© Jack Cashill

WorldNetDaily.com
July 3, 2008

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Barack Obama both made their way to Washington at almost exactly the same time from opposite ends of the planet, Ali from Somalia and Obama presumably from Hawaii.

Before arriving in DC to work at the American Enterprise Institute, Ali endured genital mutilation, malaria, a nearly fatal beating by her Koran teacher, a brutal civil war, unspeakable poverty, parental rejection, a knife attack, a coerced marriage, and several months of forced hiding after her film collaborator, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered, and her life threatened.

Before arriving in DC to serve as U.S. Senator, Obama endured a pleasant childhood in Indonesia, posh private schooling in Hawaii, a subsidized education at America’s best universities and law schools, a comfortable life in Chicago and, oh yeah, a few raised eyebrows about his mixed heritage along the way.

So why was it that when each of the two sat down to write his or her respective memoirs, it was Ali who wrote about her blessings and Obama who wrote about his grievances?

In the traditional hero saga, like Ayann Hirsi Ali’s brilliant up-from-Islam memoir, Infidel, the individual is expected to overcome hardship and injustice.

In the grievance narrative, like Obama’s Dreams From My Father, written in 1995 before Obama ran for anything, the hero nurses his slights like grudges.

If those slights seem inadequate to evoke guilt or anger—the two desired responses from the audience—the grievance narrator reserves the right to embellish or even invent additional offenses as Obama has rather artfully done with the recent invocation of a racist grandma.

Not surprisingly, the literary and journalistic establishments approve. In the way of background, they began encouraging the writing of these shame-on-you narratives in the sixties.

The timely discovery of “institutional racism” and “structural poverty” in that same unfortunate decade has given them the license to continue their encouragement.

This was fortunate for Obama. He had no ties at all to the civil rights struggle, which was pretty much over by the time he was two. Plus, he came of age in the one state where whites, “haoles,” were the scorned minority.

To be fair, Obama recognizes that he is not exactly Emmett Till. On top of his “ledger of slights,” he recounts a fellow seventh-grader calling him a “coon” and a tennis pro making a stupid joke about his color wiping off.

Nor is this memoir quite the racist book its detractors make it out to be, sometimes by citing quotes out of context. It is more cloying and self-conscious than that.

Dreams tells of how Obama rose above the race hatred that was his due, given all the false smiles and perceived slights he had suffered throughout his life.

Unlike Obama, however, Ali moves honestly to the heart of why this is so. “We had always been sure that we, as Muslims, were superior to unbelievers, and here we were, not superior at all.”

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In reading Obama’s book back to back with Ali’s Infidel, however, one sees just how impressively trivial Obama’s suffering has been. And without in any way intending to, Ali shows why Obama has raised triviality to the level of bathos.

As Ali tells it, when she fled Africa for Holland, she recognized it instantly for the superior civilization that it represented.

This was not just because Holland was vastly cleaner, safer, more orderly and more efficient than the world she had left behind.

“The Dutch value system,” Ali writes, “was more consistent, more honest, and gave people more happiness than the one with which we had been brought up.”

Yet for all of Holland’s virtues, most of Ali’s fellow Somalians rejected the Dutch and their system and chose instead to self-segregate much the way Obama has in America.

Unlike Obama, however, Ali moves honestly to the heart of why this is so. “We had always been sure that we, as Muslims, were superior to unbelievers, and here we were, not superior at all.”

As a defensive gesture, many withdrew into “an enclave of shared Somaliness.” In doing so, they were able “to create a fantasy that they as Somalis knew better than these inferior white people.”

The Moroccans of Ali’s acquaintance withdrew into their own cocoon as well. One female friend of hers complained of the racism of Dutch shopkeepers in that they always seemed to be staring at her.

Ali explained that the stares from the extravagantly tolerant Dutch were more likely due to the obvious bruises her friend sported, an application of Islamic law generously provided by an unapologetic husband.

“This obsession with identifying racism,” Ali observes, “was really a comfort mechanism, to keep people from feeling personally inadequate and to externalize the causes of their unhappiness.”

Ali sees this seemingly irrational defensiveness as a universal phenomenon, one that can occur when any group is thrust into a new and confusing situation, however objectively positive that situation might be.

Obama never gets this. The American black community that he desperately hoped would accept him was not reeling under the weight of oppression as he imagined.

Rather like the Somali community in Holland, it was reeling under the weight of a new found freedom and opportunity that many of its people, including wife Michelle and Reverend Jeremiah Wright, could not quite master.

“White folks’ greed runs a world in need,” Obama approvingly quotes Wright as saying in Dreams. In her clear-eyed attack on multiculturalism, Ali would recognize Wright’s paranoid nonsense as the “comfort mechanism” that it was. Obama did not.

Indeed, Wright made this statement during Obama’s first day at Trinity United twenty years ago. “The reverend spoke of the hardship that the congregation would face tomorrow,” Obama remembers, “the pain of those far from the mountaintop.”

By Ali’s standards, neither Obama nor Wright know the first thing about pain or hardship. What they do know about, however, are self-pity and white guilt.

Although candidate Obama may now reject Wright’s rhetoric as impolitic, the Obama that sat in Wright’s pews for twenty unfathomable years learned the grievance narration from a master.

And now America’s young learn the same false lesson from Obama. Unfortunately, Dreams From My Father is the best selling book on college campuses today.

Not for the first time, students are wasting their youth on the wrong message and the wrong messenger.