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The
Terrorists -- Bill and Bernadine
As part of her transition out of power, Alice Palmer introduced her
successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district's influential liberals
at the home of left-wing terrorists,
William Ayers
and Bernardine Dohrn -- long-time friends of the Obamas.
On the morning of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, along with a million other readers of the New York Times
including many who would never be able to read the paper again, I opened
its pages to be confronted by a color photo showing a middle-aged couple
holding hands and affecting a defiant look at the camera. The
article was headlined in an irony that could not have been more
poignant, "No Regrets For A Love Of Explosives." The couple
pictured were Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former leaders of the
1960s' Weather Underground, America's first terrorist cult. One of
their bombing targets, as it happened, was the Pentagon.
While Ayers and Dohrn, who, in July, 1969, traveled to Cuba and met with
representatives of the North Vietnamese and Cuban governments, may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists,
they're better known nationally as two of the most notorious -- and
unrepentant -- figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war
movement. These two domestic terrorists have written and spoken at
length about their pasts -- their bombings and robberies -- and today he
is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the
University of Illinois at Chicago; she's an associate professor of law
at Northwestern University.
William (Bill) Ayers
went underground with several comrades after their co-conspirators'
bomb
accidentally exploded on March 6, 1970, destroying a Greenwich
Village townhouse and killing three members of the
Weather Underground
(Ted Gold, Terry Robbins, and Diana Oughton, who was Ayers' girlfriend
at the time). He and his colleagues invented identities and
traveled continuously. They avoided the police and FBI, while
bombing high-profile government buildings including; the United States
Capitol, The Pentagon, and the Harry S. Truman Building housing the State
Department. Living underground, Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn raised
two children, Zayd and Malik, (Muslim names) before turning themselves
in in 1981, when most charges were dropped because of what Ayers
described as "extreme governmental misconduct" during the long search
for the fugitives.
Dohrn served seven months in a NYC federal jail in 1983 for refusing to
testify before a grand jury investigating the Brinks robbery of 1981, in
which two policemen and a security guard were killed.
Dohrn worked in a baby boutique in 1979 where stolen customer ID's were
used to rent trucks used in the series of robberies culminating in the
1981 slaughter in which 9 kids lost their fathers, the youngest of which
was six-months.
Because of the criminal convictions Dohrn, who received a law degree
from the University of Chicago in 1967, was refused admission to the New
York bar.
Nonetheless, she was hired as a legal clerk by Sidley and Austin, a
major Chicago law firm, in their New York office in 1984. Howard
Trienens, then managing partner of the firm, recently told the Chicago
Tribune that he arranged the hiring of Dohrn as a favor to his fellow
Northwestern University trustee and classmate, Tom Ayers. Tom
Ayers' firm, Commonwealth Edison, has used Sidley as outside counsel for
many years. She later worked in their Chicago office when she and
Bill Ayers moved back to Chicago in 1987. She left Sidley in 1988.
Update: In 1989, Obama was a summer intern at
Michelle Obama's law firm. One of Michelle's co-workers was
Bernadine Dohrn. So the relationship between the Obamas and Ayers
has spanned twenty years.
One of the best known contacts between Obama and Ayers was when the
couple hosted a "meet and
greet" for Obama at Ayers house in Hyde Park -– an upper middle class neighborhood
on Chicago's south side, where Obama now lives as a neighbor of Louis
Farrakhan.
"I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill
Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the
senate and running for Congress," said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent
Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the
informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. "[Palmer]
identified [Obama] as her successor."
A Chicago-based
blogger named Maria Warren -- whose writing suggested she was to the
left of Obama -- recalled watching the candidate give a "standard,
innocuous little talk" in 1995, in the Ayers' living room when Obama was
running for the state Senate.
"They were launching him," Warren wrote, "introducing him to the Hyde
Park community as the best thing since sliced bread."
Although Team Obama has repeatedly denied the Ayers' "meet and greet,"
in an interview with the Daily Beast, Ayers recalled that fundraiser.
