Kamala Harris and Barack Obama are “Rootless Cosmopolitans”

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB]  Times & Transcript

We know politicians craft a “narrative” to present their “lived experience” to voters. They are aware that the question of where they’re from is more about “identity” than geography.

This is very important for Kamala Harris and Barack Obama, given their unusual biographies. Harris calls herself a “daughter of Oakland” while Obama lists Chicago as home. But should Harris win the Nov. 5 presidential election, not only will these two Democratic Party presidents have been “non-white,” but both are what some would term “rootless cosmopolitans.”

Why has this become such an important matter? Two reasons. First, for the past few decades, immigration, legal or otherwise, has become a major political issue in America and perhaps the most essential policy difference between those who have largely sorted themselves into the “pro-immigration” Democratic Party and the “anti-immigrant” Republicans. It has become the “third rail” in American politics.

The other reason is the debate about African Americans – who they are and who gets to define them. While Obama and Harris are often heralded as being the first Black president and vice-president, there’s more to it, because they are in effect the first “immigrants” to these offices -- though both are of course American-born and have every right to be president.

Three of their four respective parents were foreigners: Barack Obama had a Kenyan father while Kamala Harris had a Jamaican father and Indian mother. Both Obama and Harris were born not long after three of their four respective parents arrived in the United States as graduate students.

As well, both Obama and Harris spent many of their formative years outside the country. Those are very rare resumés indeed for American politicians seeking the highest office in the land.

Obama’s father, also named Barack, was a Luo born in Rachuonyo District, Kenya, who met Obama’s Kansas-born white American mother, Ann Dunham, in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii. He was a foreign student on a scholarship.

The couple married in 1961, and Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu that year. His parents divorced in 1964, and the father returned to Kenya.

At the age of six, Barack and his mother, who had in the meantime remarried while in Honolulu, moved to Indonesia to join her new husband, Lolo Soetoro, a Javanese who had also met her at the University of Hawaii.

Lolo Soetoro was a geographer who returned to Indonesia in 1966 and Obama lived for several years in Jakarta with his parents. From ages six to ten, he attended local Indonesian-language schools in Jakarta and he can speak Bahasa Indonesia, the country’s national language.

In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents in Hawaii, a formerly ethnic Polynesian kingdom in the middle of the Pacific Ocean conquered by the United States in 1898, and a place far outside of, and very different from, the continental U.S.

When he was 18 years old, Obama moved to Los Angeles to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles. He transferred to Columbia University in New York in 1981, graduating two years later. He obtained a law degree from Harvard University in Cambridge, MA in 1991. He only “invented” himself as an American Black later in Chicago, where he would work as a community organizer.

Kamala Devi Harris’ father and mother arrived in California as graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley not long before she was born in 1964. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, an upper-caste Brahmin Tamil from Chennai, in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, was a biologist who came to the United States in 1958 to enroll in graduate school in endocrinology. 

Her father, Donald Harris, from Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica, arrived in Berkely in 1961 to study economics. Harris’s parents met in 1962 and married in 1963. Donald Harris went on to become a professor at Stanford University. After the two divorced in 1972, Harris’ mother moved to Montreal with Kamala and her younger sister to work at the Jewish General Hospital and McGill University.

Kamala spent her formative teenage years, ages 12 to 18, in Montreal, attending anglophone Westmount High School for four years and a junior college, Vanier, for a year. She, too, had to invent herself as an American Black by returning to the U.S. and enrolling at historically Black Howard University in Washington, DC, also at age 18. Harris then attended the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and obtained her law degree in 1989.

Neither of them is African American in the way Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson or Jim Clyburn are. None of their four parents were part of the historic African American ethnic group, the descendants of the people enslaved in America for centuries.

Both are basically immigrants to that community, and in many ways have more in common with the experience of all first-generation immigrants, whatever their origins, than of “old stock” Americans. We’ll see how this plays out in the contest between Harris and Donald Trump.

