Barack Obama Racially Abused as Boy, Says Book on 'Beaten’ Mother
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Barack Obama was subjected to racial abuse as a child in Indonesia and may have witnessed his mother being beaten by his stepfather, according to a new book about her troubled life.

Ann Dunham died at the age of 52 in 1995 before her son embarked on the career in politics that would lead him to the White House.

At the age of 18, the anthropologist married Barack Hussein Obama Snr, an African. She was already pregnant with a baby who would become the first black president of the US.

She later divorced and married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian.

The forthcoming book, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother, details her unconventional approach to the world, which led to turbulence in the lives of Mr Obama and his half-sister Maya but also extraordinary achievement on his part. Mr Obama has joked that his mother raised him to become a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Belafonte.

In an interview with Janny Scott, the author, Mr Obama said that his mother was "resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent" and had made sure that her children knew they were loved.

"But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organised person. And that disorganisation, you know, spilled over. Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots, I think my mother would have had to make some different decisions. » | Toby Harnden, Washington | Thursday, April 21, 2011

Obama’s Childhood Movie

Fears of Hitler’s Childhood Home in Braunau-am-Inn Becoming Fascist Shrine
MAIL ONLINE: The owner of the house where Adolf Hitler was born wants to put it on the market with a likely asking price of over £2million.

But the local authority in Braunau-am-Inn, Austria, has vowed to try to find a way of blocking any sale because it fears it could land up in the hands of extreme right-wingers who would turn it into a grotesque shrine to his memory.

The mayor of Braunau, Gerhard Skiba, said ideally the town council would like to purchase it and so control its future fate.

But there is not enough money in the town coffers to buy the property, Salzburger Vorstadt 15.

He says he will appeal to the government in Vienna to help the town purchase the property if the owner goes ahead with the sale.

It was in a room on the first floor of the three-storey, 2,000 square foot house – the ground floor of which was a pub called Gasthof Zum Pommer – that Hitler’s mother Klara gave birth to her infamous son on April 20, 1889.

She and her husband Alois, a stern local customs official, rented a suite of rooms above the pub and continued to live in it until 1892 when they moved to Linz.

Alois, a drunkard, often availed himself of the beer on sale in the saloon downstairs before returning to the family home to abuse his timid wife 24 years his junior.

The house is still owned by the family after which the pub took its name. Owner Gelinde Pommer says she wants to sell because the tenants for the past two decades, handicapped people who worked and lived there under the care of a disabled organisation, are moving to more modern premises in January, and she no longer wants to have the responsibility for it.

She has not yet advertised it, but estate agents have suggested it will have an asking price of about £2million. She was not available to comment. >>> Allan Hall | Thursday, November 05, 2009

Barack Obama’s Muslim Childhood
In view of Obama’s recent successes in the US primaries, it's worth reading what Daniel Pipes has found out about Obama’s childhood. With many thanks to Pierre of Québec for drawing my attention to this article:

DANIELPIPES.ORG: As Barack Obama's candidacy comes under increasing scrutiny, his account of his religious upbringing deserves careful attention for what it tells us about the candidate's integrity.

Obama asserted in December, "I've always been a Christian," and he has adamantly denied ever having been a Muslim. "The only connection I've had to Islam is that my grandfather on my father's side came from that country [Kenya]. But I've never practiced Islam." In February, he claimed: "I have never been a Muslim. … other than my name and the fact that I lived in a populous Muslim country for 4 years when I was a child [Indonesia, 1967-71] I have very little connection to the Islamic religion."

"Always" and "never" leave little room for equivocation. But many biographical facts, culled mainly from the American press, suggest that, when growing up, the Democratic candidate for president both saw himself and was seen as a Muslim.

Obama's Kenyan birth father: In Islam, religion passes from the father to the child. Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. (1936–1982) was a Muslim who named his boy Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. Only Muslim children are named "Hussein".

Obama's Indonesian family: His stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was also a Muslim. In fact, as Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng explained to Jodi Kantor of the New York Times: "My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim." An Indonesian publication, the Banjarmasin Post reports a former classmate, Rony Amir, recalling that "All the relatives of Barry's father were very devout Muslims." Barack Obama's Muslim Childhood >>> By Daniel Pipes FrontPageMagazine.com | April 29, 2008

The same article is available in French HERE

Hat tip: Pierre of Québec

DANIELPIPES.ORG:
Confirmed: Barack Obama Practiced Islam >>> By Daniel Pipes FrontPageMagazine.com | January 7, 2008

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback - UK)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardback - UK)

The Lamentable State of Childhood
”Further research has shown that while we are wealthier than 50 years ago, our young people are experiencing increasing levels of anxiety and mental health problems, where one in 10 teenagers has a clinically diagnosed mental health disorder.” – Bob Reitemeier

It should be noted that fifty years ago, most mothers did not work; they generally stayed home to raise their children instead. Perhaps we can learn a lesson from that.