Stated Ayers of his relationship with Obama: “We were friendly, that
was true; we served on a couple of boards together, that was true; he
held a fundraiser in our living room, that was true; Michelle [Obama]
and Bernardine were at the law firm together, that was true. Hyde Park
in Chicago is a tiny neighborhood, so when he said I was ‘a guy around
the neighborhood,’ that was true.”
Ayers and Dohrn are simply the most visible of the far left supporters
who propelled Barack Obama's early political career. The woman who
touted Obama at the Ayers meeting, Alice Palmer, was herself a far left
activist who was into community organizing like Obama.
Wondering whether the three may have crossed paths is not speculation.
It is a fact that in 1989, Bernadine Dohrn and Michelle Obama were
associates at the Chicago law firm of
Sidley & Austin, when Obama joined the firm as a summer intern.
Barack also was essentially an
employee of Bill Ayers for eight years, starting in 1995, the
year the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created to raise funds to help
reform the Chicago public schools. One of the architects of the
Challenge was none other than Professor Bill Ayers. Ayers co-wrote
the initial grant proposal and proudly lists himself on his own website
as the co-founder of the Challenge.
And who did William Ayers, co-creator of the Challenge, help select as
the new director of the board for this program? Why, Barack Obama,
of course. Obama was the first Chairman of the Board of the
Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
Obama served on the board for eight years until the Challenge ended in
2003. Bill Ayers was intimately involved in the Challenge over
this same time period, raising and spending at least $110 million in an
effort to bolster a "radical" (Ayers'
word) reform program in the Chicago Public Schools from 1994 to
2001.
In November 1997, Ayers and Obama participated in a panel at the
University of Chicago entitled "Should a child ever be called a 'super
predator?'" to debate "the merits of the juvenile justice system."
In April 2002, Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama, then an Illinois State Senator,
participated together at a conference entitled "Intellectuals: Who Needs
Them?" sponsored by The
Center for Public Intellectuals and the
University of Illinois-Chicago. Ayers and Obama were two of the
six members of the "Intellectuals in Times of Crisis" panel.
Here is the
agenda.
"I know they are friends,"
said Dr. Young of Obama and Ayers.
Ayers is the Board Chairman of the nonprofit Woods Fund of
Chicago and Obama was a
Board member. Obama was a director
of the Woods Fund board from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the
Fund's website.
The Woods Fund focused on welfare reform, affordable housing, the
quality of public schools, race and class disparities in the juvenile
justice system, and tax policy as a tool in reducing poverty. The
Fund supported the concept of an expanding welfare state allocating
ever-increasing amounts of money to the public school system, and the
redistribution of wealth via taxes.
Obama always describes his relationship with Ayers as casual, but a
close, working relationship spanning eight years is hardly casual --
especially an employer-employee relationship.
Beyond that, it was Ayers who brought Obama to Chicago.
According to
The Nation: "The Woods Fund, in many ways, is responsible
for helping start Obama as an organizer and shaping his political
identity. In 1985 the foundation gave a $25,000 grant to the
Developing Communities Project (aka the "DCP"), which hired Obama, at
24, as an organizer on Chicago's economically depressed South Side."
The Woods Fund was founded by the Woods family which owned the
Illinois-based Sahara Coal Company, a major supplier of coal from its
mines to major Illinois power companies. Commonwealth Edison, the giant
Chicago-based electric power company was headed by Thomas Ayers, father
of Bill Ayers.
The
problem of Barack Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers will
not go away. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn were
terrorists for the notorious Weather Underground during the
turbulent 1960s, turning fugitive when a bomb -- designed to kill army
officers in New Jersey -- accidentally exploded in a New York townhouse.
Prior to that, Ayers and his cohorts succeeded in bombing the Pentagon.
Ayers and Dohrn remain unrepentant for their terrorist past. Ayers
was pictured in a 2001 article for Chicago magazine, stomping on an
American flag, and told the New York Times just before 9/11 that the
notion of the United States as a just and fair and decent place "makes
me want to puke."
Although Obama actually launched his political career at an event at
Ayers's and Dohrn's home, Obama has dismissed Ayers as just "a guy who
lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas from
on a regular basis." For his part, Ayers refuses to discuss his
relationship with Obama.