 

Kamala Harris is No Friend to Israel

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post

A mere days after the Democratic Party leaders pushed President Joe Biden out the door, Kamala Harris, until then a virtual nonentity, was suddenly recast by the so-called “legacy media,” acting in complete lock-step, as a wunderkind bringing the politics of “joy” to America.

That was no surprise. She is a creature of the Democratic Party left and its journalistic enablers, themselves beholden to a woke progressive ideology. And this includes an antipathy – if not worse – to Israel.

For many American Jews, the prospect of Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania as a running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris prompted elation. He was clearly the candidate who could help the party bring back worried Jewish voters. But not so fast!

Why did Harris go with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a man who can’t deliver a swing state, over a young and glib governor who can? There’s only one reason: Jews are no longer allowed on the Democratic presidential ticket. Shapiro is, after all, a “Zionist,” and that wouldn’t do.

Efforts by left-wing and pro-Palestinian activists to derail Shapiro’s nomination – some called him “Genocide Josh” -- worked, and it told us just where Harris stood as she made the first significant choice of her candidacy.

The left attacked Shapiro, considering him too sympathetic to Israel. Heeding their warning, she preferred a bland Minnesota liberal governor who will help her far less.

Progressive Democrats were elated. CNN senior political commentator Van Jones said “anti-Jewish bias” may have played a part in the selection of Walz and warned that “antisemitism has gotten marbled into this party.”

Remarked Micah Lasher, a New York City Democrat who is running for that state’s legislature, “There was an inescapable sense the selection had been made into a referendum over Israel.”

We all remember her egregious insult to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed the U.S. Senate July 24, an event Harris boycotted. She instead spoke to the Zeta Phi Beta sorority in Indianapolis. 

“It is unconscionable to see Vice President Kamala Harris shirk her duties as president of the Senate and boycott this historic event,” stated Victoria Coates, vice president of the Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation. “If we can’t stand with Israel now, when can we?”

“I see you. I hear you,” Harris told pro-Hamas demonstrators in Washington during Netanyahu’s visit, as they burned American flags and assaulted police.

On August 7 Harris and Walz met with the leaders of the Uncommitted National Movement in Michigan, a state with a large Arab American population. This is the group that mobilized more than 100,000 people to withhold their votes from President Biden in the Michigan primary last February over his support for Israel.

Founder Layla Elabed reported that Harris “expressed an openness” to meeting with them to discuss an arms embargo against the Jewish state. “Michigan voters right now want a way to support you, but we can’t do that without a policy change that saves lives in Gaza right now,” she told Harris. “Will you meet with us to talk about an arms embargo?”

Elabed explained that Harris wasn’t agreeing to an arms embargo but was open to discussing one “that will save lives now in Gaza and hopefully get us to a point where we can put our support” behind Harris. At a rally in Arizona August 9, Harris told pro-Palestinian demonstrators that “I respect your voices.”

Harris’s presidential campaign subsequently stated that she has “prioritized engaging with Arab, Muslim and Palestinian community members and others regarding the war in Gaza.” She herself had maintained that “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”

All this led to pushback among some Israel supporters. “Kamala Harris won’t speak with the press. But she will speak with pro-Hamas radicals and suggest she’s open to a full arms embargo against Israel,” Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton stated. “Floating an arms embargo against Israel to pro-Hamas activists is disgraceful,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served in the Trump administration, added.

“If the group in line with Harris was pro-life and asked for a meeting about banning abortion, she would forcefully say ‘no.’ Don’t tell me it means nothing she said she’s open to an arms embargo on Israel when radical Hamasniks got in line,” declared Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

In an interview with the far-left Nation magazine, “Is Kamala the One?”, published July 8, she had already indicated her sympathy for the young people who had mobilized against the war in Gaza and occupied university campuses across the country.

“They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”

The Biden administration has assembled an interagency team tasked with finding Israeli individuals and groups to sanction, in order to weaken if not topple Netanyahu.

