Obama`s Kind of Town, Chicago Is …*


[*VDARE.com note: If you`re not familiar with the song


My Kind Of Town
(Chicago
Is), click


here
to hear Frank
Sinatra sing it.
]


Did you know that now-convicted fixer

Tony Rezko,
who funneled

$250,000 in campaign contributions
to Sen. Barack
Obama from his initial campaign onward, got his start as
a big-time Chicago operator back in the early 1980s
through … the Nation of Islam?


Also known as the Black Muslims, they are the gentlemen
in the bow-ties who

preach
that, in prehistoric times, the vile

Dr. Yacub
genetically engineered

Europeans
to be a race of human wolves.


Fat Tony, of course, is neither Black nor Muslim—he`s a
white Christian immigrant from Aleppo, a famous Syrian
rug-trading souk.


The Black Muslims are also notoriously anti-Semitic—but
not when it came to their friend Tony Rezko, whose
partner in Rezmar, the notorious government-subsidized
slumlord racket, was

Daniel Mahru,
who is Jewish.


But that`s the kind of town Chicago is—diverse,

vibrant
, tolerant …  as long as you`ve got

clout
and are willing to put aside petty differences
and play ball with others with clout to mutually

defraud the public
.

If
you want to understand

Barack Obama
, you have to understand

Chicago
, the city where he twice chose to make a
political career.


Chicago sits at the conjunction of America`s two great
watersheds, the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, which
made it the transportation hub of the nation by the
Civil War.
Even today, the convenience of direct
flights from

O`Hare
make the Chicago area central to American

corporate life
. The ample amount of money that can
be extracted from businesses before they finally resolve
to flee Chicago means that the city has always been

a politician`s paradise.


I`m still amazed that I only found out about Rezko`s
decades-long relationship with the Black Muslims last
week. It showed up in the obituaries of Jabir Herbert
Muhammad, the son of Nation of Islam founder Elijah
Muhammad

of evil memory
, whose followers

assassinated
his rival Malcolm X in 1966.


Jabir`s funeral was quite a success. Both current Nation
of Islam boss Louis Farrakhan and The Champ,
Muhammad Ali,
were in attendance.


Malcolm had converted the young

Cassius Clay
to Elijah`s race-baiting Islamic heresy
in the early 1960s. In 1964, however, Elijah
excommunicated the dangerously charismatic Malcolm and
installed his own son, Jabir, as Ali`s business manager.
The energetic Rezko, who had arrived in Chicago from

Syria
in 1974, went to work for Jabir in the 1983
and was soon managing the ex-champ`s business affairs.


Rezko, sadly, was unable to make the memorial service
because he`s been busy at Chicago`s

Metropolitan Correctional Center
since his
conviction on 16 counts in June.


And there had been some recent unpleasantness between
Jabir and Tony. The Chicago Tribune reported
recently:



“Muhammad also was once a close associate and business
partner of convicted political fundraiser

Antoin “Tony” Rezko
, but that relationship ended
badly and is now the subject of a lawsuit alleging
trusts set up by Muhammad were looted…”
[Muhammad
Ali`s longtime manager remembered
, By James
Kimberly,  August 30, 2008]


Jabir`s suit claims that Tony embezzled from him his
Kenwood mansion, which is located not far from Barack`s
Kenwood mansion, the 2005 purchase of which Tony
apparently subsidized.


Strikingly, the Nation of Islam in particular and
Chicago black politics in general were Rezko`s launching
pad for his decades-long takeover of quite a bit of the
government of the State of Illinois.


James L. Merriner wrote in

Chicago
magazine in November 2007:


“When

Harold Washington
was running for mayor of Chicago
in 1983, Rezko held a fundraiser after Jabir Herbert
Muhammad, who was Muhammad Ali`s business manager, urged
him to get involved in the campaign. Subsequently, Rezko
also joined Ali`s entourage, traveling the world with
him for five years. Rezko apparently took little
interest in

boxing
—he says he and Ali did watch a few matches
together—but he relished putting together business and
endorsement deals for the champ.”
[Mr.
Inside Out
]

I
bet he did. A rich

punchdrunk
pugilist and Tony Rezko—what
could possibly go wrong?
In the 1990s, Ali`s

latest wife
forced out both Jabir and Tony.


Strange as it seems, the relationship between Rezko and
the Black Muslims is not unique. Chicago-based columnist

Ray Hanania
of the Arab Writers Group explained:


“Like
many

Arab Americans,
Rezko had close ties to the Nation
of Islam, which sympathized with the Palestinian and
Arab causes. He became close to the inspiring icons like
Muhammad Ali and even young Obama, a little-known state
legislator who later rose to stardom.”


Rezko is representative of a recent trend in Chicago
politics: the rise of

Arab wheeler-dealers
as corruption catalysts.


The elites of the African-American and Arab communities
may tend to agree on foreign policy. But down on the
street, relations are hostile. The Arab immigrants, who
are best known in Chicago as middle-man merchants
operating liquor stores and the like in the ghetto, much
like the

Koreans
in South Central Los Angeles at the time of
the 1992 riots, are too hated by black voters to win
political power for themselves through the ballot box.
Hence their leaders tend to play

shadowy roles
in Chicago politics.


Rezko kept a sharp eye out for upcoming black political
talent who could provide a politically correct front for
him. Rezmar offered Obama a job in 1990. He didn`t take
it, but that was the beginning of a long and mutually
beneficial friendship between Rezko and the man who is
now the Democratic Presidential nominee. Rezko paid for
15 percent of Obama`s first campaign, and Obama looked
out in the state senate for Rezko`s interests in

low-income housing
and in packing the state`s

hospital construction board
.