The phony Obama
"Fight the Smears" website says that they "have encountered each other
occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood."
Wrong. The two men shared an office and Obama knew very well who he was
associating with:
• Obama knew who was paying him to serve on two
boards,
• Obama knew who he was directing thousands of dollars of donations to,
• Obama knew whose living room he was in when he kicked off his political
career,
• Obama knew who was sitting with him on panels,
• Obama knew who was on his floor at the University of Chicago,
• Obama knew whose book he was writing a blurb on, etc.,
etc. etc.
A Personal Tale
Ayers And Obama Agree On Major
Issues
Amazing Ayers Audio Unearthed (06:10)
A Limousine Revolutionary
Bill Ayers is
a limousine revolutionary. He was born into a wealthy Chicago
family, raised in the leafy western Chicago suburbs, educated at the
best schools, and benefited from connections and privilege wherever he
turned. His father, Thomas Ayers, was CEO and president of
Commonwealth Edison, Chicago's electric utility company, and sat on
several influential boards, including those of the Chicago Tribune,
Northwestern University, and the Chicago Symphony. In 1966, Mayor
Richard J. Daley enlisted Thomas Ayers, a close friend, to head
negotiations with Dr. Martin Luther King for a city-wide open housing
agreement. Tom Ayers was so successful at talking out of both
sides of his mouth that King claimed victory while, according to local
press accounts, Daley could claim he was able to "preserve the
segregationist status quo."
After a couple of mediocre years in a
suburban public high school, Bill Ayers transferred to Lake Forest
Academy, an upscale prep school for boys on suburban Chicago's north
shore. (I attended the same school, before Ayers's arrival).
He then went on to the University of Michigan in 1963, where he liked to
consider himself a jock because he roomed with the Wolverines' star
running back. He spent a summer working for Leo Burnett, Chicago's
largest ad agency, a job arranged by his father. But he soon
joined protests and demonstrations. He was arrested and spent 10
days in jail for trying to disrupt the Ann Arbor draft board.
Shortly thereafter he joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and
was well on his way to becoming a Marxist and self-styled radical
revolutionary.
Made For Each Other
Bernardine
Dohrn seemed made for Ayers; one has to wonder if God doesn't find
the perfect mate even for people who don't believe in Him. A
native of Milwaukee, Dohrn spent her first two years of college at Miami
University of Ohio, but transferred to the University of Chicago after
she was blackballed at the Delta Delta Delta sorority because she was
half-Jewish. She graduated from the University of Chicago law
school. But instead of taking the bar exam, she became an
organizer for the National Lawyers Guild, a group identified by the FBI
as a Communist front. She also became active in SDS.
As she
rose to prominence in SDS, Dohrn and Mark Rudd, leader of the SDS at
Columbia, split off from SDS in 1969. For them, SDS was too
passive in its radicalism and opposition to the Vietnam War. They
believed a more militant group, one that would preach violent class
hatred and worldwide revolution, was needed. They called
themselves the Weathermen after the Bob Dylan line, "You don't need a
weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
Dohrn was unique in
far-left circles: no wire-rims, no stringy hair, and no sackcloth.
Peter Collier and David Horowitz, in their 1989 book Destructive
Generation, write that when Dohrn arrived in New York City in 1967,
"with her tight miniskirt and knee-high Italian leather boots, she
created an instant sensation among males in Movement circles."
Even SDS president Greg Calvert was astonished. "I'll never forget
the first time I saw Bernardine," he said. "She was wearing an
orange sweater and a purple skirt, and while everyone else had on Stop
the War buttons, hers said Cunnilingus is Cool, Fellatio is Fun.
She had a boyfriend…but like others buoyed by the new air of sexual
freedom, she had relationships with men who interested her." J.
Edgar Hoover later nicknamed her "La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left."
Dohrn was always one of SDS's most radical and outspoken leaders.
