War of Ideas against Islam Chapter # 15 Chicago, Subud, and Obama When thinking about the story of Obama in Chicago keep in mind that he has not forgotten his friends in Subud. On this subject there are several sources to turn to. To read a history of Subud in Chicago from its beginnings in 1959 to 1977, the year of Bapak's last of four visits to the city, see Notes on the Origin and History of the Chicago Group, a Subud publication available online. Interesting about this paper is its open discussion about the Pentecostal nature of the religion with its "jumping, stomping, and shouting," among other spiritual excitements. Like, it may be added, what you will find in many black churches. The group in those years, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, resulted in moving from one meeting venue to another as fortunes improved. However, while there were temporary setbacks during this process, the group always rebounded There is a peculiarity, however. If I understand this correctly, although there were somewhere around 500 people involved altogether over the course of years, after its peak of about 180 members during the 1960s, it gradually declined thereafter. Yet its accommodations improved as membership fell to a current tally of maybe 35. But the transition from Van Buren Street to Fullerton Avenue to posh digs in Evanston is impressive. This does not tell the whole story -because what has the most significance in this case is not real estate or raw numbers of believers, but who, exactly, these members were.
There are two other Subud sources to mention in this context, also available online, these are: Bei Dawai, "Bahá'í and Subud Dissent: Developments in the 2000s," a 2011 paper, and "A Review of Bahá'í and Subud Dissent: Developments in the 2000s," published by Subud Vision, author not listed, also written in 2011 -or possibly 2012. What is notable with respect to both Baha'is and Subud people is the rising tide on independent thinking in each group. For Baha'i dissenters the main problem is what is perceived as the stodginess of the leadership, its closed system mentality, and emphasis on conformity to the official 'party line,' so to speak. But there is little ebbing of faith in the destiny of the religion which, although numbers probably are inflated in different cases, continues to grow and now stands in excess of 5 million believers worldwide and maybe several million more depending on actual numbers from India and a few other places. For Subud, the main problem is lack of unifying authority after Bapak's death and passing of the torch to his daughter, a development that may well have caused an increase in dropouts from the faith. In any case, for Subud stalwarts the issue is the end of a dream; it is less and less plausible that the religion can recover from a decline that has continued for over 30 years. In both instances, though, there are more dissidents than ever before. This parallel dissent has drawn the attention of scholars, hence the following online notice that appeared in 2011: 'Baha'i and Subud Dissent' at a conference for the Center of the Study of New Religions, Aletheia University, Taiwan. http://bahai-library.com/dawai_bahai_subud_dissent For Baha'is there is, as Bei Dawai says, a "continuation of the 'internet wars' of the 1990s." Here is the most informative paragraph: "Outside of academia, discussion involving dissidents is especially likely to be found on Yahoo groups (especially Talisman9, begun in 1999 as a successor to Talisman), Usenet / Google groups (e.g., talk.religion.bahai), and the message boards at Beliefnet.com. During the 2000's, Bahá'í dissidents have created a number of personal blogs and websites;" several others are run by non-believing ex-Bahá'ís The most interesting Baha'i dissident is Juan Cole, a history professor who is fluent in Arabic and Farsi, who teaches at the University of Michigan. What exactly to call him is unclear. He still professes belief in the Baha'i Faith but cannot accept the authority of the official Baha'i Administration with its headquarters in Haifa Israel. But how much of a Baha'i is he? You might wonder inasmuch as his overt views are not all that different than those of the DNC, especially the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. And whatever else the Baha'i Faith is, it is not really a form of latter-day Democratic Socialism and especially not of any kind of Marxist orthodoxy. Cole is more-or-less a Cultural Marxist on social issues and that puts him roughly in the camp of so-called "Unitarian Bahaism" This phrase can refer to Baha'is who are Unitarian in everything but name, and some remain members of the official religion, or it can refer to a formal group within the Unitarian-Universalist Church composed of former Baha'is who like a great deal about the Baha'i message but do not accept such social teachings as condemnation of homosexuality. There also are differences in interpretation of some teachings. For instance, Baha'is teach the equality of the sexes but as a matter of custom Baha'i women 'naturally' assume roles that are more-or-less traditional, in contrast to Unitarians, often under feminist influence, for whom just about anything goes. As well, the Baha'i governing body, the Universal House of Justice, is still led by a coterie of men only. In any case, Subud people, especially in Chicagoland, are well aware of the Baha'i Faith and refer to it regularly. Wilmette, to the North of Chicago, is where the Baha'i House of Worship, aka Baha'i Temple, is located, one of the most beautiful buildings in the world and a major tourist attraction. And, after all, despite some important differences, each religion shares a common view of the religions of the world; each is an "ecumenical faith" in which spiritual truth is recognized in a variety of religions and acknowledged as good and blessed whatever is