Camp Obama's anti-military trainer

WND has learned that a senior Obama campaign staffer involved in marshalling college students and other campaign volunteers to get out the vote tomorrow is an anti-military extremist who, even during the popular first Gulf war, steered minority youth away from service in the military.

Sen. Barack Obama hired Jamillah Muhammad, an early community organizer friend in Chicago, to help train young volunteers in the "ruthless" agitation tactics of the late socialist organizer Saul Alinsky. The training sessions have been held at something called "Camp Obama" inside the campaign's Chicago headquarters.

Muhammad, a black Muslim, led anti-military counseling in Chicago during the Gulf war to steer young blacks away from supposedly racist military recruiters who she claimed took advantage of their joblessness and poor education. Her Chicago Coalition of African-American Religious Women sponsored "peace clubs" and other youth-training programs as a non-military alternative for young minorities.

Her pacifist agenda dovetails with Obama's plan to slash military spending and shift national resources to nonmilitary service, creating an army of young community organizers, such as those who work for the radical nonprofit ACORN.

"We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set," Obama said at a July 2 speech in Colorado Springs, Colo. "We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

During the 1990-1991 Gulf war, Muhammad, also director of the Youth and Militarism Program, a branch of the Clergy and Laity Concerned in Chicago, battled campus military recruiters who she claimed targeted and exploited black youth. She said they "capitalize" on their financial desperation and therefore engage in a kind of "poverty draft."

"Once and for all, black women are saying, we're not sending our sons anymore," said Muhammad, who opposed the war. "Until things change for our children," the military is not going to get them.

"Eighty-eight to 90 percent of black Americans are opposed to the war because we continually find that our young people are considered the most expendable by United States government officials," Muhammad charged, adding that the Pentagon lies about the true number of blacks enlisted in the army. She claimed they made up as much as 60 percent of the ground forces during the Gulf war.

Muhammad says the black community rejects the government's foreign policy and believes that change in the country's socio-economic structure is coming.

"We have to support our troops from a different perspective than white people, because our soldiers are going to return home to the same lousy situation they left," she said. "Patriotism means something all together different for us."

Obama's pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright has also condemned the U.S. military, even claiming the 9/11 attacks were just punishment for military aggression in the world.

Muhammad added that black youths don't get the high-tech training the military advertises.

"The only involvement they may have with computers is unloading them off a truck," she said. "We send kids to the military, and they come out qualified to be janitors with a gun."

But, "They make it sound like the promised land," she said. "How is a kid supposed to resist that?"

Muhammad compared military recruiters to inner-city gang leaders.

"Show up in uniform, and you are somebody. That's the way the gangs recruit kids," she said. "They have their colors, and their jackets, and they are a part of something."

Muhammad also is a founder of African American Women for Choice, and served as director of resource and program development for Jesse Jackson's PUSH for Excellence in Chicago.

Muhammad worked with Obama as a community organizer in the housing projects on Chicago's South Side.

Obama hired his old friend and colleague as a senior trainer at his Camp Obama, which has trained more than 2,000 young campaign volunteers in the techniques of community organization originally popularized by radical Saul Alinsky in order to organize voters and help win the election. Alinsky was a street agitator who sought to "rub raw the sores of discontent" and provoke a socialist revolution in America.

Camp Obama's director is Jocelyn Woodards, another former Obama colleague who worked with him early last decade at an ACORN subsidiary to help get out the vote during Carol Moseley-Braun's Senate campaign.

Woodards has taught campers to "be absolutely ruthless" in turning out the vote for Obama.

Obama recently told supporters in Nevada, a hotly contested state, to sharpen their elbows in the final days of the campaign. Confront Republicans, he said, and "get in their faces."