Singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, the indigenous icon billing herself as a Cree Indian from Saskatchewan, is really Beverly Jean Santamaria, born in 1941 in Stoneham, Massachusetts, with no indigenous ancestry whatsoever. That revelation came on Oct. 27 in a 6,000-word report from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, based on birth records and interviews with relatives.

Sainte-Marie got her start in the Greenwich Village folk scene and during the 1960s began claiming indigenous ancestry from several tribes. In 1975 she showed up on Sesame Street and appears on television in Being There. Canada showered the chanteuse with awards and even put her on a postage stamp.

Actresses Audrey Hepburn, Linda Darnell, Rita Moreno, Donna Reed, Julie Newmar, and many others played Indians in Hollywood movies but never claimed they were the genuine item. Buffy did, and her fakery was not the only revelation of its kind in 2023.

One day after the CBC called her out, Yusuf Islam, also known as Cat Stevens, performed at a rally in Istanbul protesting Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The Hamas terrorists took videos and called relatives to brag about how many Jews they killed, women and children among them.

Yet Yusuf Islam claimed that in his Muslim faith, “the protection of women and children and non-combatants is fundamental.” And so on, with historical background.

“One hundred years have passed, and Turkey is now stronger than ever,” Islam told the cheering crowd. “Before this we had 600 years as the ultimate empire, and when Jerusalem was under your wings, it had peace for 400 years. Allahu Akbar. I say thank you to the people of Turkey and the leadership of Turkey, for taking the right stand on this issue, while many other countries, especially the so-called international community, is falling on the wrong side of justice, even assisting this genocide which we are witnessing.” For the former Cat Stevens and Steven Demetre Georgiou, these were not new themes.

“Islam is perfect,” he wrote in the account of his conversion in 1977, “and if we imitate the conduct of the Holy Prophet (Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) we will be successful.” Yusuf Islam was successful at supporting the Iranian fatwa on Salman Rushdie.

The Satanic Verses author “must be killed,” Islam said. “The Koran carries the death sentence. If someone defames the prophet, then he must die.”  In 2020 Islam claimed “I never supported the fatwa.”  In 2001, he denounced the “indiscriminate terrorist attacks,” of 9/11, hoping to “reflect the feelings of all Muslims and people around the world,”—but there was more to it.

In 2004, the United States deported Yusuf Islam after he was found on a “watch list” because of “known associations and financial support to organizations believed to be aiding terrorism.” According to intelligence reports, Islam had given money to Hamas. For the fan of the “ultimate empire,” these terrorists can do no wrong.

It’s hard to find a counterpart to the imperialist Islam, say, some heavy metal drone touting Genghis Kahn or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On the other hand in 2023, a parallel for Buffy-style fakery emerged in greater detail.

On Aug. 2, a landmark article “The Obama Factor” appeared in Tablet, in which David Samuels interviews David Garrow, author or Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. The massive 2017 volume contends that Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, is without any question a novel and the author a composite character.

“He wants people to believe his story,” David Garrow told Samuels. “For me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction—oh God, did that infuriate him.” In reality, the fakery was apparent to any unhypnotized reader back in 1995.

The book contends the Kenyan Barack Obama looks like Nat King Cole, which is rather like saying Bill Clinton looks like Elvis Presley. Barry’s beloved “Frank,” the Communist Frank Marshall Davis, is decked out like Grady Wilson (Whitman Mayo) from Sanford and Son, drinking whiskey from jelly jars and warning Barry that women will “drive you to drink, boy.”

The author visits Kenya and the account bears remarkable similarities to the memoirs I Dreamed of Africa, published in 1991, and its 1994 sequel, African Nights. Both volumes are the work of Italian writer Kuki Gallmann, a person of pallor and longtime resident of Kenya. In Dreams from My Father, Samuels spotted a passage ripped off from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, but plagiarism was not the major problem.

“I find Barack Obama deeply sympathetic as a person,” Samuels said. “I identify with him emotionally. Yet there was something about this fictional character that he created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now.” As Samuels observed, Obama’s people are now in the Biden administration and are running his foreign and domestic policy. “There are obviously large parts of White House policymaking that belong to Barack Obama because they’re staffed by his people, who worked for him and no doubt report back to him. Personnel is policy, as they say in Washington.” There could be a lesson here.

Former musical stars Islam and Buffy are basically done. By contrast, the composite character former president continues to run the government behind the senile incumbent, producing the disaster we are living through now. What starts as farce, one might say, repeats as tragedy.