may be called in any given culture. And both have roots in Islam, Sufism in particular. To continue with what Bei Dawai said: "The creation of a Bahá'í subgroup within Unitarian Universalism seems significant. According to Stetson, some fifty people have written to express their support for the Unitarian Universalist Bahai Association (formerly the Unitarian Bahai Association), which has a five-member board, and has applied for recognition by the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. The group's Facebook page has about 70 friends at this writing, while about 200 have signed up for a related Yahoo group. The U(U)BA is not to be confused with Derrick Evanson's Unitarian Baha'i Federation." As the review of Dawai's article points out: "UUs are similar to Subudites in that all personal belief systems are accepted" and "each individual has their own unique path, guided by spirit." While this view is not exactly what you will find in the Chicago church that Barack Obama attended "every week" during the Jermiah Wright years, it is reasonably close. The question is whether Obama had any dealings with Subud in the time he lived in Chicago. So far there is no definitive proof, however, there is considerable circumstantial evidence in the form of a lengthy article by Alan Jones for July 13, 2015, entitled: Loretta Fuddy, Subud, Bill Ayers, UIC's Soviet propaganda guru, PLO, UN. Obama logo designer and CIA's MKULTRA While parts of the research are not relevant to the issues discussed here, most of it clearly sheds light on elements of the Obama story that most people overlook. What follows are verbatim quotes from Alan Jones' work. clearly there are connections to Obama and several levels: Loretta 'Deliana' Fuddy, [was the] former Hawaii state director of health and Subud USA national chairperson (2006-2008) Fuddy simultaneously managed large amounts of money for the Hawaii Department of Health and for SUBUD USA. Fuddy died following a bizarre Pacific ocean plane ‘crash’ off the coast of Molokai, Hawaii, on December 11, 2013. [She was] the Hawaii state director of health and Subud USA national chairperson (2006-2008). (Fuddy is perhaps best know for her role in authenticating Obama's birth records, just prior to her accidental death). UIC Professor Emeritus of Art and Design History, Dr. Victor Margolin and his wife Sylvia ‘Shoshanah’ Margolin live in the Chicago area and have long been members of Subud. Dr. Margolin has also worked as a professor in Havana, Cuba. [The exact school is listed as the Instituto Superior de Diseño Industrial.] Victor served as treasurer of the group in the recent past. Victor Margolin, who graduated from Columbia University, is an expert on the history of political propaganda graphic design, and his Union Institute Ph.D. dissertation focused on the work of top Soviet propaganda graphic design artists. ‘Shoshanah’ Margolin was named Subud USA national chairperson in 2012, the position held by Fuddy from 2006-2008. Victor Margolin’s father Benjamin Margolin worked for Nelson Rockefeller and for the Pan American Health Organization (part of the United Nations). Victor Margolin’s mother Olya Margolin was involved in a scandalous 1976 secret meeting in Washington, D.C. with representatives of the P.L.O, uncovered by Wolf Blitzer [then] at the Jerusalem Post. Dr. Margolin's Ph.D. dissertation, according to his résumé, focused on Soviet propaganda artist El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian artist who supported the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, and graphic designer Alexander Rodchenko, who Stalin called in 1935 "a hero of the revolution" Barack Obama 2008 campaign logo lead designer Sol Sender has given presentations at graphic design conferences in Chicago and China where Victor Margolin was also speaking. Margolin has known School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor Maud Lavin since the early 1990s. Lavin and Sender worked together “team teaching” graphic design classes as early as 2003. Obama logo designer Sol Sender’s father Ramón Sender, co-produced the “Trips Festival” with Ken Kesey (author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”). Kesey was involved in the CIA’s PROJECT MKULTRA LSD experiments at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. Kesey was a close friend of Timothy Leary (broken out of jail by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn and the Weather Underground) ----- As a personal note for Kesey fans, I have no interest whatsoever in his work. It may be that he is well known in Eugene, Oregon, but basically I could care less. What I know of Kesey's values has given me a very negative impression. He has some relevance in the Obama story, however. ----- Subud USA National Chair Loretta ‘Deliana’ Fuddy and future Subud USA National Chair Sylvia ‘Shoshanah’ Margolin met at a Subud USA board of directors meeting in Portland, OR on November 10, 2010. Eleven weeks later Fuddy was appointed acting director of the Hawaii Department of Health. "Sylvia [Shoshana] and Victor Margolin” and “Bill Ayers & Bernardine Dohrn ” are both listed as donors in the Crossroads Fund in 2006... Margolin suggests ways in which Radical America, the journal of Bill Ayer’ s ‘Weather Underground’ Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), could have employed graphic design elements to better deliver their message: Victor Margolin’s colleague Maud Lavin was working with Sol Sender at least three years before Mode Project approached Sender about designing the Obama Logo for David Axelrod’s Obama election campaign team. Also part of the picture was Steve Heller, the noted graphic artist at the New York Times. As the article points out, two publications of his are relevant in this context: Design for Obama. Posters for Change: A Grassroots Anthology, authored by Steven Heller and edited