THE TELEGRAPH: A generation of children are being "contaminated" by a cocktail of addictive computer games, test-driven schooling, increased traffic and an irrational fear of strangers which leaves them unable to play outside, according to a lobby of more than 270 experts.

In a letter to the The Daily Telegraph, the group of academics, authors and charity leaders say modern life has eroded children's ability to leave their homes unsupervised, seriously undermining their long-term development. Modern life ‘is destroying children’s play’ (more)

Letter signed by 270 experts: ‘Let our children play’

Sir – Since last September, when a group of professionals, academics and writers wrote to The Daily Telegraph expressing concern about the marked deterioration in children’s mental health, research evidence supporting this case has continued to mount.

Compelling examples have included Unicef’s alarming finding that Britain’s children are amongst the unhappiest in the developed world, and the children’s charity NCH’s report of an explosion in children’s clinically diagnosable mental health problems.

We believe that a key factor in this disturbing trend is the marked decline over the last 15 years in children’s play. Play – particularly outdoor, unstructured, loosely supervised play – appears to be vital to children’s all-round health and well-being.

It develops their physical coordination and control; provides opportunities for the first-hand experiences that underpin their understanding of and engagement with the world; facilitates social development (making and keeping friends, dealing with problems, working collaboratively); and cultivates creativity, imagination and emotional resilience. This includes the growth of self-reliance, independence and personal strategies for dealing with and integrating challenging or traumatic experiences.

Many features of modern life seem to have eroded children’s play. They include: increases in traffic that make even residential areas unsafe for children; the ready availability of sedentary, sometimes addictive screen-based entertainment; the aggressive marketing of over-elaborate, commercialised toys (which seem to inhibit rather than stimulate creative play); parental anxiety about "stranger danger", meaning that children are increasingly kept indoors; a test-driven school and pre-school curriculum in which formal learning has substantially taken the place of free, unstructured play; and a more pervasive cultural anxiety which, when uncontained by the policy-making process, routinely contaminates the space needed for authentic play to flourish.

A year on, the signatories of the original letter to the Telegraph are joined by other concerned colleagues in calling for a wide-ranging and informed public dialogue about the intrinsic nature and value of play in children’s healthy development, and how we might ensure its place at the heart of twenty-first-century childhood. [Source]

See all 270 signatories of this letter

Peter Abbs, research professor of creative writing, Sussex University

Kay M. Albrecht, Innovations in Early Childhood Education, Houston, Texas

Dr Waseem Alladin, Editor in Chief, Counselling Psychology Quarterly and Head of Psychology Autism Care UK

Chris Allison, ex-infant school headteacher, University of Portsmouth

Joan Almon, coordinator, US Alliance for Childhood

Concern must be turned into action By Bob Reitemeier

Mark Alexander

’Slave-Driving’ Our Children to Perform
THE TELEGRAPH: It was Charles Dickens who gave us the eternal image of the child-hating beadle who screws up his face with revulsion at the sight of a child in need, but that facial expression is greatly in evidence nowadays. Britain's disadvantaged children are, according to a major report on Sunday, a year behind in education by the age of three.

Only a few weeks ago, we heard of schools that proposed to ban break-time, and now news arrives of a massive survey conducted by researchers from the Institute of Child Health at University College London, which suggests that a quarter of Britain's children are obese before school age. Might I be permitted to put up my hand and ask a question: what are we doing to our children?

Some we exploit, some we pollute. Some we spoil and others we ignore. Some we nurture and some we fear and some we mess up and others we enthral. But mainly what we do is subject children to an excessive number of examinations.

Too often we forget that childhood should be a magical place, a zone of enchantment, discovery and - most of all - a kind of freedom many people will never see again. Yet, increasingly, we subject these children to tests and exams and score charts and point averages, as if we can't wait to throw them into the rat race of adult competition. I thought we’d abolished the workhouse (more) By Andrew O’Hagan

Mark Alexander