Creepy O-cult video of the day: “Deliver us, Obama!”

By Michelle Malkin  
MichelleMalkin.com
 

I didn’t think you could top those schoolchildren substituting Obama for Jesus in their public school praise hymn.

Now, thanks to Naked Emperor News and Breitbart TV, we have video of community organizers led by the “Gamaliel Foundation” praying to The One as they lobby for “social justice” and health care for all.

“HEAR OUR CRY, OBAMA!”

“DELIVER US, OBAMA!”

And no, this is not an Onion parody:

Update: Ed Morrissey asks if it’s just bad acoustics. Are they saying “Obama” or “Oh, God?”

Here’s a little background about the Gamaliel Foundation from its history statement:

History of the Movement: This type of community organizing began in Chicago in 1938. Saul Alinsky created the “Back of the Yards Community Council”. The organization operated in the shadow of Chicago’s stock yards. The community was beset with poverty, political corruption, gangs, disease, deteriorating housing and inadequate schools; but most of all it was beset with a sense of powerlessness. The organization successfully engaged people to change the conditions of the community. Its motto was, “We shall decide our own destiny.” And to a large extent and for some time, they did just that. Many organizations were created utilizing the model of the Back of the Yards Council. Unfortunately most of those organizations have dissolved, become stagnant, parochial and marginalized; have evolved into social service, advocacy, or economic development corporations; or have become the fiefdoms of political hacks. The original mission of empowerment and expansion of democracy has, all too frequently, been lost. To insure the promise of community organizing, the Gamaliel Foundation was born.

History of the Gamaliel Foundation: The Gamaliel Foundation was originally established in 1968 to support the Contract Buyers League, an African American organization fighting to protect homeowners on Chicago’s Westside who had been discriminated against by banks and saving and loan institutions. In l986, the Foundation was reorganized as an organizing institute providing resources to community leaders in the efforts to build and maintain powerful organizations in low income communities. The Gamaliel Foundation has grown from three to more than forty-five affiliates in seventeen states and in three provinces of South Africa.

And here’s the background on the Gamaliel/Obama connection from the foundation’s Gregory A. Galluzzo:

President elect Barack Obama has throughout his political career made repeated references to his time as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. It is important that we all understand the connection between Barack and Gamaliel. In l980 Mary Gonzales and I created the United Neighborhood Organization of Chicago.

In l982 we decided that we needed some expertise from someone who had done faith based community organizing. A person who had worked as such an organizer in Illinois and in Pennsylvania approached me about joining our organizing team. His name was Jerry Kellman. Jerry helped Mary and myself become better organizers. While he was working for us, he connected with a group called the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) operating on the South Side in the South Suburbs of Chicago, and in Indiana. CCRC had been formed in response to the massive shut down of major industry and the resulting job loss and all of the concomitant social tragedies.

Jerry and I reached an understanding that we would support his work in the South Suburbs so that he could become director of his own project. It was Jerry Kellman who put an ad in the New York Times about an organizing position in the Chicago area. Barack responded; Jerry interviewed him and offered him a position. Barack accepted. Almost at this very time, Jerry propositioned an old friend of his to return to Chicago from Texas and work with him in this new organizing venture. His friend was Mike Kruglik. Mike and Jerry were the first mentors of Barack in organizing.

CCRC, which spanned communities in Northwest Indiana, the South Suburbs and parts of the City of Chicago proved to be unwieldy. Jerry and I decided to split it into three parts. Barack would work to found a new independent project in the South side of Chicago, Mike Kruglik would be the director of the South Suburban Action Conference and Jerry Kellman would develop organizing in Northwest Indiana. At that point Jerry asked me to become Barack’s consultant.

And at this time we were just creating the Gamaliel Foundation. I met with Barack on a regular basis as he incorporated the Developing Communities Project, as he moved the organization into action and as he developed the leadership structure for the organization. He would write beautiful and brilliant weekly reports about his work and the people he was engaging.

When Barack decided to go to Harvard Law School, he approached John McKnight, a professor at Northwestern and a Gamaliel Board member for a letter of recommendation. When Barack was leaving he made sure that Gamaliel was the formal consultant to the organization that he had created and to the staff that he had hired.

Barack has acknowledged publicly that he had been the director of a Gamaliel affiliate. He has supported Gamaliel throughout the years by conducting training both at the National Leadership Training events and at the African American Leadership Commission. He has also attended our public meetings.

We are honored and blessed by the connection between Barack and Gamaliel.

And here’s Stanley Kurtz last November on Gamaliel and Obama:

The same separatist, anti-American theology of liberation that was so boldly and bitterly proclaimed by Obama’s pastor is shared, if more quietly, by Obama’s Gamaliel colleagues. The operative word here is “quietly.” Gamaliel specializes in ideological stealth, and Obama, a master student of Gamaliel strategy, shows disturbing signs of being a sub rosa radical himself. Obama’s legislative tactics, as well as his persistent professions of non-ideological pragmatism, appear to be inspired by his radical mentors’ most sophisticated tactics. Not only has Obama studied, taught, and apparently absorbed stealth techniques from radical groups like Gamaliel and ACORN, but in his position as a board member of Chicago’s supposedly nonpartisan Woods Fund, he quietly funneled money to his radical allies — at the very moment he most needed their support to boost his political career. It’s high time for these shadowy, perhaps improper, ties to receive a dose of sunlight.

The connections are numerous. Gregory Galluzzo, Gamaliel’s co-founder and executive director, served as a trainer and mentor during Obama’s mid-1980s organizing days in Chicago. The Developing Communities Project, which first hired Obama, is part of the Gamaliel network. Obama became a consultant and eventually a trainer of community organizers for Gamaliel. (He also served as a trainer for ACORN.) And he has kept up his ties with Gamaliel during his time in the U.S. Senate.

The Gamaliel connection appears to supply a solution to the riddle of Obama’s mysterious political persona. On one hand, he likes to highlight his days as a community organizer — a profession with proudly radical roots in the teachings of Chicago’s Saul Alinsky, author of the highly influential text Rules for Radicals. Obama even goes so far as to make the community-organizer image a metaphor for his distinctive conception of elective office. On the other hand, Obama presents himself as a post-ideological, consensus-minded politician who favors pragmatic, common-sense solutions to the issues of the day. How can Obama be radical and post-radical at the same time? Perhaps by deploying Gamaliel techniques. Gamaliel organizers have discovered a way to fuse their Left-extremist political beliefs with a smooth, non-ideological surface of down-to-earth pragmatism: the substance of Jeremiah Wright with the appearance of Norman Vincent Peale. Could this be Obama’s secret?


 

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