Four Questions about President Obama’s Birth Certificate – Fiction!

Four Questions about President Obama’s Birth Certificate – Fiction!

Summary of eRumor:  

An attorney named Richard Silverlieb asks four questions about President Obama’s birth certificate in a forwarded email.

The Truth:

 

Questions about President Obama’s birth certificate posed in this forwarded email are pretty easy to answer, so we’ll look at each one of them.

President Obama’s U.S. citizenship (and right to the presidency) has been questioned since he first arrived on the national political scene as a senator in 2006. The White House released a long form copy of Obama’s birth certificate in 2008 in hopes of bringing an end to the issue, and the four questions posed by the eRumor attempt to prove that the birth certificate was forged.

The author of the email is identified as Richard Silverlieb, an attorney from New Jersey. TruthorFiction.com tracked down an attorney from Greater New York named Richard Silverlieb and reached out to confirm the email’s authorship. Future updates will be posted here.

Authorship aside, the email makes specific claims about President Obama’s birth certificate that we can investigate. Here’s a look at each claim:

President Obama is identified as an African-American on the birth certificate- Fiction!

President Obama is not identified as an African-American on his birth certificate. The birth certificate doesn’t name a race for Obama, but his mother as identified as “Caucasian” and his father is identified as “African.”

President Obama’s birth certificate says his father is from Kenya, which wasn’t a place in 1961 – Fiction!

Obama’s birth certificate says his father was born in “Kenya, East Africa,” but the claim that Kenya wasn’t a known place in 1961 is false. Kenya’s original name was Kikuyu. It was named after Mount Kikuyu, which means “mountain of whiteness” because of its snow-capped peaks. However, during British colonization, the name was shortened to “Kenya” because British settlers were unable to pronounce “Kikuyu.” It’s true that Kenya won its independence in 1963, but it was known as Kenya for decades before that.

Kapi’olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital, the listed place of President Obama’s birth, wasn’t called that in 1961- Fiction!

The medical facility that President Obama was born at has been known as the Kapi’olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital since 1931. Click here for a previous TruthorFiction.com story that covers the history of the hospital.

President Obama said his father fought in World War II in his book – Fiction!

Obama has regularly talked about how is grandfather fought in World War II and was able to attend college because of the GI Bill. In a video from 2012, Obama misspoke and said that his father served in World War II, but it’s assumed that he meant to say that his grandfather had served.