The International Economics Directorate at the National Security Council (NSC) leads the effort. Ilan Goldenberg, who has now become Harris’ liaison to the Jewish community, has played a very enthusiastic role.

Goldenberg, who has served as Harris’s adviser on Middle East issues, has been an acerbic critic of both Netanyahu and the Palestinian leadership.

All this demonstrates that Harris is no friend of Israel. To take another example, her Middle East guru, Philip Gordon, who has served as Harris’s foreign policy adviser since she ran for the White House in 2020, sees and hears no evil emanating from Iran.

Republicans are already demanding the vice president answer why Gordon wrote a string of 2020 opinion pieces together with a Pentagon official, Ariane Tabatabai, who was tied last year to an Iranian government-backed initiative tasked with selling the 2015 nuclear deal to the American public.

“Before joining your office, Mr. Gordon co-authored at least three opinion pieces with Ms. Tabatabai blatantly promoting the Iranian regime’s perspective and interests,” Cotton and New York Representative Elise Stefanik wrote Harris on July 31.

Gordon has argued that the easing of economic sanctions could have allowed Iranian businesses and civil society to better integrate internationally and potentially moderate Tehran’s clerics. He was among the most vocal Democratic critics of former President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to pull the U.S. out of that landmark nuclear agreement.

But critics have maintained that the loosening of sanctions on Iran has provided Tehran with billions of dollars to fund its terror proxies across the Mideast, leading, among other things, to the Hamas and Hezbollah attacks on Israel, as well as providing the Houthis in Yemen with weapons to strangle Red Sea shipping.

Cotton and Stefanik, in their letter to Harris, asked if Gordon and Tabatabai purposefully spread Iranian disinformation to relieve U.S. pressure on Tehran’s theocratic rulers. “Did you request further investigation into Mr. Gordon when Ms. Tabatabai’s connections to the Iranian Foreign Ministry were revealed in September 2023? Did Mr. Gordon admit and report his ties to this individual?” they wrote. Harris did not reply.

Yet there are Jews who have eyes yet cannot see, so wedded are they to the Democrats. It’s become their ersatz religion. Not long ago the Charlottetown Jewish community hosted a mid-summer event on a beautiful day, which included many of the American summer residents. I was talking to an older man from Massachusetts who said he will (as usual) vote for the Democrat.

I suggested that it should be impossible for any Jew to vote for Harris after she went off to a sorority event in Indiana in July when the prime minister of the embattled Jewish state, suffering a traumatic loss last October and fighting for its survival today, spoke to the United States Senate, where she normally serves as presiding officer. Such a slap in the face would not have been administered to any other head of government.

And not liking Benjamin Netanyahu is no excuse. Would this man not have supported Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill during the Second World War, no matter what he thought of them? Would he have thought Britain and the United States were not worth defending, due to some of their actions during the war? Such excuses really ring hollow. I can understand why Harris favours the Palestinians, both for pragmatic reasons -- there are more Muslim votes than Jewish ones -- and ideological ones -- progressive woke ideology -- but do Jews have to go along with this?

(Yes, we know Harris has a Jewish husband. But this is a man who has had little concern with Judaism in his life. His first wife was non-Jewish and neither are his daughters; indeed, one supports anti-Israel protests. A Hollywood entertainment lawyer, he has only now been trotted out as a supposed expert on anti-Semitism, with absolutely no qualifications, so I doubt too many Jews are impressed.)

“Jews for Kamala are Living in Denial,” wrote American playwright, film director, and screenwriter David Mamet on August 9 on the website UnHerd. “Can one imagine a more appallingly calculated slight? Her absence announced that, under her administration, the United States will abandon Israel. And yet American Jews will support her.” We do live in strange times.

 

Bangladesh Remains in Political Turmoil

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Apparently even the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was at first reluctant to have British India partitioned into Muslim and Hindu majority states. He would have preferred a federated polity which would have also guaranteed the political security of the tens of millions of Muslims who would otherwise end up as minorities in a Hindu country.

