Barack Hussein Obama was a Muslim for almost 25 years and is a master at shaping his own mythology.
 
 In Obama's famous 2004 DNC Convention speech, he said ""My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya.  He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack.  His father -- my grandfather -- was a cook, a domestic servant to the British."
 
 In fact, Obama's grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama was a prominent and wealthy farmer from Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya.  He was part of the British colonial system, owned a large ranch and was one of the first Muslim converts in his village.  His son, Barack (changed from Baraka, an Arabic word meaning blessed) Hussein Obama Sr. was a child of privilege, not privation.  He was an outstanding student, not a herdsman.
 
 Like other children of privilege, Obama's father was a person with access to the highest levels of government in Kenya and as a result of those connections was able to come to America to study in 1958 at the age of twenty-three.
 
 His scholarship, to the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was organized by a former Kenyan cabinet minister, the late Tom Mboya, who was earmarked as Jomo Kenyatta's successor.  Kenyatta, president of the Kenya African Union and the country's leading nationalist leader, was charged with managing the Mau Mau terrorist society in Kenya and sentenced to seven years hard labor along with five others.
 
 The senior Obama married a fellow student, eighteen year old Shirley Ann (Anna) Dunham of Wichita, Kansas.  A self-professed atheist, Dunham was an anthropology student.  Obama Jr. was born on August 4th, 1961, in Honolulu.
 
 Two years later, the senior Obama divorced Dunham according to Sharia law and returned to Kenya the same year that Kenyatta took control as the first prime minister of a self-governing Kenya (June 1963).  He became an economist and a powerful member of Kenyatta's government which was one of the most corrupt regimes in Africa.  The Mau Mau was finally banned by the Kenyan government in August 2003 (one year before Obama's DNC speech).
 
 Was Obama lying when he said, "My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation," in his famous speech?  His father abandoned him to return to the secret shame of Kenyatta's history of rape, murder and arson."
 
 Obama's father died in a driving accident in 1982, leaving three wives, six sons and a daughter.
 
 Obama's mother remarried.  Again, she chose another Muslim, Lolo Soetoro, an oil company manager, who took Dunham and Obama to Indonesia, the most densely populated Islamic country in the world.  Soetoro educated his stepson as a good Muslim by enrolling him in one of Jakarta's Wahabbi schools.  Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad on the industrialized world.
 
 When his mother divorced her second Muslim husband, Dunham sent Obama to live with his maternal grandmother in Honolulu. The teenager lived with his grandparents -- "white folk," as he describes them -- and attended the prestigious Punahou School, the school of Hawaii's royalty. Dunham remained in Indonesia.
 
 In his book, "Dreams from My Father," Obama wrote of his mother, "She was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position paper liberalism."  In his book, "The Audacity of Hope," (pp 202-203), Obama wrote that she was "always too rational and too stubborn to accept anything she couldn't see, feel, touch or count."  She was the quintessential secular humanist, he told Newsweek's Jonathan Alter and Daren Briscoe.
 
 Julia Suryakusuma, the author of Sex, Power and Nation, says that Ann was one of her closest friends from 1981 until her death of ovarian cancer in 1995.  Suryakusuma, wrote in the Jakarta Post, "Ann was an anthropologist.  Her doctorate research was on cottage industries in Java and she had a deep love for this country."  In a later paragraph, she writes, "I think she would also see Berry (Dunham's nickname for Obama) as a great inspiration for Indonesia, her (Dunham) adopted home."
 
 Obama then studied for two years at Occidental College in California before transferring to Columbia College, the undergraduate division of Columbia University, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations and graduated in 1983.  Obama then worked for Business International from January 1984 to January 1985.  After that he  worked as a community organizer at a Chicago housing project. It was during his time spent there that Obama joined the Trinity United Church of Christ (UCC). Oprah Winfrey and Howard Dean are also members of the UCC and on October 29, 2006, Dallas's Cathedral of Hope, known as the "world's largest gay church," was accepted into the UCC.
 
 Trinity has a non-negotiable commitment to Africa, is committed to the historical education of African people in diaspora and committed to liberation, restoration, and economic parity.
 
 At the UCC General Synod in 2005, the denomination adopted a resolution calling for "equal marriage rights for all" - regardless of gender.  This includes homosexuals and transgendered individuals.
 
