Best-selling New York Times author Dinesh D'Souza is firing back at mainstream media critics who are taking shots at his new book "The Roots of Obama's Rage," which explores what really motivates President Barack Obama in his ongoing effort to transform America.
The book has drawn sharp attacks from left-wing bloggers and the White House, in large part based on remarks from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who recently cited D'Souza's work in a blistering critique of Obama.
Gingrich told National Review Online that D'Souza's work offered the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.”
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D'Souza's ideas reveal that Obama “is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president," Gingrich added.
But the thing that really touched off the firestorm was Gingrich’s comment that Obama has a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview.
The day after Gingrich made those remarks, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs ripped into the House speaker, saying he was impugning Obama's citizenship status — despite the fact that nowhere in the book or in a related Forbes magazine cover story does D'Souza question Obama's legitimacy as president.
"He's trying to appeal to the fringe of people that don't believe the president was born in this country," Gibbs said of Gingrich. "You would normally expect better from somebody who had held the position of speaker of the House."
D'Souza tells Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview that Gibbs' attack "was a red herring, because my article and the book have nothing to do with where Obama was born. It has to do with the ideology that he got, he adopted, from his father. So the birther issue is completely irrelevant."
In the book, D'Souza, the president of King's College in New York City, writes that President Obama's fondness for "spreading the wealth around" stems from an anti-colonial world view revealed in Obama's first book, "Dreams From My Father."
D'Souza believes the president is driven by his father's anti-colonialist ideology.
"His father, it's well known, was an anti-colonialist," D'Souza says. "He came of age in Kenya during the great struggles in Africa for liberation from European rule."
Anti-colonists see the poor nations of the world as being colonized and exploited by powerful, oppressive Western nations.
"I was born in 1961, the same year as Obama," D'Souza tells Newsmax. "And I grew up in India in the aftermath of Indian independence. So anti-colonialism is what my father believed, and my grandfather.
"This is the air that I breathed as a young man growing up in Bombay in the ’60s and ’70s. So the moment I saw Obama talking about all this, I said, 'Wait a minute, I know this world very well! It's my world!"
D'Souza notes that Obama spent very little time with his father, Barack Obama Sr. But anti-colonial sentiment also was very strong in Hawaii and Indonesia, where Obama grew up. And in his quest to understand his father, Obama adopted his father's goals according to D'Souza.
Essentially, D'Souza says, that means Obama is acting out the dream of his father, which was to de-colonize the world. He believes it explains the unusual tenor of the Obama presidency.
"Of course the big power today is not Europe, it's America," D'Souza. "So what is Obama doing? He's in a sense trying to de-colonize American actions in the world, get us out of Afghanistan, out of Iraq, reduce America's energy consumption. And then within America he's targeting the rich, the elites, the corporations, the banks, the healthcare industry, the energy industry.
"And he's not trying to get rid of it, he's not trying to nationalize it kind of like a socialist would do. Rather, he's trying to bring it under the rein of the government. He's trying to decolonize these institutions by basically putting their work to the service of the state — of course, a state run in effect by him. So this is de-colonization, it's not really socialism."
D'Souza says his theory explains many things about Obama's behavior, including his early decision to insist that a bust of Winston Churchill, which had been presented to the United States and placed in the Oval Office, be removed and returned to the United Kingdom. That move drew widespread attention from the British media.
D'Souza recounts that Winston Churchill was prime minister of Britain during the Mau-Mau Rebellion in Kenya, which was then called British East Africa, during which President Obama's father and grandfather were imprisoned.
"In other words," says D'Souza, "Churchill was, from the anti-colonial point of view, a villain, a champion of the empire. And this, of course, would in a minute completely, explain Obama's relentless hostility not only to Churchill, but to the British more generally. He's always insulting the British."
D'Souza says the anti-colonial theory of Obama explains several other actions, including his early effort to repair the U.S. image abroad by embarking on an international apology tour; his support for the controversial mosque located two blocks from the site of the Ground Zero mosque; and his apparent de-emphasis of stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
D'Souza also warns that Obama's failure to appreciate and recognize the exceptional role America plays in maintaining world stability and economic development could have devastating consequences.
"We are in a tough struggle here as Americans," D'Souza says. "But Obama, far from helping us win this fight, I think is actually pulling us down. He's pulling us down in terms of America's influence in the world. He's weakening our economy and reducing our ability to compete in the world. So this is why the Obama dream, in which Obama is in a sense living in the time machine created by his father a half century ago, this has become an American nightmare."