Did Obama make a campaign appearance with Malik Shabazz? « Hot Air

Did Obama make a campaign appearance with Malik Shabazz? « Hot Air

Did Obama make a campaign appearance with Malik Shabazz?

posted at 1:25 pm on October 3, 2011 by Ed Morrissey

Since the Washington Post has decided to turn over every rock looking for racism among the Republican presidential candidates, Andrew Breitbart decided to do the same among Democratic presidential candidates, too.  Not surprisingly, he found an interesting connection between both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to the New Black Panther Party in 2007 — the same organization whose leaders mysteriously escaped prosecution for voter intimidation once Obama took office:

New photographs obtained exclusively by BigGovernment.com reveal that Barack Obama appeared and marched with members of the New Black Panther Party as he campaigned for president in Selma, Alabama in March 2007.
The photographs, captured from a Flickr photo-sharing account before it was scrubbed, are the latest evidence of the mainstream media’s failure to examine Obama’s extremist ties and radical roots.
In addition, the new images raise questions about the possible motives of the Obama administration in its infamous decision to drop the prosecution of the Panthers for voter intimidation.
The images, presented below, also renew doubts about the transparency of the White House’s guest logs–in particular, whether Panther National Chief Malik Zulu Shabazz is the same “Malik Shabazz” listed among the Obama administration’s early visitors.

You’ll have to go to Big Government’s post to read Breitbart’s lengthy report on the March 2007 campaign appearance of both Democratic candidates, but it’s easy to ask the pertinent question of whether the media will express any interest in this at all.  Over the weekend, the national news outlets seemed agog over Rick Perry and his father leasing hunting rights at a place with a rather disturbing name by the time the 1980s rolled around, a name whose use it appears they tried to discourage.  But as far as I know, the place had no connection with calls to kill children in the name of racial politics — not like the NBPP’s leadership has, anyway, in the personage of King Shamir:
Of course, Malik Shabazz isn’t King Shamir, so let’s hear a bit from Shabazz about Shamir’s tirade, courtesy of Tommy Christopher:
“Not in that context”? When Tommy follows up with the obvious question, Shabazz backs off with the qualifier, “For the sake of this interview, no context.” Does a rejection of killing babies really require a context?
Somehow, I’d consider a campaign alliance between a group with these points of view and a presidential candidate a little more noteworthy in terms of character than when a candidate’s father painted over an ugly epithet on a hunting ranch, but that’s also true of a man who spent 20 years in Jeremiah Wright’s church, too, a topic that the media also avoided. If the Washington Post wants to take aim at something relevant to the campaign, maybe they could find the answer to another of Breitbart’s questions, which is whether this is the same Malik Shabazz that Secret Service records show as a visitor to the White House after Obama took office — and whether that had anything to do with the Department of Justice vacating a case it had already won against Shamir.
Update: Some are arguing that this wasn’t a campaign appearance, but the commemoration of the March on Selma.  However, Obama was clearly campaigning there (as was Hillary); he even gave the speech in which he said that he owed his existence to the March on Selma even though he was born almost four years prior to the march.  Besides, if Rick Perry or Mitt Romney just happened to share a stage at a Fourth of July celebration with, say, the leader of Stormfront, would that also be a non-story?  Something tells me … no.