Freedom Watch's Klayman Makes Birther Beliefs Explicit in Radio Interview
Right-wing activist Larry Klayman, founder of Freedom Watch, has hinted in the past at support of “birther” conspiracy theories, such as when he helped WorldNetDaily sue Esquire for satirizing “birthers.” Last week, in a radio interview, Klayman made his support explicit.
“We have a president who was elected fraudulently who wasn’t even a natural born citizen,” Klayman asserted during an interview Friday on Fox News Radio with liberal host Alan Colmes, who shook his head at this remark and asked Klayman if he thought the president was born in Hawaii.
“I believe he was born in Kenya, the evidence points to that,” Klayman replied.
Colmes noted that in fact Obama’s birth was recorded in contemporaneous notices published in two separate Hawaii newspapers. Klayman explained that those were “ads” placed by his parents in attempt to claim citizenship for their son.
“Alan, I’m not still a birther, these are the facts,” Klayman said. “Even if he was born in the United States, many people in Hawaii place these ads in to try to get permanent residency or citizenship. Hawaii is the most corrupt state in the United States...."
“American citizenship is valuable,” he continued. “Wouldn’t your kid want to be an American citizen rather than a Kenyan?”
In reality, of course, those birth notices published in the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin weren’t advertisements at all. Rather, they were standard newspaper birth announcements, common during this era, collected by newspaper staff reporters who gathered birth records from local hospitals (a practice that has gradually vanished from most newspapers today). In other words, these newspaper announcements stand as independent corroboration that Obama was born in a Honolulu hospital.
Klayman also went on to claim during the interview that Obama is secretly a Muslim who “favors Muslim interests over Christian and Jewish interests”. Colmes demanded that he substantiate such a claim.
“Well, number one, his dad was Muslim,” said Klayman. “Number two, he wears a ring that says my only God is Allah. He cancelled the National Day of Prayer in the White House to observe Ramadan and endorse the Ground Zero Mosque. He has been continually hostile toward Israel in six years.”
Colmes then proceeded to knock down each of these claims factually, observing that Klayman was collecting and parroting “old wives’ tales” that had all been proven untrue.
Klayman was undaunted, and indeed continued in the same vein. “Alan, you’re Jewish, you understand what I’m talking about,” he said. “You know, Jewish people here, I’ll tell you something, you walk around Beverly Hills, California, or any other place, people are changing their opinion of this president. They believe he’s an anti-Semite. He hangs out with Reverend Wright. Previously with Derrick Bell, who’s a vehement anti-Semite and a law professor. Louis Farrakhan is one of his friends.”
Klayman concluded that “Obama in his heart is not a Christian.”
The interview is reflective of Klayman’s increasingly extremist approach to the Obama presidency. Last November, he led a small demonstration outside the White House in which he demanded that the president “come out with his hands up.” It was a spectacular failure.