by Aaron Perry-Zucker and film director Spike Lee, published in 2009, and "The Evolution of Design," a book review Heller wrote for The Atlantic about Victor Margolin’s World History of Design. Heller is an interesting man, a Jew who is an expert on uses of the swastika symbol in Western culture and history. Not that he knows much at all about swastika use in Asia, however, where the device is ubiquitous. He basically is ignorant of that subject. As a "pure"graphic artist he has a similar shortcoming. As I wrote him back in 2003, his book about the history of design not only is essentially about America and Europe and little else, in terms of its treatment of design in the United States, he is naively Manhattan-o-centric. He doesn't seem to think that there is much graphic art at all outside of Gotham. Or maybe he is so parochial that he has not bothered to do much research outside of New York City. Regardless, given his limitations, Heller knows his stuff. And he has a wealth of information available about the history of the Swastika as his 2000 book, The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption?, makes very clear. Indeed, Heller's opus is one of the two or three best currently available books about swastika symbolism independent of Nazi use that I know of, and I think I have read every such book. The first was Thomas Wilson's 1894 volume commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution, The Swastika: The Earliest Known Symbol, and Its Migrations. The reason for my writing to Heller was to discuss his book and my hope to persuade him to join my new club, then still mostly an idea in my mind back in 2003, intended to restore the meaning of the swastika as it was prior to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. In America until about 1930 swastikas were everywhere in our culture, which can still be seen in various place names that survive from that era, like Swastika Mountain here in Oregon about 40 miles from where I live, Swastika Lake in Wyoming, the village of Swastika in upstate New York not far from Plattsburgh, and the legendary ghost town of Swastika in New Mexico, near Raton. There is also a thriving town called Swastika located in Ontario Province in Canada, to the north of Lake Superior, a few miles from Kirkland. The ceiling of the foyer of the Supreme Court building features a large number of swastikas; the Senate hearing room brasswork features about 30 swastikas; the interior of City Hall in San Francisco features a large number of swastikas; the ceiling of the Astoria post office features many swastikas; the floor of Garfield's tomb in Cleveland features swastikas. The Swastika Club of America, also known as Swastika Club International, is anti-Nazi and will not knowingly accept Nazis or neo-Nazis as members. The group remains modest in size, around 30 members; of this number about 1/4th are Hindus. Others are history buffs, artists, and collectors of Americana. Several members live in Europe or South America. I also think that my qualifications for organizing the club to begin with are respectable. My minor in college was Art History. I have written various materials about the history of swastikas, including a front page story that appeared in the New Mexico Independent, an Albuquerque newspaper, in 1983. I also gave a two hour lecture on the subject at the University of Oregon in 2008 which was televised on CTV, community television, that year. Possibly my collection of swastika images is the largest in the world. Almost all, 99. 9 %, have nothing to do with Nazis. The collection. now stands at about 5000 items. One club member, in London, has his own collection of similar magnitude. Two other members, one in Argentina and one in Portugal, also have very large collections. Included in my archives are some great pictures of ornate crosses used in Ethiopian churches that feature swastikas as integral to Christian art. However, my favorite photo shows a graduation from a Buddhist kindergarten in Hong Kong in ca. 2010. On stage with maybe 20 little children were about 20 Buddhist swastika flags. Very colorful. And utterly charming. Pictures of the Baha'i Temple near Chicago also show swastikas. Look it up on Google images, and inspect the designs on the exterior pylons; they all include swastikas. Hindus use two official flags, one features a swastika. The Red Swastika Society, the Buddhist version of the Red Cross, as the name indicates, uses swastika emblems. So do the Jains in some of their art, and so does Falun Gong. Also look at examples of Greek and Roman and Renaissance art some time. Swastikas are everywhere. As they are in the Vatican and in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. As well, archaeological remains of the Hulda Gate of the Second Temple include a large number of swastikas, and a very conspicuous swastika appears in mosaic tilework at Ein Gedi synagogue of ca. 200 AD. If the mass media cannot understand the fact that the people of India and China and Japan and Korea and Indonesia, etc, have made use of swastikas for at least 3000 years, all that would indicate would be the abysmal ignorance of most news people. For that matter, even if none have background in Asian culture, about 100 American Indian tribes use some version of swastikas in tribal arts. Most American journalists are blissfully unaware of this fact, either. It is long past the time when the media should have stopped demonizing the swastika as if Hitler deserves the last word on the subject. He deserves no such thing. Which is a long way to say that Steve Heller is a swastika expert. Mr. Heller has connections to graphic arts used in one or the other of Obama's campaigns for president. The implications should be clear to anyone who might be tempted to smear Heller or anyone else who actually is informed about the history of swastika symbolism. And Heller is