 Trinity is very anti-Israel and supports divestment.  It is also unique among UCC churches nationwide in its black value system which requires commitment to the black community and family, adherence to the "black work ethic" and disavowal of the pursuit of "middleclassness."  It also states members must make a pledge to gift the black community with members' learned skills and personal resources.  They also must pledge allegiance to "all black leadership who espouse and embrace the black value system."
 
 Note:  To appreciate the racism of the Black Value System, read its 12 precepts and covenantal statements (link above) , substituting the word white for black.  Additionally, item 8, "Disavowal of the Pursuit of 'Middleclassness'" is kind of an interesting concept.  I've Googled the phrase and can find no description of its meaning.  Could it mean that Trinity wants African-Americans to remain poor and indebted to the Democratic Party?
 
 The question needs to be asked, was Obama's conversion faith-based or political expediency? In either case, Muslims view Obama as first a Muslim and as an apostate Muslim, he faces the death penalty in nearly the entire Islamic world.
 
 There is no dispute among either ancient or modern Muslim scholars that under Islamic law, a murtadd, "one who turns his back on Islam," an apostate, must be put to death.  Irtidad, apostasy, is committing treason against God, and traitors deserve to be killed.   At a minimum, other Muslims would shun him if not kill him and his mother.  The fact they are eagerly welcomed by the Muslim community begs the question, is he their 'Manchurian' candidate?
 
 At a minimum, Obama should be asked if he will support the efforts of Christian missionaries in Islamic countries to peacefully convert Muslims to Christianity.
 
 In his 1995 memoir, "Dreams from My Father," Obama admits to using marijuana and cocaine. 
 
 On "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" Obama was asked by Leno about taking drugs.  Said Leno, "Remember, Senator, you are under oath. Did you inhale?"  Replied Obama, "That was the point."  In his book, Obama excuses his drug use as "reflective of the struggles and confusion of a teenage boy; teenage boys are frequently confused."
 
 Even more incriminating than the fact that Obama inhaled and admits to "maybe a little blow," Obama is a cigarette smoker, actually, a chain smoker.  That's more than a just a little substance abuse.  The question begs asking, how much of a striver can he be if he's also a smoker?  It was sort of disappointing to read a recent interview in which Mr. Obama claimed to have quit except for the occasional lapse.
 
 Obama has become the Senate's point man on ethics and now says he will no longer accept rides on corporate jets.  This after having accepted 23 such flights, some to attend his own  fundraisers, in 2005 alone.  He joined only a handful of Democrats in voting against a Senate reform banning the widespread practice of legislators hiring their family members on their campaign or PAC payrolls.  He does, after all have a very activist wife.
 
 Ethical questions also surround Obama's shady real estate deal and relationship with indicted political fundraiser and Arab-American activist Tony Rezko, who befriended Obama during his Harvard days.
 
 Obama bought a $1.65 million dollar mansion at a gigantic discounted price, some $300,000 less than the asking price.  The same day, Rezko's wife bought the adjoining lot, paying the full $625,000 asking price.  The Rezko involvement invited a second question for Obama: did Rezko's wife in effect subsidized Obama's purchase of the opulent home and also provided an abutting private preserve that adds to its ambience?  The lot isn't accessible from the public street but can be reached from Obama's property.
 
 Pretty good for a guy earning $165,200 per and who once ran his credit cards up so high that the credit card company denied him access to further use of his card.
 
 His political history in Illinois shows that Obama has proven himself to be a nearly perfect leftist dhimmicrat.  He supports homosexual marriage, racial preferences, gun control, flag-burning, socialized medicine and the absolute right to abortion, including partial-birth abortions. He voted against requiring medical care for aborted fetuses who survive.
 
 He is anti-war, voted against the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, against privatizing Social Security and opposes the death penalty, three strikes laws and school vouchers.  He has no military service record.
 
 He believes in the separation of church and state -- except when he campaigns in black churches.
 
 He loves Jimmy Carter and is the 18th most liberal member of the Senate, receiving a 100% rating from Americans for Democratic Action, NARAL Pro -Choice America, National Organization for Women, the NAACP and the National Education Association.
 
 Some may say that this backgrounder is biased, however, perception is everything in politics and both Ted Kennedy and CNN (Cable News Network) have mistakenly referred to Obama as Osama (as in ben Laden).
 
 I just don't believe America will ever elect an uber-liberal, apostate Muslim and self-admitted drug user to the Office of the President of the United States.
 
 What really scares me, though, is that I could be wrong.
 
 This backgrounder is evolving and additions and/or corrections are welcome and should be sent to Beckwith using the "Mail To" link at the top of this page.