Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah April 18 WorldNetDaily column is a rebuttal to a Media Matters detailing various birther myths and falsehoods. Despite Farah's claim to be "setting Media Matters straight," Farah perpetuates deceptions and misleading claims that hide the actual truth.
Farah asserts that the birth certificate Obama's campaign released "would likely not have been sufficient proof to get the young Obama signed up in Little League, if he had been living in Hawaii rather than Indonesia at the time of his eligibility for competitive sports." In fact, as FactCheck.org points out, that certificate is good enough for the State Department in satisfying legal requirements for proving citizenship and obtaining a passport.
Farah then claims that "This is a document that Hawaii has routinely handed out to register births occurring elsewhere, even out of the country, on the basis of an affidavit filed by a parent or grandparent." In fact, the right-wing organization Farah founded, the Western Journalism Center, reported that Hawaii does not provide birth certificates that say children born out of state were born in Hawaii or at a specific location in Hawaii.
Farah then dissembles on the grandmother stuff:
In a recorded interview Oct. 16, 2008, Sarah Hussein Obama does indeed seem to suggest he was. While it is true her translators insist repeatedly that she was mistaken, insisting he was born in Hawaii, the grandmother herself is clearly heard to say "Mombasa." It's hardly conclusive evidence of anything, but it is of some interest given the highly unlikely scenario that the grandmother traveled to Hawaii to witness the birth of a grandson to an American woman, when her financially struggling son, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., had already produced offspring with a Kenyan wife.
In fact, people who have listened to the tape issued by Obama-hating pastor Ron McRae, like FactCheck.org, have reported:
[I]t was McRae — not Sarah Obama — who said the future president was born in Kenya. McRae’s leading questions were relayed to her through a translator, since she spoke in her native Luo language, not English. Later, the part of the conversation that Berg omitted was revealed. And it makes clear that Sarah Obama misunderstood McRae at first, and tried repeatedly to correct McRae’s misunderstanding, saying emphatically: "He was born in America!"
Farah rebuts Media Matters' pointing out that WND peddled a fraudulent Kenyan birth certificate as real by asserting, "To the contrary, WND was the first news agency to proclaim the alleged Kenyan birth certificate produced by Orly Taitz as 'probably not authentic.'" Farah is being disingenous; the disavowal came only after several days of presenting it as real, even claiming that "WND was able to obtain other birth certificates from Kenya for purposes of comparison, and the form of the documents appear to be identical" -- which contradicted WND's later claim that "WND obtained several samples of Kenyan birth certificates in use around Aug. 4, 1961, the date of Obama's birth, showing differences" from the certificate it suggested was real. Farah has not explained that contradiction, nor has he explained why he published a "birth certificate" he couldn't bother to authenticate beforehand.
Farah also take refuge in the eligibility argument: "But if his father was a Kenyan visiting student, as Obama claims, and his mother was Stanley Ann Dunham, it's doubtful either of his parents were in a position to confer even run-of-the-mill U.S. citizenship on their son – he because of foreign citizenship and she because of her age." That relies on a definition of "natural born citizen" that requires both parents be citizens -- a definition no modern U.S. court has validated. Further, the idea that Obama's mother could not confer citizenship upon him because of her age at birth is important only if Obama was not born in the United States. There are no age requirements for conferring citizenship on a child born in the U.S. to an American citizen; indeed, current interpretation of the 14th Amendment is that a child born in the U.S. is an American citizen regardless of the citizenship status of his parents.
Farah probably knows all of this. He simply chooses to deceive and mislead about the facts in order to further his anti-Obama agenda. And he thinks he's setting others "straight" on the birther issue?
(Disclaimer: I'm employed by Media Matters, but it has no editorial control over ConWebWatch.)