But it was not to be. Instead, he got what many described as a “maimed, moth-eaten Pakistan,” comprising the far western and eastern areas of the subcontinent, separated by 1,600 kilometres by the new sovereign Indian nation.

Two former provinces were themselves partitioned. In the west, Punjab’s Muslim majority became part of Pakistan, while the Hindu and Sikh areas were incorporated into India. In the east, Bengal was likewise split in two. The western part, including Kolkota, went to India, the Muslim east to Pakistan.

Even this Pakistan, whose people had little in common save their Muslim faith, did not last. The Bengali Muslims in 1971, tired of domination by the west, fought a liberation struggle and formed their own nation of Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is a homogenous nation-state, a rarity in this part of the world, yet it has remained in political turmoil, with fraudulent elections, military coups, political violence, and the assassination of several political leaders, including its founder and first president, Sheik Mujibar Rahman, in 1975, and one of his successors, General Ziaur Rahman, murdered in 1981.

In recent years, two women have, so to speak, inherited power and taken turns running the country. Begum Khaleda Zia, the widow of President Ziaur Rahman and head of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), became prime minister in 1991, followed five years later by the Awami League’s Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Begum Khaleda Zia returned to power in 2001, but lost the 2008 election to Sheikh Hasina, who won three more elections in 2014, 2018, and 2024. But she was ousted on August 5 of this year, just seven months into her term. What happened?

Well, the nation’s last two general elections proved “controversial,” with complaints of crackdowns on opposition parties and ballot stuffing in favor of her ruling Awami League.

Before 2011, Bangladesh had a “caretaker” system intended to prevent ruling parties from rigging and manipulating elections. Under that system, when an elected government finished its mandate, a caretaker took over the state administration for three months in order to hold free and fair elections.

Caretaker administrations conducted general elections in 1996, 2001, and 2008, and the polls were considered free, fair, and inclusive.

However, the system came to an end in 2011, and the ruling Awami League was in power at the time of the general election of 2014. With the safeguards gone, the vote was clearly fraudulent, with almost all major opposition parties boycotting it. Accusations of massive vote rigging also tainted the subsequent 2018 and 2024 polls.

Opposition figures alleged that more than 20,000 BNP supporters had been arrested on “fictitious and concocted charges,” including Begum Zia. They also claimed to have documented hundreds of cases of enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings by security forces since 2009.

“Democracy is dead in Bangladesh,” Abdul Moyeen Khan, a senior BNP leader, remarked prior to the Jan. 7 vote. Less than 10 per cent of the eligible voters bothered to turn up to cast a ballot.

It all came to a head this summer. Weeks of student-led anti-government protests toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who resigned and fled the country to India. They were protesting of a quota system that reserved government jobs for the children and grandchildren of those who fought in the 1971 liberation war. Students called for most of jobs to be filled on merit alone.

Huge crowds stormed her official residence in Dhaka amid reports of looting and disorder in the capital. More than 1,000 people were killed in the unrest, most of them civilians shot by security forces.

Her 15-year rule was known for human rights violations. The United States placed sanctions on the elite Rapid Action Battalion, linked to disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Human Rights Watch said in a report in 2021 that nearly 600 people have been forcibly “disappeared” by security forces since 2009.

Former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia is now free, and Mohammad Yunus, the developmental economist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work with microcredit through Grameen Bank, is leading an interim government as a “chief advisor.”

How will this affect relations with India? When Sheikh Hasina fled Bangladesh to New Delhi, she was greeted by India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval. She is believed to have been living in and around the Indian capital. But calls for Hasina’s extradition back to Bangladesh are growing.

The general secretary of the opposition BNP,, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir,, told Indian media that Hasina must be extradited and tried in Bangladesh. Muhammed Quader, the chairman of the Jatiya Party, echoed this demand on the same day. Quader was the opposition leader of the Bangladesh parliament that was dissolved on August 6.

“India should help Bangladesh seek accountability from her as she has evidently done great deal of harm,” Alamgir was quoted as saying by Indian media. A slew of legal cases, including murder, face her.