, 14-year-old blacks and began to feed them again a dose of legal racist hatred music and talk.  So it has festered again, and I teach this all the time:  until young black people who hate white folk can have that poison removed from their hearts, they’re not going to be able to work with white folk.  They’re not going to be able to go to school because there’s this constant tension going back and forth. And right now, that is a major problem, more so than during the Jim Crow era or the era of the Ku Klux Klan. We are in a MAJOR problem, and when Obama came along as a black knight, that reinforced racism.

MRS. RONDEAU: Is there anything else you’d like to add about what has happened in the country since Obama’s election and what we as a nation can do?

DR. MANNING: Well, one of the things that is perhaps more insidious now than Obama is the fact that the people who voted for him a year ago, in 2008, and were made up of what one would call politically “the Independents”… it was that group, not so much the black folk, but it was the Independent vote, people who had declared themselves non-Republican, non-Democrats, but Independents, who actually gave Obama the edge and changed red states into blue states, as the saying goes. They became a very powerful voice. It was through that that Obama became the president. It wasn’t because of the Democrats, or because of blacks; the Independents put him in power. Those same Independent voters who have, in terms of their philosophy, a socialist agenda – they’re not Republicans, they’re not really conservatives – they now are extremely angry with Obama. They have morphed also into an identity party known as the Tea Party.

Now some Independents have not become rank and file Tea Party members, but the Tea Party is now getting the press of a third political group.  Rather than calling Independents as a group without a name or an identity, it has now morphed into the Tea Party.  And they are responsible for what happened with Scott Brown, what happened with Chris Christie, what happened in Virginia with the governor’s race and the senate race. They are angry at Obama because he lied to them; he pimped them, that’s exactly what he did.  They are fighting mad with him and they’re demonstrating it at the polls.

What I think America needs to know and if not, we’ll go into a deeper morass than we’re in right now with Obama, is that the Tea Party Independent people were very much aware during the campaign that there were major questions about Obama’s association with Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, his Islamic leaning, and whether or not he was a U.S. citizen.  The Independents said during the entire campaign, “We don’t care whether or not he’s a Muslim; we don’t care about Jeremiah Wright; we don’t care about Tony Rezko; stop bringing that up. We don’t care; we want him. We don’t care about his citizenship, we don’t care.”

What I want America to be very cautious about, otherwise we’ll make a more grievous mistake, is if we allow the Independents, or the Tea Party, now, to continue to sway influence in voting after they have said that the issue of the Constitution, whether he’s constitutionally eligible, does not matter.  Colin Powell stood up after an interview with ABC News and said, “John McCain ought to quit talking about this man’s Islamic heritage, whether he’s a Muslim or not; who cares? We have problems in America, and we just want a president, it doesn’t matter whether he’s a Muslim or who his associates are.”

The deal is this: if America allows the Tea Party to live after they said it doesn’t matter about the Constitution, it doesn’t matter whether he’s constitutionally eligible, it doesn’t matter whether he is now a treasonous, illegal alien, if they have said that about the Constitution and are allowed to get away with it, we’re in a much deeper state of being…I am doing this pursuit of Columbia…you asked an initial question, “Why didn’t Fox News pursue this matter even further? Why didn’t the political structure pursue Obama’s eligibility and why are they not doing it now?” Because they said, “We don’t care about the Constitution.” The Tea Party must be stopped or must be held accountable for the fact that they have become complicit in not caring whether or not this man is constitutionally eligible.

MRS. RONDEAU: If Fox News did not do any more investigation as to why they couldn’t find one person who had met Obama, supposedly, then what about all the other stations?

DR. MANNING: Absolutely.

MRS. RONDEAU: You wonder where were they? Where was ABC, where was CBS? What were they doing?

DR. MANNING: Yes!!

MRS. RONDEAU: I know you mentioned in your videos that they will not have you on. Have you specifically called CBS or NBC or Diane Sawyer and asked to be on any of their shows?