When she ran for SDS "Interorganizational Secretary" in 1968, she was
asked whether she was a socialist. When she answered that she was
a revolutionary communist, she won by a landslide. In order to
assure everybody of her bona fides, she announced that "what we're about
is being crazy motherf---ers and scaring the s--t out of honky America."
1970 Bombing
A San Francisco police union has
accused former domestic terrorist William Ayers, co-founder of the
Weather Underground, and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, in a 1970 bombing that killed one
sergeant, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The union, in a
letter to a conservative organization lobbying for arrests in the case,
accused Ayers and wife Bernardine Dohrn of bombing a city police
station.
On Feb. 16, 1970, a bomb placed on a window ledge of
Park Station killed Sgt. Brian McDonnell and injured eight other
officers, the Chronicle reported.
The union said it had not been
in contact with investigators nor did it have new evidence, but it cited
Larry Grathwohl, who works with the conservative organization America’s
Survival of Maryland and claims that he infiltrated Weather Underground
as an FBI informant and heard Ayers confess, the Chronicle reported.
"There are irrefutable and compelling reasons to believe that Bill
Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn … are largely responsible for the
bombing of Park Police Station," the Feb. 24 letter reads, according to
the Chronicle.
In sworn testimony that goes back to the 1970s, former FBI
informant Larry Grathwohl had
implicated Ayers and Dohrn in the knowledge and/or planning of the
bombing murder of San Francisco Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell. Metal staples from the powerful bomb ripped through his body, killing
him after several agonizing days in the hospital.
The new evidence in the case developed by Jamison adds to the solid
information already available and raises the question of when, if ever,
the bombers will be prosecuted. There are other witnesses to the bombing
plot.
He reports, "Now, speaking publicly for the first time about the
investigation, former FBI agents have told Village Voice Media the basis
for their belief that the Weather Underground was behind McDonnell's
murder. The agents have revealed that two credible eyewitnesses-both
former left-wing radicals tied to the Weathermen-gave detailed
statements to investigators in the 1970s alleging that Dohrn and Howard
Machtinger, another member of the group, were personally involved in
organizing the deadly attack. Both witnesses claimed to have
participated in meetings where the bombing was planned, and one
confessed to having cased the police station for the Weathermen prior to
the explosion."
Jamison discloses that Dohrn, Machtinger, and Ayers were targets of a
secret federal grand jury investigation in 2003 into McDonnell's
killing. He quotes a left-wing lawyer as saying "it was clear they were
the targets. They weren't called-other people were called about them.
The Weather Underground was the target of Park Station [investigators]."
Jamison adds, "The case against the Weathermen is far from complete.
Still, given the multiple witnesses tying the group's former members to
the killing of a police officer, some investigators say they are
troubled by the impunity with which Ayers and Dohrn have peddled a
version of the past wiped clean of bloodshed."
Bill Ayers'
Manifesto
Zombie Time has published an
article about William Ayers' forgotten communist manifesto, "Prairie Fire."
A now long-forgotten book entitled Prairie Fire: The Politics of
Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, which was written and published in 1974
by William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and other members of the
Weather
Underground. In this slim volume, which functioned as the Weather
Underground's ideological manifesto, Ayers declares himself to be a
communist, and announces that his group's bombing campaign was intended
to start a violent revolution to overthrow the American government.
In his book, which is extremely difficult to
obtain, Ayers calls for socialism in America and stopping aid to Israel.
It's full title is, "Prairie Fire: The politics of revolutionary
anti-imperialism." (The page at the link is
outstanding and shocking.)
In his manifesto, Ayers writes, "We are a guerilla organization.
We are communist men and women, underground in the United States for
more than four years" and "We need a revolutionary communist
party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the
fight, seize power and build the new society" and "Our intention
is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the
cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the
people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the
inside."
Ayers manifesto is dedicated to 100 radicals, among them is Sirhan
Sirhan, the man who assassinated Robert Kennedy.
Why would Barack Obama associate so closely with a man
who supports Robert F. Kennedy's murderer, seeing him as a mere
"political prisoner". That's a view so far out into fringe
territory that it could give a Berkeley radical pause.
