EXCLUSIVE: ’2016 Obama’s America’ Filmmaker Reacts To President’s Slam; Looking For Network To Air Before Election; Says Mainstream Media Refusing Coverage
By DOMINIC PATTEN | Tuesday September 11, 2012 @ 4:39pm
’2016: Obama’s America’ Docu Slammed By President’s Campaign As “Lies”
BREAKING… EXCLUSIVE: Dinesh D’Souza is the conservative author of the best-seller The Roots Of Obama’s Rage which was the basis for the #2 political documentary of all time 2016 Obama’s America. He is also its co-director. He answers today’s slam on the film by the Obama-Biden campaign, which comes just as the movie is hot in battleground states and its producers are looking for a network to air it before the November election. D’Souza attacks the mainstream media for “refusing” coverage:
DEADLINE: What is your reaction to today’s Obama-Biden campaign slam of 2016 Obama’s America??
DINESH D’SOUZA: “I welcome Obama’s critique of the film. He has probably figured out that he cannot ignore it any longer. Obama’s response is a characteristic mix of name calling and false allegations. Some of the claims he makes refer to things that are not even in the film. Elsewhere Obama just gets it wrong. For example, he disputes that he funded $2 billion in Brazilian oil exploration. In reality, Obama has given billions of dollars not only to Brazil but also to Colombia and Mexico to drill for oil. On March 19, 2011, Obama gave a speech in Brazil in which he deplored the legacy of colonialism, promised technology and support for Brazilian energy development, and concluded “when you are ready to start selling we want to be one of your best customers”. The facts in the film stand up very well to the closest scrutiny. I think people should see 2016 and make up their own minds.
DEADLINE: What do you think of the criticism the film has received?
D’SOUZA: The criticism of the film actually bothers me less than the neglect of the film. If I were Michael Moore and I were to make a film that was the No. 2 political documentary of all time, I would be on every network. I would be on Meet The Press, and I would be profiled in The New York Times, and I would be all over MSNBC. Instead large sectors of the press are refusing to cover the film. They are just pretending it doesn’t exist.
DEADLINE: What is your response to charges that you are simply an anti-Obama propagandist?
D’SOUZA: I tried very hard with this film to make an intelligent film with credible sources and new information. I’m a college president [D’Souza in 2010 was named the president of The King’s College, a Christian college located in New York City], I’ve been a fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the American Enterprise Institute, so what is kind of funny is in a guy like Michael Moore we have a true propagandist and a true conspiracy theorist. A guy who is fast and loose with the facts. My film was to some degree inspired by Fahrenheit 9/11. In the sense that I remember that Michael Moore dropped that film in the middle of the 2004 campaign and it had a big impact. But nevertheless, I set out to make very different type of film than Michael Moore. One that is, first of all, not just preaching to the converted. And second, one that doesn’t insult the intelligence of the audience. And I really think that is actually a large part also of the film’s appeal. That even though the left says it’s propaganda, it’s a risky attack on the film because when people go to see it, they actually see whether they agree or disagree that it is not propaganda. Whatever your politics, you are going to come away from this film saying at least, “Hey, I do know a whole bunch of things about Obama I didn’t know 90 minutes ago.”
DEADLINE: How do you respond to claims that the film is racist?
D’SOUZA: There have been some factual attempts to puncture the film but those I think have not worked. So now we have the sleezeball attack. Basically an attempt to blacken my name and imply the film is some sort of a birther type film, which it most emphatically is not, or to suggest that there is some racial element in the film. Whereas in reality I go out of my way to diffuse the race issue to say this is not about race. What Obama is about, in my opinion, is he is a Global redistributionist. He’s pursuing reparations but it’s not racial reparations. It’s global reparations for the sins and conquest of colonism. So the film is manifestly not racial. Now it does explain that part of Obama’s appeal is that he, you know, offers White America the certificate of racial absolution, if you will. That he makes people feel good about voting for him, as if by doing that they are somehow transcending America’s racial past. …But that hardly makes the film a racial film. That’s simply part of the film’s intelligent analysis of what’s going on out there.
DEADLINE: You have been accused of saying that the President doesn’t have America’s best interests at heart.
D’SOUZA: Look, what I say is it’s not that Obama hates America. It’s not that he’s a traitor, that he’s a secret Muslim, that he’s a Manchurian Candidate. He simply subscribes to an ideology that thinks it would be good for America to have a diminished economy and a diminished role in the world. In other words, Obama is all about what he perceives as global justice. And global justice to him means a redistribution of wealth and power away from America and towards the rest of the world. That’s his ideology. He thinks it would be good for America to have a humbler role in the world. He thinks it would be good for America not to be No. 1 but to be No. 18 or No. 34 in the world. It’s part of his vision of global justice. Nowhere do I question his motives or say that he is a bad guy. Rather what I’m saying is these are his beliefs, this is his ideology.