DR. MANNING: No, I’ve never done that.

MRS. RONDEAU: I know you said that YouTube had completely censored you.

DR. MANNING: Yes, they did, and we’ve started our own media network now.

MRS. RONDEAU: Is that “ATLAH” on your website?

DR. MANNING: Right, ATLAH Media Network.

MRS. RONDEAU: And when did that start?

DR. MANNING: We were censored by YouTube several times. I think we started it sometime in November or December. It hasn’t been very long.

MRS. RONDEAU:  I don’t know if you’ve read The Post & Email, but Mr. Charlton is very much focused on the Obama issue and has a campaign running for people to sign a petition to the Hawaii State government.”

DR. MANNING: Yes, I have.

MRS. RONDEAU: Your effort is certainly different from any of the attorneys’ or petition drives because you’re actually going after an institution of higher learning. My last question is, if it’s true that Obama never attended Columbia and instead somehow bought a degree, do you think he attended Harvard?

DR. MANNING: I think he did attend Harvard. However, that does beg another question: How do you go from Occidental College where you were smoking dope and snorting cocaine, selling drugs and getting very poor grades and get accepted at the fifth-most difficult school on the planet to get into? Columbia – they don’t just let you waltz into that school. How did he demonstrate the kind of grades that would have allowed him to transfer from Occidental, where he was a very poor student – he admits that in his book – into Columbia, and then, if attending Columbia under the best of circumstances, legitimately, he would have had to knock down a 4.0 average every year, and then would have had to have major power to get into one of the world’s most difficult law schools like Harvard. Something about all of this stinks to high heaven. Academically, do you know how tough it is to get into Harvard Law School?

MRS. RONDEAU: I can just imagine. I just wondered if you had any evidence or proof of anything in regard to Harvard as you feel you do with Columbia. It’s very interesting that Obama said in his book that his grades were very poor and he took drugs, but he transferred to Columbia without a problem.

DR. MANNING: It doesn’t happen, it just doesn’t happen. I suspect that Percy Sutton, Charles Rangel and Al-Waleed bin Talal, the Saudi Arabian prince, were very much involved in this entire process. It isn’t clean, I can tell you…it’s a very dirty process.

MRS. RONDEAU: Has anyone approached Charlie Rangel that you know of?

DR. MANNING: Not that I know of. No one would touch him. Racism again. They’re afraid to touch Rangel because they’re afraid to be called racist. The media will not ask him one question on that matter.

MRS. RONDEAU: And bin Talal…has anyone tried to contact him as to whether or not he really did pay for Obama’s supposed degree at Columbia?

DR. MANNING: No, not that I’ve heard of.

MRS. RONDEAU: Have you been in touch with him at all?

DR. MANNING: No, but I plan to. As you know, he now owns the second-largest amount of shares in Fox NewsCorp.

MRS. RONDEAU: What part do you think Percy Sutton played in this specifically?

DR. MANNING: Simply as a go-between. I don’t think he knew Obama or anybody else involved, except for the fact that at the time, he was a very influential black here in Harlem and could have appealed to either Columbia or Harvard to consider…or could have been the go-between, he could have been the bag-man carrying the money for bin Talal.

MRS. RONDEAU: Thank you very much again for your time, Dr. Manning, and please extend my thanks to Mrs. Manning for setting up the interview.

DR. MANNING: You’re welcome, and have a good day.

For more information on Dr. Manning’s programs and activities, please visit his website.  To sign his petition to “finish the fight of restoring the Constitution,” click here.

To watch Steve Cooper’s interview with Dr. Manning, via The Conservative Monster Blog, click here.

To read Ross Golberg’s, “Obama’s Years at Columbia are a Mystery,” in the New York Sun, click here

To read the January 2005 Cover Story On Barak Obama, in the Columbia College Magazine, which drew heavily from his Campaign for information, click here.