Wednesday, October 15, 2008

OBAMA'S PAKISTAN CONNECTIONS

The website of All Things Pakistan has some very interesting things to tell about Obama. For example, his mother, Ann Dunham, lived in Pakistan for five years, and Obama himself spent time there:
Second, Barack Obama has himself visited Pakistan. Indeed, Barack Obama may have visited Pakistan for longer than any U.S. President or presidential candidate ever has. As so many college students do, he seemed eager to see the world. He was in Karachi in 1981 as a young student, returning from a visit to his mother in Indonesia. According to a New York Times report:

…Mr. Obama also spoke about having traveled to Pakistan in the early 1980s. Because of that trip, which he did not mention in either of his autobiographical books, “I knew what Sunni and Shia was before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” he said… According to his campaign staff, Mr. Obama visited Pakistan in 1981, on the way back from Indonesia, where his mother and half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, were living. He spent “about three weeks” there, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, Bill Burton, said, staying in Karachi with the family of a college friend, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, but also traveling to Hyderabad, in India.

Finally, as mentioned in the excerpt above, Senator Obama had a number of Pakistani friends during his college days, and it was that friendship that brought him to Pakistan. Some details, again, from the same New York Times report:

…In Dreams from My Father, he talks of having a Pakistani roommate when he moved to New York, a man he calls Sadik who “had overstayed his tourist visa and now made a living in New York’s high-turnover, illegal immigrant work force, waiting on tables”… During his years at Occidental College, Mr. Obama also befriended Wahid Hamid, a fellow student who was an immigrant from Pakistan and traveled with Mr. Obama there, the Obama campaign said. Mr. Hamid is now a vice president at Pepsico in New York, and according to public records, has donated the maximum $2,300 to the Obama campaign and is listed as a fund-raiser for it. Mr. Chandoo is now a self-employed financial consultant, living in Armonk, N.Y. He has also donated the maximum, $2,300, to Mr. Obama’s primary campaign and an additional $309 for the general election, campaign finance records show.
Wow, now this is very eyebrow-raising too, and I wouldn't be surprised if not many in the MSM pick up on this. But I think it certainly is worthy of attention as to what kind of connections he's got.

2 comments:

  1. So what does this prove? That he is versatile in his associations or what? That he has a multicultural experience? What is wrong with this? Did this Government not contribute over 10 billion dollars to Gen. Musharraf over the last eight years in Pakistan. A man who took control of a democratically elected country and turned it into a dictatorship. A country that a Republican Administration feared chasing Bin Laden in? A country McCain still refuses to want to track Bin Laden down in. A country Obama explicitly says he will strike Bin Laden in if he is within the U.S. sight. So what he knows people in Pakistan.

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  2. Anonymous9:58 AM

    "Wow, now this is very eyebrow-raising too, and I wouldn't be surprised if not many in the MSM pick up on this. "

    ---and the New York Times is NOT main-stream-media???? You can't QUOTE the MSM and then claim the MSM is ignoring the story!!!

    And what does this prove? I spent most of my life in Pakistan... so? What happened to "its a free country?" :)

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