Starvin Larry

alakhtal says:

Valerie was born in Shiraz during the Bowmans’ sojourn in Iran; she returned to the U.S. with her parents in 1962 (when she was five years old), whereupon she attended prep school in Massachusetts, graduated with a B.A. in psychology from Stanford University in 1978, and earned a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 1981 before returning to Chicago to begin her working career. We’ve found no evidence Valerie Jarrett is (or ever was) Muslim, her only apparent connection to that religion being the incidental one that she temporarily lived in a predominantly Muslim country with her American parents for the first few years of her life.

The quote to attributed “Valerie Jarrett, Stanford University, 1977” about her “seek[ing] to help change America to be a more Islamic country” is an unfounded one that has no source other than recent repetition (primarily on right-wing web sites and blogs). It’s also an anachronism, as “Valerie Jarrett” didn’t exist in 1977: she was born Valerie Bowman and didn’t take the latter surname until she married William Jarrett in 1983.

Moreover, the wording of the meme in its commonly reproduced form is too stilted to be believable as the utterance of a fluent English speaker (e.g., “I am an Iranian by birth and of [sic] my Islamic faith”). Finally, no news article or document associated with Stanford University records Jarrett as having made this statement back in 1977; and if there were any credible evidence Jarrett had ever said anything remotely like this, it would have been a well-covered news story since shortly after the 2008 presidential election and not a obscure meme that didn’t pop up until several years later.

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