Documentary finds Obama’s half-brother in Kenya slums
Posted by AFP on July 10, 2012
George Obama in an interview with Dinesh D’Souza – Photo: The Hollywood Reporter
WASHINGTON, July 10 – Barack Obama’s slum-dwelling half-brother in Kenya says he needs no help from his powerful sibling, in an election-year documentary that is highly critical of the US president.
“I think he has a family of his own,” said George Obama in a park-bench interview with conservative author Dinesh D’Souza that is a highlight of “2016: Obama’s America,” which premieres this week in Houston, Texas.
“I’m a member of his family, but I’m over-age, so I help myself,” the younger Obama said in a four-minute clip that appears on the website of the Hollywood Reporter (
www.hollywoodreporter.com) trade journal.
D’Souza, author of the 2011 bestseller “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” said he tracked down the US president’s brother in Nairobi after seeing a news report about him living in squalor in the Kenyan capital.
The film clip does not mention that Obama grew up in a well-to-do part of Nairobi, before he ventured toward its slums, ultimately working with a charity he co-founded to help young people trapped in poverty.
When D’Souza, citing the Bible, suggests that President Obama — who is up for re-election in November — is failing in his duty as “his brother’s keeper,” George Obama replies: “He’s got other issues to deal with.”
“He’s taking care of the world, so he’s taking care of me.”
George Obama, appearing for the first time in a movie, goes on to say that Kenya might be enjoying a higher level of development today had British colonial rule — which ended in 1963 — lasted for a bit longer.
“But it’s true,” he said. “They would have developed us. Instead we were fighting, fighting, fighting over nothing. We are third world, second world.”
Barack Obama Senior, an economist and academic, had four wives including anthropologist Ann Dunham, the mother of President Obama, and Jael Otieno, the mother of George Obama, who now lives in the United States.
The youngest Obama told D’Souza he was only six months old when his father died in a car accident. He said he had no memories of him, although his mother had told him that “he was really educated.”
The film clip ends on a note of glaring contrast, with a photo of George Obama at the door of a tiny cinder block hut set alongside an image of the American leader strolling purposefully across the White House lawn.
D’Souza, a policy analyst in the Reagan administration who now runs a Christian college in New York, stirred controversy when he argued in his book that Obama’s politics embody his father’s contempt for colonialism.
“There seems to be something foreign, something not American about Obama,” D’Souza told radio talk show host Michael Berry, who is hosting Thursday’s screening in Houston ahead of the film’s nationwide release.
“He has embraced a kind of anti-American third world ideology and that’s anti-colonialism.”
“2016,” which alludes to the last year of what D’Souza says would be a disastrous second Obama term, is produced by Gerald Molen, who was behind such Steven Spielberg blockbusters as “Schindler’s List” and “Jurassic Park.”
How on earth am I supposed to make educated political decisions and form educated opinions when all I see/hear/read is biased stuff?
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