Contract set-asides for minorities provide a lucrative
opening for crooks like Rezko. The demand for
“diversity”
provides an excuse for a thumb on the
scales, a justification for diverting the contract from
the lowest bidder to a political ally who employs a
minority frontman. Most of America`s pundit class hasn`t
figured this out yet, but Rezko grasped
how “diversity” works
soon after getting off
the plane. (Indeed,

multicultural America
is becoming ever more like the

Ottoman Empire,
giving an advantage to immigrants
from old

Ottoman mercantile minorities
.)



Chicago

explained: “Rezko ran Jabir Muhammad`s firm, Crucial
Concessions. Under Mayor Washington
[remember that
fundraiser?], Crucial won the concessions to sell
food at city beaches.”


Now

I know why Chicago beach concession food in the 1980s
was so untasty. The municipal hot dog stands were
managed by the Nation of Islam and Tony Rezko!


Muhammad and Rezko worked the same minority set-aside
scam with several high-grossing Panda Expresses at
O`Hare airport. The Chicago Sun-Times reported on
March 17, 2005:


“Two
restaurants at O`Hare Airport have been allowed to rake
in millions of dollars, even though the Daley
administration learned back in 2002 that the company
running them was probably

a phony minority
“front” for Panda Express and
Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a top fund-raiser for Gov.
Blagojevich. Crucial Inc. won the O`Hare concessions in
part because it was certified as a minority-owned
business. Its largest shareholder was listed as Jabir
Herbert Muhammad, son of the late Nation of Islam
founder,

Elijah Muhammad
. … The [Chicago minority contractor]
program has been

tarred
by a relentless string of scandals…”[
City
ignored possible O`Hare `front` for years
,


By Chris Fusco, Fran Spielman And Michael Sneed]


Jabir and Tony also got a $10 million affirmative action
contract from SBC, the giant phone company whose
president was

William Daley
, Mayor Richie Daley`s brother, to run
the payphones at the

Cook County jail.
Their designated owner-operator
was a

twofer
under the quota of 35 percent of

contracts reserved
for

minority
and

women-owned businesses
: a black woman named Deloris
Wade, although she happened

to be dead
.



Building on these black Chicago roots
, Rezko
eventually became the statewide power behind the throne
when the Democrats swept to victory in the 2002
elections. Chicago Magazine

reported
:



“Rezko became a virtual one-man headhunting firm for
staffing the Blagojevich administration, sending along
recommended candidates, many of whom ended up getting
appointments. … (The U.S. attorney here has charged that
Rezko schemed to pack the government with his cronies so
that they could peddle their influence.)”


Diversity sensitivity also provides a convenient
justification for corruption:


Blagojevich said he sought Rezko`s



“advice on recommendations for agency directors for two
reasons. Number one, I had every reason to think he was
honest and independently successful in business and that
he was able to bring us people who were not part of
state government before. And he has connections and
roots in the

African American community
, and he could help us
with candidates . . . because part of what we wanted to
do was to have a diverse administration.”


This

spider`s web of connection
is baffling to outsiders
trying to understand what Obama really believes in.


You can trace his Chicago network to all sorts of
unsavory folks: Rezko, terrorists,

Farrakhan
, the various Daleys,

Jeremiah Wright
,

Manson Family fans
, Jesse Jackson,

billionaire Iraqi swindlers
,

Emil Jones
, and so forth. One of Obama`s

donors
is the former Iraqi Electricity Minister

Aiham Alsammarae,
who broke out of prison in the
Baghdad Green Zone where he was locked up for stealing
hundreds of millions. Alsammarae

now lives
in the Chicago area, where he put up $2.8
million to help bail

Rezko
out of jail.


What`s the common ideological thread unifying all these
gruesome guys?


Perhaps there isn`t one—other than cynicism and a
contempt for the public. All are part of the Combine,”
the bipartisan, multiracial crew of insiders who scratch
each other`s backs
in Illinois.


Consider

Michelle Obama.
She`s been close friends with

Jesse Jackson`s family
since girlhood. Yet, her
father was a precinct captain in Mayor Richard J.
Daley`s Machine and she went to work for Richard M.
Daley as a fixer when she washed out of the legal
profession in the early 1990s.


The Jacksons and the Daleys were, nominally, enemies
during a series of black vs. white mayoral elections in
the 1980s and 1990s. In the long view, however, the
Jacksons and Daleys are colleagues in their mutual
profession of using politics to bilk money and clout
from the public.


Think of the Illinois power structure as a pyramid. At
the bottom are the voters. Above them are the ethnic
activists,

like Obama was on the South Side
back in the 1980s.
Ethnic relations are

pretty frosty at the bottom
, but much chummier
toward the top of the heap, where the big boys engage in
a perpetual conspiracy to

betray their respective constituencies
for their
mutual benefit.


Why don`t the voters turn the rascals out? Because no
one ethnic group can afford to unilaterally disarm in
the struggle for government boodle. Your racial leaders
may be pocketing much of what they get in your name, but
without their connections and time-tested stratagems,
your group would be completely despoiled by the other
groups` veteran politicians.


So, to

echo an old story about FDR
, while your leaders may
be sonsabitches, at least they`re your sonsabitches.


Overall, the Obamas fit right in to this civic
tradition. This isn`t to say that Barack Obama utterly
lacks

an ideology
. He`s a

complex, sophisticated man
and he may well have

private goals more ambitious and/or alarming
than
those of the average Chicago politician.


Yet Obama is a Chicago politician—make no
mistake.


[Steve Sailer (
email
him) is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and

movie critic

for

The American Conservative
.
His website


www.iSteve.blogspot.com

features his daily blog.]