DEADLINE: Why do you think the film has been successful at the box office?
D’SOUZA: I’ve been pleasantly surprised and thrilled by its success which I attribute to the deep hunger on the part of people for factual information about Obama, combined with a sense that the full story about Obama is not out there, combined with an intuitive sense that the mainstream media has not been doing its job in fully vetting Obama. So when people watch the film there is a powerful sense of “Wow, I didn’t know all this stuff” and “Why didn’t I know all this stuff because this information is really valuable in helping me think about Obama and the future of this country?” I also attribute it to the riveting Obama story. Obama has a fascinating story. I think there’s almost an element of Greek drama here of a boy who is left, abandoned by his father and goes on an odyssey to find his father and to find himself. I think it’s the storytelling element of the film that is part of makes it so effective. I wanted to make a film that didn’t look like a TV documentary but looked more like Out Of Africa. A beautiful shot film that would take you from Hawaii to Chicago to Indonesia to Kenya to tell the Obama story. So I feel very good about the quality of the film.
DEADLINE: Are you planning a sequel?
D’SOUZA: No, not a sequel about Obama. I’m excited about the idea of doing another film. But the topic that I’m thinking about has more to do with the search for God and the role of Christianity in the world rather than another film about Obama. It’s just an idea right now. I’ve written three books about this topic. It’s a topic that’s interested me for several years.
Interesting that for weeks this film has been widely attended and is gaining in credibility and reviews...and only now Obama realizes that he can't ignore it any longer....so now like everything else Obama does he demonizes it....I've seen it and I believe...if you haven't seen it, you need to see it TODAY!
Filmmakers call it "the movie the White House doesn't want you to see." Apparently, they're right.
Perhaps the president was hoping 2016: Obama’s America would come and go unnoticed like so many other political documentaries. But seven weeks after its opening, the film is still going strong, prompting Barack Obama to finally respond, which he has done through a lengthy entry at his campaign’s website that calls the movie “a deliberate distortion” of his “record and world view.”
The entry at BarackObama.com quotes from several negative reviews of the film and claims Dinesh D’Souza, who stars in the film based on his book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, has a “long history of attempting to add a veneer of intellectual respectability to fringe theories, conspiratorial fear-mongering and flat-out falsehoods.”
The entry is dated Sept. 5, just ahead of the weekend in which 2016: Obama’s America became the second-highest-grossing political documentary in history, behind only Fahrenheit 9/11, and the sixth-biggest documentary of any kind. The movie has earned $26 million domestically since opening July 13.
Among the movie’s inaccuracies, according to BarackObama.com:
1.“D’Souza falsely claimed that President Obama said he didn’t believe in American Exceptionalism.”
2. “D’Souza falsely asserted that President Obama funded $2 billion in Brazilian oil exploration even though numerous fact checkers and reporters have noted that President Obama had nothing to do with the loan."
3.“D’Souza falsely charged that President Obama backed Scotland’s release of the Lockerbie bomber only weeks after the Obama administration had put out a statement opposing Scotland’s decision.”
4. “D’Souza even claimed that President Obama passed the bank bailouts when the facts clearly show that it was President Bush who signed the Troubled Asset Relief Program into law in October 2008."
The film, which its marketers dubbed, “the movie the White House doesn’t want you to see,” was in 2,017 theaters during the weekend and is expected to be on the same number this coming weekend.
For good measure, the website entry also bashes some of Obama’s harshest critics: Tea Partiers.
“It should say enough about D’Souza’s credibility that a movie catering to the Tea Party attacks someone for allegedly ‘anti-colonial’ views,” the entry reads. “His attempts to hide his lies behind pseudo-scholarly presentation and glossy production values cannot withstand basic scrutiny. The facts show that 2016: Obama’s America is nothing more than an insidious attempt to dishonestly smear the President by giving intellectual cover to the worst in subterranean conspiracy theories and false, partisan attacks.”
‘2016: Obama‘s America’ Filmmaker Responds to President’s Attacks: ‘I Think They Are Scared — And They Have a Reason to Be’
Posted on September 11, 2012 at 8:34pm by Jason Howerton
In an exclusive interview with TheBlaze on Tuesday, Dinesh D’Souza, creator of “2016: Obama’s America,“ said President Barack Obama and his campaign are now attacking him because they are ”scared” of his documentary and what it reveals.
It’s true that with the 2012 presidential election just around the corner, Obama and his campaign can‘t be happy to see that D’Souza’s anti-Obama documentary is now the second biggest political documentary of all time, surpassing popular liberal productions like Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” and Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”
That may be why Obama’s so-called “Truth Team” attacked D’Souza and his film openly and aggressively on BarackObama.com last week, calling it a “deliberate distortion of President Obama and his worldview” and D’Souza a “right-wing” author peddling conspiracy theories. Or perhaps “2016” has grown so popular that the Obama campaign can’t ignore it any longer.
