What Kind of “Memories Come Rushing Back” for Obama in Kenya?

A TRUE “HOMECOMING?”

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jul. 26, 2015) — During remarks made following a state dinner in Kenya hosted by President Uhura Kenyatta on Saturday evening, Barack Hussein Obama joked that “I suspect that some of my critics back home are suggesting that I’m back here to look for my birth certificate. That is not the case.”

Obama landed in Kenya on Friday evening to co-host the Global Entrepreneurship Summit with Kenyatta and will travel to Ethiopia on Monday before returning to the U.S.

Obama has promised U.S. support for new entrepreneurs in Africa “and around the world.” Addressing an entrepreneurship conference in Tunis, Tunisia in March, Obama said, ““When laws and regulations truly welcome foreign investors; when rule of law and transparency allow companies to play by the same rules – that’s when trade and investment flourish. That’s how new jobs are created. When a person can start and build their own business; when an entrepreneur has the freedom to pursue a new idea that’s how new prosperity is unleashed.”

To “successful” American entrepreneurs, Obama said, “You didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.”

CNN misquoted Obama’s words as “I suspect that some of my critics back home are suspecting that I’m back here to look for my birth certificate” [emphasis The Post & Email’s].

Continuing his remarks, Obama related that on a previous trip to Kenya, his half-sister Auma and several half-brothers had visited Kogelo Village where his claimed father, also named Barack Hussein Obama, reportedly was born and buried in 1982.  Barack Hussein Obama II’s step-grandmother, “Mama Sarah,” speaks only Swahili and another African dialect but has been reported to have said in 2008 that she witnessed the her step-grandson’s birth in Mombasa, Kenya through a translation provided by an Anabaptist minister fluent in Swahili.

Obama has said in the past that he knew a limited number of Swahili words, but in his speech on Saturday, he related that Mama Sarah had commented that he was unable to communicate with her for all of his education.

According to The New York Times, Obama remains fluent in Indonesian, but his wife said in June 2009 that “both she and the president ‘regret they never learned another language.'”  In a remark intended to belittle Southern voters, writer Nicholas D. Kristof wrote on March 6, 2007, “Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

However, also prior to the 2008 presidential election, a Washington Post writer claimed that Obama was “raised in the Kansas heartland.”  The Post did not respond to an inquiry from The Post & Email last year regarding the origin of the statement.

A media introduction to Obama’s Saturday remarks depicts an anchor and on-scene reporter previewing Obama’s statement about his “birth certificate,” with the female anchor speculating as to what Donald Trump might say in response to Obama’s quip.

In early 2011, Trump had stridently called for the release of Obama’s “long-form” birth certificate as he considered a presidential run challenging Obama the following year.  After the White House released an image on April 27, 2011 purported to be Obama’s detailed, long-form birth certificate from the Hawaii Department of Health, Trump expressed doubt about its authenticity.

A criminal investigation launched in September 2011 in response to concerns that the image might be fraudulent concluded after approximately six months of examination that the long-form birth certificate is, in fact a “computer-generated forgery.”

Also studied during the same time frame was Obama’s purported Selective Service registration form which had been disseminated to FOIA requesters following a September 2008 interview during which Obama claimed to have registered for the Selective Service in 1979. However, in 1975, then-President Gerald Ford had suspended the draft, which was not reinstated until the end of Jimmy Carter’s term in office in 1980.

Obama’s purported Selective Service registration form is date-stamped “Jul 29 80,” but the posse found that all other forms from the same era obtained through a FOIA request used a four-digit date stamp.  Obama allegedly hand-dated the form “July 30, 1980.”

After the posse asked to see the original or a certified copy at the offices of the Selective Service System, the agency stated that it no longer retains records from that period.

Obama has not released any other documentation about his life, and the law firm Perkins Coie has put forth considerable effort on his behalf to guarantee that his records would remain sealed.

Obama’s father was reportedly a “teenage goatherd but also highly educated at exclusive schools in Kenya.  He also was a polygamist with children from three wives and a fourth relationship.  He was reportedly married to a Kenyan woman, Kezia, when he arrived in the U.S. in 1959 to study at the University of Hawaii.  According to various reports, he met fellow student Stanley Ann Dunham there, and the couple married on February 2, 1961.  However, as bigamy is a violation of federal law in the U.S., the marriage, if it occurred, could not have been legitimate.

His third wife was Ruth Nidesand, with whom he had four sons, and a fourth woman reportedly gave birth to his child in 1978.

Documentation from the U.S. State Department on Stanley Ann Dunham, though reported deceased in 1995, has been difficult to obtain through FOIA requests.

The first known requester of Obama’s Selective Service registration form, Stephen Cofffman, received documentation backdated to the date of Obama’s televised interview on the subject. Subsequent FOIA requesters received forms containing different information, including The Post & Email.

