Barack Obama in Kenya supporting Raila Odinga, the election and violence afterwards.
- Status
MontyB
All-Blacks Supporter
Man you make this easy and almost laughable...
Claim:[FONT="] E-mail from missionary describes Barack Obama's connection to political events in Kenya.
[/FONT]Status:False.[FONT="]
[/FONT]Example:[FONT="][Collected via e-mail, April 2008][/FONT]
Origins:[FONT="] This widely-circulated message from Celeste Davis (who operates a ministry with her husband Loren Davis, whose previous works include an article explaining why the five-pointed stars used on the U.S. flag are Satanic) references Kenyan politician Raila Amolo Odinga, who represented the Orange [/FONT]
[FONT="]Democratic Movement Party of Kenya against incumbent Mwai Kibaki in a presidential election held on 27 December 2007. Kibaki was initially proclaimed the winner of a close election, the results of which were challenged by Odinga as having been manipulated. (International observers generally agreed that the election count was flawed.) Violent protests over the disputed election results eventually left 1,500 people dead and displaced an estimated 600,000 more before Kibaki and Odinga agreed to form a coalition government in a power-sharing deal negotiated by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Odinga was sworn in as the prime minister of a national unity government (with Kibaki as its president) on 17 April 2008.
The real subject of this message is Barack Obama, however, and virtually everything included therein about him is either unsubstantiated or demonstrably false: [/FONT]
·[FONT="]Raila Odinga (who was jailed for a total of eight years beginning in 1982 for protesting the one-party rule of Kenya's then-dictator, Daniel Arap Moi) has claimed to be a cousin of Illinois senator Barack Obama (maintaining that Obama's biological father was his maternal uncle). However, no evidence has been offered to document that claim, and the fact that Odinga made such a claim only in the immediate aftermath of the disputed December 2007 elections in Kenya (even though Barack Obama had been a prominent political figure long before then) suggests it was a opportunistic fiction invented by Odinga to provide himself with a badly-needed cloak of political legitimacy. (A few months earlier, another Kenyan political candidate, Nicholas Owino Rajula, had also claimed to be a distant cousin of Senator Obama.)
Barack Obama's uncle has denied Odinga's claim that the two men are directly related, saying: "Odinga's mother came from this area, so it is normal for us to talk about cousins. But he is not a blood relative." Even if Raila Odinga and Barack Obama were in fact distant relatives, their connection would merely be a genetic one — the two men have no history of any substantive form of familial relationship.
Although the Obama campaign acknowledged that Senator Obama spoke to Raila Odinga by telephone "for about five minutes" in January 2008 (he also made a public appearance with Odinga during a trip to Kenya in August 2006), we could find nothing substantiating the claim that "Obama and Raila speak daily."[/FONT]
·[FONT="]Spokesman for both Barack Obama and Raila Odinga deny that the former donated any money to the latter's campaign. The document on which this claim is based (a fax of dubious origin) purportedly reproduces an internal campaign memo from November 2007 showing a campaign contribution from "Friends of Senator BO." However, there is no political action committee (PAC) registered in the U.S. under that name (or under the name "Friends of Barack Obama" or anything similar). Moreover, a contribution from a "Friends of Joe Smith" PAC isn't the same thing as a contribution from Joe Smith himself — PACs are independent entities that can donate money to political causes without the knowledge or consent of whatever candidate they claim to be supporting.[/FONT]
·[FONT="]Senator Obama's full name, according to all available documentation and public records, is Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., not "Barak Hussein Muhammed Obama."[/FONT]
·[FONT="]The claim that Barack Obama is a Muslim has already been widely debunked, and the claim that Obama will "use the same tactic [of] crying rigged election if he doesn't win and possibly cause a race war in America" is nothing more than an expression of the author's partisanship, with nothing offered to substantiate it.[/FONT]
Last updated:[FONT="] 15 May 2008
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/kenya.asp
Maybe Redleg or one of the mods could put a snopes/fact check filter on this board to help reduce some of the poorly researched posts appearing on this board.
Hell it took less than 25 minutes to blow a hole the size of the Grand Canyon in this story and given that it would have taken a few minutes at least find the post, 9 minutes to watch the video and at least 5 minutes to cut and paste the Snopes document into MS Word before posting it here would mean that less than 10 minutes of research would have prevented another silly post.
