When he was a 19-year-old sophomore at Occidental College, two of Barack Obama’s poems — “Underground” and “Pop” — found their way into the spring 1981 edition of the college’s literary magazine, Feast. The poem that interested me most was “Pop,” a poem that I correctly deduced was about Obama’s mentor, the communist pornographer Frank Marshall Davis.
Well traveled in the world of Islam, Obama may have intended the poem to be an allegory.
American Spectator editor Paul Kengor came to the same conclusion. So persuasive is this interpretation that Pulitzer-Prize winning author David Garrow, in his 2017 Obama biography Rising Star, gave us two “hostile critics” backhanded credit for discovering an obvious truth that eluded the willfully blind literary establishment. (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: Chauvin Did Not Murder George Floyd)
I overlooked the poem “Underground,” however, and may have misjudged it. In my 2011 book Deconstructing Obama, I dismissed the poem as “goofy” and concluded, “Republishing this poem may have been the cruelest swipe an otherwise friendly media took at Obama during the campaign.” The poem follows:
UNDERGROUND
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.
These past few weeks, I am reminded how wrong I may have been about the young Obama’s intentions. I was first alerted to a darker interpretation of Obama’s poem by independent researcher Jim O’Hagan. I published his interpretation in a December 2012 article prophetically titled, “Will Hamas Push Obama’s ‘Apes’ Into Sea?.”
O’Hagan observed that the poem’s most conspicuous symbols, apes and figs, have a symbolic presence in the Quran. As Nan Jacques Zilberdik of Palestinian Media Watch points out, in three separate citations the Quran “tells of Allah turning Jews into apes and/or pigs.” In two of them, the reference is to apes alone. In Sura 7:166, for instance, the text reads, “So when they were insolent about that which they had been forbidden, We said to them, ‘Be apes, despised.’”
To show that the ape metaphor resonates to this day, Zilberdik cites a directive issued on October 7 by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades: “Break into the settlements, strike the sons of apes of pigs, kill everyone who is a settler, slaughter everyone who is Israeli, by Allah, they are the most cowardly among men.”
As to the fig, the Arabic word for it, At-Tin, is significant enough in the Quran to deserve its own Wikipedia page. Writes Muhammad Asad, the author of The Message of the Quran, “The ‘fig’ and the ‘olive’ symbolize, in this context, the lands in which these trees predominate, i.e., the countries bordering on the eastern part of the Mediterranean, especially Palestine and Syria.”
Well traveled in the world of Islam, Obama may have intended the poem to be an allegory. If so, a likely interpretation is that these belligerent apes, Israeli Jews, not only exploit the fig-rich land in which they have settled, but they also disrespect it. The apes “eat” the figs when not “stepping on” them.
From the Hamas perspective, the poem would seem to have a happy ending. The apes “tumble” into “the blue,” the sea, but only after howling and baring their fangs, a gesture of war. In Obama’s poem, the fate of Israel seems to fulfill the prophecy implicit in Isaiah 9:12, New Living Translation, “The Syrians from the east and the Philistines from the west will bare their fangs and devour Israel.” The next line is even more ominous: “But even then the LORD’s anger will not be satisfied. His fist is still poised to strike.”(READ MORE: Michelle Obama’s ‘Black Flight’ Problem)
More immediately, Israel’s predicted fate would satisfy those multiple thousands of protestors who have been calling these past few weeks for Israel’s elimination. The chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is hard to interpret as anything other than a call for genocide.
The Barack Obama of 2023 remains as superficially ambiguous on the subject of Israel as he was in 1981. In a lengthy statement earlier this week, Obama made a few perfunctory remarks about the “unspeakable brutality” perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, but he reserved very nearly all his finger wagging for Israel.
He called on Jews to acknowledge that many Palestinians “were not only displaced when Israel was formed but continue to be forcibly displaced by a settler movement that too often has received tacit or explicit support from the Israeli government.” He made the dubious claim as well that, “Palestinian leaders who’ve been willing to make concessions for a two-state solution have too often had little to show for their efforts.” In short, he scolds Israelis for wanting to defend themselves against people for whom one’s “unspeakable brutality” is something to brag to momma about.
Yes, true, Obama gently reminds Hamas and its fellow travelers “that Israel has every right to exist” and that the Jewish people “have ancient historical roots,” but the days of reasoning are over. As Obama surely knows, Hamas will not be satisfied until the sons of apes are slaughtered and then tumble into the sea.
Jack Cashill’s new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, is available in all formats.