March 9, 2009
Well is He or Isn't He?
It is a popular topic of discussion in political circles these days, and as the weeks pass more and more people are asking, “Is Barack Obama really a natural born citizen of the United States? Is he eligible to serve as President, or isn’t he?” If he is, then so be it. We’ll just have to grit our teeth until this long dark nightmare comes to an end…one way or another.
But what if he is not eligible? What then? Well, in that case we have a problem…a very large problem, the solution to which could tear asunder the fabric of American society.
Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that, “No person except a natural born citizen…shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States.”
That’s pretty straightforward, yet, when confronted with the possibility that the man who sits in the Oval Office may be a usurper, a great many otherwise patriotic Americans can be heard to say, “What difference does it make? The election’s over; the people have spoken. Get over it!”
Well, it’s not quite as simple as all that, and the sooner we can all be satisfied that Obama is or is not a natural born citizen the better. To postpone that finding for a year or two and then find, conclusively, that Obama is not eligible to serve as president would be disastrous. Every new law and every executive order he had signed, every political appointment, every judicial appointment, every order he had given to the military, and every act and every decision of all of his appointees would immediately become null and void. How could we ever undo all of that? The American people would quickly learn that it is not much easier to undo two or three years of history than it is to undo a decade or a century. Obama must end his stubborn refusal to produce his birth certificate, his passports, his visas, and his college records. We must continue to recruit more and more Americans to insist that he do so.
To do that it is not necessary to prove that he was born in Kenya, not in Hawaii…as his paternal grandmother, a Kenyan half-brother, and a Kenyan half-sister insist…or who his natural father may have been. The proof of Obama’s failure to meet the “natural born citizen” standard is much simpler than that.
To convert a non-believer…one who insists that the Constitutional requirements must be met, but who believes that questions about Obama’s citizenship status are nothing more than sour grapes…it is only necessary to establish the facts surrounding Obama’s travel to Indonesia and Pakistan in the summer of 1981.
Although Obama fails to mention that trip in either of his memoirs…not in Dreams from My Father and not in The Audacity of Hope…he made a potentially fatal error when he mentioned the Pakistan trip during an April 6, 2008 speech in San Francisco…the same speech in which he referred to rural Pennsylvanians as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion…” In that speech, Obama explained in an offhand manner the value of that trip, vis-à-vis his knowledge of foreign affairs, saying, “I knew what Sunni and Shia was (sic) before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”
When questioned about that trip, Obama’s campaign press secretary, Bill Burton, confirmed to the New York Times, and others, that Obama had visited Pakistan in 1981 on his return from Indonesia, traveling there with a Pakistani friend from Occidental College, Wahid Hamid. According to Burton, Obama stayed in Karachi with the family of another Pakistani friend, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo. Obama has never mentioned the Pakistan trip again.
So it is well established that Obama did travel to Indonesia and Pakistan in 1981. What is not established, and what is critically important, is what passport he used during that trip. There are only three possibilities: Obama could have traveled under a U.S. passport…a passport first issued when he and his mother moved from Hawaii to Indonesia in 1967; he could have traveled under an Indonesian passport, issued following his adoption by his Indonesian stepfather; and it is conceivable that, if he was, in fact, born in Kenya in 1961, he could still have been a British subject, traveling with a British passport. So which is it?
Unfortunately for Obama, in the present circumstance, Pakistan was under martial law in 1981 and certain undesirables…Christians, Jews, and Americans…were prohibited from entering the country. Pakistan was on the U.S. State Department’s “no travel” list, making a U.S. passport no more valuable than an empty chewing gum wrapper at the Karachi Port of Entry.
So how did a young man who arrived in New York in early June 1981, without the price of a hotel room in his pocket, suddenly come up with the price of a round-the-world trip just a month later? And once he was on a plane, shuttling between New York, Jakarta, and Karachi, what passport was he offering when he passed through Customs and Immigration? The American people not only deserve to have answers to these questions, they must have answers.
It makes the debate over Obama’s citizenship a rather short and simple one.
Q: Did he travel to Pakistan in 1981, at age 20?
A: Yes, by his own admission.
A: Yes, by his own admission.
Q: What passport did he travel under?
A: There are only three possibilities:
A: There are only three possibilities:
- He traveled with a U.S. passport;
- He traveled with a British passport; or
- He traveled with an Indonesian passport.
Q: Is it possible that Obama traveled with a U.S. passport in 1981?
A: No. It is not possible. Pakistan was on the U.S. State Department’s “no travel” list in 1981.
A: No. It is not possible. Pakistan was on the U.S. State Department’s “no travel” list in 1981.
Conclusion: When Obama went to Pakistan in 1981 he was traveling either with a British passport or an Indonesian passport.
If he was traveling with a British passport that would provide proof that he was born in Kenya on August 4, 1961, not in Hawaii as he claims. And if he was traveling with an Indonesian passport that would tend to prove that he relinquished whatever previous citizenship he held, British or American, when adopted by his Indonesian step-father in 1967.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the American people deserve to know how he managed to become a “natural born” American citizen between 1981 and 2008. The sooner we learn the truth of all this, the better.
Is he a “natural born” citizen, or isn’t he? It seems pretty clear from currently available evidence that he is not. If this proves to be the case he should minimize the damage to the country and follow the Nixon example; he should simply resign from office so that we can begin to clean up the mess he leaves behind.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Paul Hollrah is a Senior Fellow at the Lincoln Heritage Institute.