I didn’t think you could top those schoolchildren substituting Obama for Jesus
in their
public school praise hymn.
Now, thanks to
Naked Emperor News and Breitbart TV, we have video of community organizers
led by the “Gamaliel Foundation” praying to The One as they lobby for “social
justice” and health care for all.
“HEAR OUR CRY, OBAMA!”
“DELIVER US, OBAMA!”
And no, this is not an Onion parody:
Update:
Ed Morrissey asks if it’s just bad acoustics. Are they saying “Obama” or “Oh,
God?”
Here’s a little background about the
Gamaliel Foundation
from its history statement:
History of the Movement: This type of community organizing began in
Chicago in 1938. Saul Alinsky created the “Back of the Yards Community
Council”. The organization operated in the shadow of Chicago’s stock yards.
The community was beset with poverty, political corruption, gangs, disease,
deteriorating housing and inadequate schools; but most of all it was beset
with a sense of powerlessness. The organization successfully engaged people
to change the conditions of the community. Its motto was, “We shall decide
our own destiny.” And to a large extent and for some time, they did just
that. Many organizations were created utilizing the model of the Back of the
Yards Council. Unfortunately most of those organizations have dissolved,
become stagnant, parochial and marginalized; have evolved into social
service, advocacy, or economic development corporations; or have become the
fiefdoms of political hacks. The original mission of empowerment and
expansion of democracy has, all too frequently, been lost. To insure the
promise of community organizing, the Gamaliel Foundation was born.
History of the Gamaliel Foundation: The Gamaliel Foundation was
originally established in 1968 to support the Contract Buyers League, an
African American organization fighting to protect homeowners on Chicago’s
Westside who had been discriminated against by banks and saving and loan
institutions. In l986, the Foundation was reorganized as an organizing
institute providing resources to community leaders in the efforts to build
and maintain powerful organizations in low income communities. The Gamaliel
Foundation has grown from three to more than forty-five affiliates in
seventeen states and in three provinces of South Africa.
And here’s the background on the
Gamaliel/Obama
connection from the foundation’s Gregory A. Galluzzo:
President elect Barack Obama has throughout his political career made
repeated references to his time as a community organizer on the South Side
of Chicago. It is important that we all understand the connection between
Barack and Gamaliel. In l980 Mary Gonzales and I created the United
Neighborhood Organization of Chicago.
In l982 we decided that we needed some expertise from someone who had
done faith based community organizing. A person who had worked as such an
organizer in Illinois and in Pennsylvania approached me about joining our
organizing team. His name was Jerry Kellman. Jerry helped Mary and myself
become better organizers. While he was working for us, he connected with a
group called the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) operating on
the South Side in the South Suburbs of Chicago, and in Indiana. CCRC had
been formed in response to the massive shut down of major industry and the
resulting job loss and all of the concomitant social tragedies.
Jerry and I reached an understanding that we would support his work in
the South Suburbs so that he could become director of his own project. It
was Jerry Kellman who put an ad in the New York Times about an organizing
position in the Chicago area. Barack responded; Jerry interviewed him and
offered him a position. Barack accepted. Almost at this very time, Jerry
propositioned an old friend of his to return to Chicago from Texas and work
with him in this new organizing venture. His friend was Mike Kruglik. Mike
and Jerry were the first mentors of Barack in organizing.
CCRC, which spanned communities in Northwest Indiana, the South Suburbs
and parts of the City of Chicago proved to be unwieldy. Jerry and I decided
to split it into three parts. Barack would work to found a new independent
project in the South side of Chicago, Mike Kruglik would be the director of
the South Suburban Action Conference and Jerry Kellman would develop
organizing in Northwest Indiana. At that point Jerry asked me to become
Barack’s consultant.
And at this time we were just creating the Gamaliel Foundation. I met
with Barack on a regular basis as he incorporated the Developing Communities
Project, as he moved the organization into action and as he developed the
leadership structure for the organization. He would write beautiful and
brilliant weekly reports about his work and the people he was engaging.
When Barack decided to go to Harvard Law School, he approached John
McKnight, a professor at Northwestern and a Gamaliel Board member for a
letter of recommendation. When Barack was leaving he made sure that Gamaliel
was the formal consultant to the organization that he had created and to the
staff that he had hired.
Barack has acknowledged publicly that he had been the director of a
Gamaliel affiliate. He has supported Gamaliel throughout the years by
conducting training both at the National Leadership Training events and at
the African American Leadership Commission. He has also attended our public
meetings.
We are honored and blessed by the connection between Barack and Gamaliel.
And here’s
Stanley Kurtz last November on Gamaliel and Obama:
The same separatist, anti-American theology of liberation that was so
boldly and bitterly proclaimed by Obama’s pastor is shared, if more quietly,
by Obama’s Gamaliel colleagues. The operative word here is “quietly.”
Gamaliel specializes in ideological stealth, and Obama, a master student of
Gamaliel strategy, shows disturbing signs of being a sub rosa radical
himself. Obama’s legislative tactics, as well as his persistent professions
of non-ideological pragmatism, appear to be inspired by his radical mentors’
most sophisticated tactics. Not only has Obama studied, taught, and
apparently absorbed stealth techniques from radical groups like Gamaliel and
ACORN, but in his position as a board member of Chicago’s supposedly
nonpartisan Woods Fund, he quietly funneled money to his radical allies — at
the very moment he most needed their support to boost his political career.
It’s high time for these shadowy, perhaps improper, ties to receive a dose
of sunlight.
The connections are numerous. Gregory Galluzzo, Gamaliel’s co-founder and
executive director, served as a trainer and mentor during Obama’s mid-1980s
organizing days in Chicago. The Developing Communities Project, which first
hired Obama, is part of the Gamaliel network. Obama became a consultant and
eventually a trainer of community organizers for Gamaliel. (He also served
as a trainer for ACORN.) And he has kept up his ties with Gamaliel during
his time in the U.S. Senate.
The Gamaliel connection appears to supply a solution to the riddle of
Obama’s mysterious political persona. On one hand, he likes to highlight his
days as a community organizer — a profession with proudly radical roots in
the teachings of Chicago’s Saul Alinsky, author of the highly influential
text Rules for Radicals. Obama even goes so far as to make the
community-organizer image a metaphor for his distinctive conception of
elective office. On the other hand, Obama presents himself as a
post-ideological, consensus-minded politician who favors pragmatic,
common-sense solutions to the issues of the day. How can Obama be radical
and post-radical at the same time? Perhaps by deploying Gamaliel techniques.
Gamaliel organizers have discovered a way to fuse their Left-extremist
political beliefs with a smooth, non-ideological surface of down-to-earth
pragmatism: the substance of Jeremiah Wright with the appearance of Norman
Vincent Peale. Could this be Obama’s secret?