At the end of the video clip presented by BirtherReport containing Obama’s Kenya remarks, Obama is observed to have said, “But what is true is that obviously there are emotions to a trip like this; memories come rushing back…”

What kind of memories?

Obama reportedly was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, allegedly spending his childhood there with the exception of four years in Indonesia between 1967 and 1971.  However, differing reports on his life narrative state that he was born in Kenya, including a claim made by members of the Kenyan Parliament in 2010.

Obama reportedly was acquainted with his father only distantly, if at all, following his abandoning of his American family to attend Harvard.  Obama II reportedly met his father once as a ten-year-old while attending the prestigious, private Punahou School in Hawaii. However, in May 1990, the Associated Press reported not only that Obama attended Indonesian schools through the fifth grade, but also that after returning to Hawaii, he attended “public schools” through high school.

Obama HLR bio 1990

According to various mainstream news reports, Obama has visited Kenya on three previous occasions: in 1988, before attending Harvard Law School; in 1992 with then-fiancee Michelle; and in 2006, as a U.S. Senator campaigning for the election of Marxist Muslim Raila Odinga.  After Odinga was reported to have lost the election, several Christian churches were torched and burned to the ground, with more than 1100 worshipers and others perishing as a result of the violence.

In the village of Kogelo, the younger Obama is considered “our son.”

Hawaii became a state in 1959 and maintained lax policies as to the awarding of birth certificates. It has been reported that thousands of children born outside of the United States brought to Hawaii when they were young obtained birth certificates which might have been used to obtain federal benefits such as food stamps and Medicaid.

On June 12, 2008, an image labeled “Certification of Live Birth” was posted at The Daily KOS from an unidentified source bearing the name “Barack Hussein Obama II” purportedly issued by the Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH).  However, spokeswoman Janice “Okubo”  would not confirm that the image was issued by the department. Several articles about Okubo’s response at the time have since been removed.

In its May 1990 article, the AP wrote that “Until the fifth grade, Obama attended Indonesian schools, where most of his friends were the sons of servants, street peddlers and farmers.”  Above that paragraph is the statement that “Obama moved to southeast Asia at age 2 when his parents divorced and his mother married an Indonesian,” which does not agree with the life story widely distributed on the Internet.

Obama has stated that his father left his mother and him when he was two but that he went to Indonesia with his mother at the age of six after attending Hawaii schools for kindergarten and first grade.

The AP also curiously reported that Obama’s father attended Oxford and Harvard, not the University of Hawaii and Harvard, as has been commonly reported. Former governor of Hawaii Neil Abercrombie has stated on more than one occasion that he met Obama’s parents as well as Obama the infant in Hawaii while the parents were attending the University of Hawaii.

According to CNN, “Obama senior separated from Obama’s mother shortly after the birth of their son and moved back to Kenya. Despite the separation, Obama senior kept up with his son’s education, knowing all his grades at school.”

CNN has trumpeted Obama’s “Kenyan roots.”  Article 2, section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution requires that the president and commander-in-chief be a “natural born Citizen.”  While the framers of the Constitution did not precisely define the term, many scholars believe it to mean that two generations of United States citizenship are required for a person to be considered “natural born” with undivided allegiance to the nation.

The term “native born,” which does not appear in the Constitution, is often conflated by the media, politicians and laypersons with “natural born.”  According to 2008, 2012 and possible 2016 presidential candidate Cody Robert Judy, who has a pending case at the U.S. Supreme Court challenging Obama’s eligibility, the “natural born Citizen” clause depicts a time requirement of two generations not unlike the 14-year residency requirement the founders also stipulated for the chief executive.  “I’ve done the time and my parents did the time; Obama hasn’t,” Judy told us in an interview earlier this month.

As Obama’s father was never a U.S. citizen, Judy and others claim that Obama could never be considered a “natural born Citizen.”  Others say that a simple birth on US soil, regardless of the citizenship of the parents, is sufficient to qualify for the presidency, which would mean that a so-called “anchor baby” born in the country to to illegal-alien parents would be eligible.

Similar controversy exists regarding the candidacy of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada to a Cuban-citizen father and U.S.-citizen mother; Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, whose parents arrived in the United States on foreign-student visas, after which he was born; and Sen. Marco Rubio, whose parents escaped Castro’s Cuba before their son was born in Florida but did not acquire U.S. citizenship until well after his birth.

While in his book, Dreams From My Father,” Obama reported having found his birth certificate and immunization records – documents every child was required to have to enter school in 1961 – it took tremendous public pressure from Donald Trump and others, labeled “birthers,” to obtain the release made on April 27, 2011, which has been deemed a forgery beyond the standard of probable cause.

Michelle Obama has described Kenya as her husband’s “home country.”

Just what are the memories Obama has of Kenya?  Of Indonesia?