'We have the attitude that my oil is under your sand, and I'm willing to end your life'

The U.S. is reverting to "colonial relationships" to "impose" its will on other countries through "economic warfare," asserted Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn.

Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, made the remarks at a so-called spiritual conference led by a slew of extremists, many with close ties to Obama, including a Marxist who reportedly compared the tea party movement to Hitler.

"Diplomatically, we have got to understand that it's not about imposing will upon countries through economic warfare, like all these sanctions that we're so fond of," Ellison said to a conference led by the Network of Spiritual Progressives, or NSP.

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Continued Ellison: "Equity has got to be how we interact with the rest of the world. And I'm telling you that many of the problems that we are facing today find their roots in colonial relationships that are fundamentally premised on inequity.

"And the reactions from people of what we used to refer to as the Third World. ... Much of what we are seeing is a reaction to historic colonial relationships and neocolonial relationships," he said.

Ellison said nothing is wrong with trade and commerce from a progressive standpoint, but "something is wrong, however, when we have the attitude that my oil is under your sand, and so I'm gonna get it from you, and I'm willing to end your life to do it and ruin your society to do it."

Ellison defined his concept of equality: "When we engage with another country or another region in the world that we're not looking simply to how to get the most and give the least."

"How to get their sugar," he continued. "How to get their oil. How to get their uranium. How to get their stuff and give 'em nothing or give the elites of their country a little bit so that they can keep the others in line."

Ellison went on to support continued dialogue with Iran.

He declared, "When we discuss Iran, we should be discussing what happened in 1953."

Ellison was referring to the overthrow of the government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh aided by the intelligence agencies of the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

"And you can't tell me that 30 years of not talking and 30 years of sanctions and then a few months of dialogue is going to solve the problem," he stated.

"It is going to take a little longer than that to work out the problem and we should not allow these neocons to abandon dialogue because it didn't work within a finger snap."

WND reported yesterday that at the same conference, Ellison called for the U.S. border to become an "irrelevancy."

WND has learned the conference was led by a number of extremists who have had close relationships with Obama.

One of the main speakers was avowed Marxist Michael Lerner, editor of the pro-Palestinian Tikkun Magazine. Lerner has been accused of using the magazine to justify Palestinian terror and has written articles in which he suggested the 9/11 attacks were a response to U.S. policies.

According to an account of the conference by Baltimore Sun columnist Marta Mossburg, who attended the two-day event, Lerner compared tea party activists to Hitler at least five times.

Mossburg wrote that Lerner used the conference to bolster support for Obama.

"We're here to support Obama. …We're here to help him to be the Obama Americans thought they elected," she quoted Lerner as saying.

Lerner said Obama attended Tikkun meetings in Chicago and used to read the magazine, according to conversations he had with Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Lerner identifies himself as an ordained rabbi. However, as Discover the Networks notes, Lerner received a controversial private rabbinic ordination by "Jewish Renewal" rabbis, whose ordinations are recognized only by those within the Jewish Renewal community and the out-of-mainstream Reconstructionist Judaism.

Orthodox Judaism, the Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis, and the Conservative movement's Rabbinical Assembly all consider such ordinations invalid.

Lerner was an activist in the 1960s anti-war movement, the Students for a Democratic Society, from which the Weather Underground domestic terrorist organization splintered.

Meanwhile, a co-chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives conference at which Ellison made his remarks is Princeton professor Cornel West, an avowed Marxist and honorary member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Obama named West, whom he has called a personal friend, to the Black Advisory Council of his presidential campaign. West was a key point man between Obama's campaign and the black community.

West served as an adviser on Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March and is a self-described personal friend of the Nation of Islam leader. West authored two books on race with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who was at the center of the controversy last year in which Obama criticized Gates' treatment by police outside his home after a report of a burglary.

Another speaker at the Network of Spiritual Progressives event was Heather Booth, founder of the Midwest Academy, which teaches the community organizing tactics of radical Saul Alinsky.

WND was first to report that the Woods Fund, a Chicago nonprofit on which Obama served as paid director alongside Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, provided funding to Midwest Academy.

WND also broke the story that the executive director of Midwest Academy was part of the team that developed and delivered a group of volunteers for President Obama's 2008 campaign.

Also, in August 1998, Obama participated with Booth in a panel discussion following the opening performance in Chicago of the play "The Love Song of Saul Alinsky," a work described by the Chicago Sun-Times as "bringing to life one of America's greatest community organizers."

Ellison's entry into Congress drew attention when he posed with his hand on a Quran instead of a Bible after taking his oath of office in January 2007. His campaign was bolstered by the work of staff members of the controversial Council on American-Islamic Relations.

As WND reported last year, Ellison defended CAIR when members of Congress sought to investigate whether CAIR was placing interns with members of strategic security committees, as revealed in the book "Muslim Mafia" by Dave Gaubatz and Paul Sperry.

Ellison read a statement in Congress criticizing the call for an investigation.

"The idea that we should investigate Muslim interns as spies is a blow to the very principle of religious freedom that our founding fathers cherished so dearly," Ellison said.

"If anything, we should be encouraging all Americans to engage in the U.S. political process; to take part in, and to contribute to, the great democratic experiment that is America," he said.

U.S. prosecutors, however, believe CAIR, while claiming to be a civil-rights group, is actually a front group for Hamas and other terrorists. The Justice Department stated in September 2007 during its prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation in Dallas – the largest terror-financing case in history – that CAIR "has been identified by the government at trial as a participant in an ongoing and ultimately unlawful conspiracy to support a designated terrorist organization, a conspiracy from which CAIR never withdrew."

With research by Brenda J. Elliott

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