[/FONT]
[FONT="]Kenya Connection[/FONT]
Claim:[FONT="] E-mail from missionary describes Barack Obama's connection to political events in Kenya.
[/FONT]Status:False.[FONT="]
[/FONT]Example:[FONT="][Collected via e-mail, April 2008][/FONT]
Origins:[FONT="] This widely-circulated message from Celeste Davis (who operates a ministry with her husband Loren Davis, whose previous works include an article explaining why the five-pointed stars used on the U.S. flag are Satanic) references Kenyan politician Raila Amolo Odinga, who represented the Orange [/FONT]
[FONT="]Democratic Movement Party of Kenya against incumbent Mwai Kibaki in a presidential election held on 27 December 2007. Kibaki was initially proclaimed the winner of a close election, the results of which were challenged by Odinga as having been manipulated. (International observers generally agreed that the election count was flawed.) Violent protests over the disputed election results eventually left 1,500 people dead and displaced an estimated 600,000 more before Kibaki and Odinga agreed to form a coalition government in a power-sharing deal negotiated by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Odinga was sworn in as the prime minister of a national unity government (with Kibaki as its president) on 17 April 2008.
The real subject of this message is Barack Obama, however, and virtually everything included therein about him is either unsubstantiated or demonstrably false: [/FONT]
·[FONT="]Raila Odinga (who was jailed for a total of eight years beginning in 1982 for protesting the one-party rule of Kenya's then-dictator, Daniel Arap Moi) has claimed to be a cousin of Illinois senator Barack Obama (maintaining that Obama's biological father was his maternal uncle). However, no evidence has been offered to document that claim, and the fact that Odinga made such a claim only in the immediate aftermath of the disputed December 2007 elections in Kenya (even though Barack Obama had been a prominent political figure long before then) suggests it was a opportunistic fiction invented by Odinga to provide himself with a badly-needed cloak of political legitimacy. (A few months earlier, another Kenyan political candidate, Nicholas Owino Rajula, had also claimed to be a distant cousin of Senator Obama.)
Barack Obama's uncle has denied Odinga's claim that the two men are directly related, saying: "Odinga's mother came from this area, so it is normal for us to talk about cousins. But he is not a blood relative." Even if Raila Odinga and Barack Obama were in fact distant relatives, their connection would merely be a genetic one — the two men have no history of any substantive form of familial relationship.
Although the Obama campaign acknowledged that Senator Obama spoke to Raila Odinga by telephone "for about five minutes" in January 2008 (he also made a public appearance with Odinga during a trip to Kenya in August 2006), we could find nothing substantiating the claim that "Obama and Raila speak daily."[/FONT]
·[FONT="]Spokesman for both Barack Obama and Raila Odinga deny that the former donated any money to the latter's campaign. The document on which this claim is based (a fax of dubious origin) purportedly reproduces an internal campaign memo from November 2007 showing a campaign contribution from "Friends of Senator BO." However, there is no political action committee (PAC) registered in the U.S. under that name (or under the name "Friends of Barack Obama" or anything similar). Moreover, a contribution from a "Friends of Joe Smith" PAC isn't the same thing as a contribution from Joe Smith himself — PACs are independent entities that can donate money to political causes without the knowledge or consent of whatever candidate they claim to be supporting.[/FONT]
·[FONT="]Senator Obama's full name, according to all available documentation and public records, is Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., not "Barak Hussein Muhammed Obama."[/FONT]
·[FONT="]The claim that Barack Obama is a Muslim has already been widely debunked, and the claim that Obama will "use the same tactic [of] crying rigged election if he doesn't win and possibly cause a race war in America" is nothing more than an expression of the author's partisanship, with nothing offered to substantiate it.[/FONT]
Last updated:[FONT="] 15 May 2008
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/kenya.asp
Maybe Redleg or one of the mods could put a snopes/fact check filter on this board to help reduce some of the poorly researched posts appearing on this board.
Hell it took less than 25 minutes to blow a hole the size of the Grand Canyon in this story and given that it would have taken a few minutes at least find the post, 9 minutes to watch the video and at least 5 minutes to cut and paste the Snopes document into MS Word before posting it here would mean that less than 10 minutes of research would have prevented another silly post.
[/FONT]
Last edited:
- Status