Regardless, it is clear that D‘Souza’s film has caught the attention of the White House and its inhabitant.
D’Souza sat down with TheBlaze to respond to allegations coming from the Obama campaign that his documentary provides a “distorted” and dishonest view of Obama and his past.
Point-by-point D‘Souza seemingly debunked the Obama team’s attacks, some based on topics that were not even mentioned in “2016: Obama’s America” and are found in his best-selling book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” which the film is based on.
“I think they are scared — and they have a reason to be scared,” D’Souza told TheBlaze. “But I certainly welcome the Obama team getting into this because it seems like the old strategy has completely failed, you know: Ignore it, pray really hard and hope it goes away.”
For argument’s sake, D‘Souza addressed the Obama campaign’s attacks one by one:
1. D’Souza falsely claimed that President Obama said he didn’t believe in American exceptionalism—when in fact the President has repeatedly praised America’s exceptional identity and core values.
“First of all, the documentary doesn’t claim that,” D’Souza said. “But I do claim that in an earlier book called ‘The Roots of Obama’s Rage,‘ that he doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism. I say that based upon the fact that Obama was asked about that specifically in 2009 and he said we are no more exceptional than the Brits and the Greeks, everybody thinks they are exceptional. And so the meaning of Obama’s response is, if everyone believes they are exceptional, no one really is.”
2. D’Souza falsely asserted that President Obama funded $2 billion in Brazilian oil exploration even though numerous fact checkers and reporters have noted that President Obama had “nothing to do with the loan.”
D’Souza said not only is that true, but he actually “understated the case.”
“Well, the Obama administration has not only approved the $2 billion in subsidies to Brazil, but after that the Obama administration has given billions of dollars to Mexico and Columbia to drill for oil, so I actually understated the case,” he told TheBlaze.
The money was approved by the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which handles these types of transactions, D’Souza explained, but the bank falls under the Obama administration, leaving the president ultimately responsible.
“So this is a case where the Obama administration is refusing to take responsibility for its own actions,” he added.
3. D’Souza falsely charged that President Obama backed Scotland’s release of the Lockerbie bomber only weeks after the Obama administration had put out a statement opposing Scotland’s decision to return Abdelbaset al-Megrahi to Libya and sent a letter to the Scottish government raising the administration’s strong objection.
Firstly, there is no reference to the Lockerbie bomber in “2016,” according to D’Souza.
“This is a recycled White House attack on my book, ‘The Roots of Obama’s Rage,’ in which I refer to a memo that was sent by the Obama administration telling the Scottish government that if they were going to release the Lockerbie bomber, Obama would prefer that he be kept in Scotland and not sent back to Libya,” the best-selling author said.
He continued: “So basically, Scottish officials understood that to mean that the Obama administration was giving them the green light to release the guy as long as they kept an eye on him… that‘s how the Scottish government read Obama’s memo. So my original report was correct, and in any case, that has nothing to do with the film.”
4. D’Souza even claimed that President Obama passed the bank bailouts when the facts clearly show that it was President Bush who signed the Troubled Asset Relief Program into law in October 2008.
D’Souza says he never claimed that President Obama was alone in passing the bank bailouts, however, for President Obama to argue he did not approve of the action is “disingenuous.”
“That is true but a technicality,” he said. “The fact of the matter is, Obama was included in those discussions, he approved of them. He said publicly that he supported the bailout and subsequently the stimulus. For Obama now to disclaim responsibility for things that he has signed off on seems a bit disingenuous.”
The fact that the Obama White House is annoyed with the success of “2016” only shows that they are “worried,” D’Souza told TheBlaze.
“They have succeeded in keeping these facts off the public menu all this time and now they feel like they have to work really hard to prevent people from seeing the film,” he said, taking a deep breath before continuing.
“We are asking one fundamental question: who is Barack Obama? We are investigating the president’s background, his ideology and the implications of his ideology for the future. We are a truth telling team ourselves and I guess his truth telling team is trying to prevent us from getting our message out.”
D‘Souza attributes the documentary’s overwhelming success to the nation’s desire to know more factual information about Obama. Even pro-Obama people have seen the movie and marveled at how much they learned about Obama that they didn’t know before, he explained.
“I think that the film goes into territory that has been previously unexplored. In fact, it even goes into territory that the Romney campaign won’t touch,” he added.
D’Souza told Deadline that the producers of “2016: Obama’s America” are trying to find a network to air the documentary before the November elections. He expressed his frustration over the mainstream media ignoring the film.
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