a friend of Victor Margolin, a Subud follower, who has direct connections with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Margolin also is connected to the circle of graphic artists who worked for the 2008 Obama campaign. Margolin's wife, Shoshanah is an important figure in Subud Chicago and the national Subud organization, as we have seen. Did Obama maintain Subud relationships during his 2008 campaign and afterwards? Obviously he did. And it is very likely that he never abandoned Subud all of the years from Hawaii onward even if he added other interests like hard Left -Communist- politics. Indeed, from available evidence it seems that, contrary to Subud in Indonesia, Subud in the United States was anything but anti-Communist. To return to Alan Jones' research: "Fuddy appeared to be active with Subud in San Diego around the same time or within a year after the time when Barack Obama was attending Occidental College in Los Angeles. The distance between Pasadena, CA (where Obama lived in an off-campus apartment with his Pakistani roommate in 1981) and San Diego is approximately 135 miles , a two hour drive on I-5." "Muhammad Subuh, the Indonesian founder of Subud known by his followers as ‘Bapak’, held several talks in Los Angeles in July, 1981." As a side note, a good number of the first generation of Subud devotees in Chicago were associated in some way with a Guerjiff group that morphed into Subud; also involved at the time were various people who had been associated with Theosophy. Personally, I have no interest at all in Guerjiff and my only interest in Theosophy outside of historical curiosity and the role it played in what we now call the "Religious Left" in the early decades of the 20th century, is with the swastika symbolism it makes use of, and made use of from the late 19th century onward, which the group borrowed from Hindu symbolism of India. A final subtopic concerns the role of Oprah Winfrey in all of this. See the May 9, 2015 article by Bethany Blankley in Patheos, under the title: "Is Oprah Teaching Subud?" Exactly what to make of the information in the article is open to debate but this is hardly the work of a standard-issue conspiracy theory looney and is passed along for any value it may have. It seems that Oprah, who officially still is a Baptist, has begun to mix her message, which at least has had some connection with Christian beliefs, with “New Age meditation exercises.” According to Jennifer LeClaire, what we now have is an "all inclusive, interfaith message emphasizing rhythm and vibration" that stresses “inner transformation,” something that fits in with Subud. This, in turn, hardly unexpected given Bapak's Muslim background and identification with Sufi Islam, was used by Oprah at a large gathering at Stanford University to surreptitiously introduce everyone to the shahada, namely, the Muslim affirmation of faith in Islam. That is, Oprah's instructions to the crowd of 1000 to “… put your thumb to your middle finger and gather your other fingers around, and let’s feel the vibration and pulse of your personal energy as you take three deep breaths with me,” she was making a formal gesture known to Muslims worldwide as the shahada. This is both a ritual and an affirmation of the belief: “There is but one God, Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.” This same gesture was made to various diplomats from Africa by Barack Obama in 2014 at the African Leaders Conference in Washington, DC. As Le Claire continued: "The “inner contact” to which Oprah referred is one aspect of the latihan kejiwaan, a practice taught by Subud founder Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo. He described the latihan as spontaneous “inner teaching,” during which he claimed “a primordial Power hidden within human beings and all creatures,” appears coming from “the spirit of God.” So much for one particular public appearance by Oprah Winfrey. What also needs to be taken into account is the fact that she donates large amounts of money to a variety of schools in Africa. Most of these schools "are part of an international SUBUD network supported by Susila [Subud] foundations." Supposedly, something I have not been able to confirm, George Soros gives financial support to other Subud organizations, some in Indonesia and a small number of organizations in the United States including one major institution in Colorado, the Crestone/Baca community. ----- Lastly, to cite Alan Jones' research again, Subud "continues to maintain a religious compound in Front Royal, Virginia, about an hour's drive from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia." Many other organizations are also in easy commuting distance from Langley but in case this fact has any significance it is reported here. ----- All of which says that when Obama refers to Islam he actually is discussing the Subud interpretation of Islam. That interpretation denies outright major parts of Muslim history, it falsifies actual Muslim practices in use now and in the past, it distorts orthodox Muslim values to make them seem to be no different than Subud values, and it misrepresents the message of the Koran, a book that Obama never seems to have read. But this interpretation is regarded as "true" Islam. In reality, orthodox Islam emphasizes violent jihad, it denigrates Christian religion and falsifies its basic teachings, it features extreme anti-Semitism (Judaeophobia), it approves human slavery and sex slavery, is allows for and sometimes relies upon violence and intimidation to get its point across, it is misogynist like no other major religion, and it is intolerant of all other religions, some more than others, but in every case non-Muslim faiths are regarded as inferior and destined to be replaced by Islam. Is Obama a Muslim? You can now answer that question for yourself. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