Obama supporters need to ask themselves how they can give that support
to someone who spent 20 years in the company of a self-described
communist, and an admirer of Sirhan Sirhan?
A blogger named Grizzly managed to find a copy of a book authored by
"Billy" Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn titled "Prairie Fire". He has
included a copy of passages transcribed, verbatim, into a word doc.
He also just picked up a copy of a book published in 2006 titled
"Sing a Battle Song". The book reprints copies of Prairie Fire and
two other Weather Underground "classics" with comments by Ayers and
Dorhn.
While he have not gotten through much of "Sing a Battle
Song", he was in interested to see whether the forwards written by Ayers
and Dorhn expressed any regret or remorse for their activities in the
sixties. They did not. As a matter of fact, aside from
expressing remorse only on the "bombast" contained in the earlier books,
they reiterate their communist beliefs and add a new hero of the
revolution to their repertoire -- Rashid Khalidi.
According to a
1982 New York Times report, Broadway Baby was implicated in an
investigation of a series of violent armed robberies in New York --
netting more than $2 million over a two-year span -- committed by former
Black Panthers and Weather Underground members in the early '80s.
Their aim? Global revolution,
naturally. They needed cash, but the rich white parents weren't in
a giving mood. So their privileged offspring grabbed guns, pointed
them at the faces of the working man and, sometimes, they pulled the
trigger.
At Broadway Baby,
customers often paid by check and used driver's licenses for
identification. On Dec. 28, 1979, information from two customer
files was used to apply for two driver's licenses at the New York State
Department of Motor Vehicles. The fraudulent licenses were used to
rent getaway cars for the gang.
The
manager of Broadway Baby at that time? Bernardine Dohrn.
Investigators at the time pointed their fingers at Dohrn, who is now a
law professor without a license to practice law, at Northwestern
University.
Dohrn and her husband,
fellow academic William Ayers, turned themselves into authorities in
1980, but the rump of the Weather Underground committed its final
violent act in 1981, a Brinks truck robbery that ended up with the
deaths of two police officers and a security guard.
In 1982, Dohrn was brought before a
federal grand jury investigating radical conspiracies linked to the New
York robberies. She refused to cooperate or to provide a signature
sought by FBI handwriting analysts. Dohrn was held in contempt of
the grand jury and imprisoned for seven months.
The Brinks
murders, the ongoing roundup of the killers and the ensuing trial were
all over the New York Papers, radio and TV from 1981 to 1984.
Barack was living in New York that entire period, and Bill Ayers was
attending Bank Street College which was about four blocks from Columbia.
Obama could not have escaped hearing about these
events.
The question is -- was he involved?
Evil
America
"As a gesture of solidarity, the Vietnamese who Dohrn met in
Budapest presented her with a ring made from an American aircraft shot
down over North Vietnam.
Bill Ayers would
receive a similar ring while meeting with Vietnamese communists in
Toronto. He later recalled being so moved by the gesture that he
'left the room to cry.' He said, 'I realized...America was an
evil... and that I was... living inside the belly of the beast...'"
Ayers Brings Obama To Chicago
The Chicago Period began in 1985, when some
leftists were looking for someone who could recruit in a black
neighborhood in the south side of Chicago and
Obama applied for the position as a community organizer
for the Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumet Community
Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago. The "Project" was
funded with a $25,000 grant by Bill Ayers'
Woods Fund.
Here is an
account from the Gamaliel Foundation, another community organizing
group.
Obama was 24 years
old, unmarried, and according to his memoir, searching for a genuine
African-American community.
Stories have varied wildly. Jerry Kellman, who hired him and is now a
strong supporter, says it was "$10,000 a year and a $2,000 car
allowance". Obama himself has given different numbers; his memoir
says $10,000 (as well as the car), in his "Wesleyan speech, he gave it
as "$12,000 a year plus $2,000 for an old, beat-up car", and when he
announced his candidacy for president, it was "a group of churches had
offered me a job as a community organizer for $13,000 a year".
However, Ryan Lizza, then at The New Republic, reported that "Jean Rudd
of the Woods Fund...had provided Kellman with his original $25,000 to
hire Obama". . Ari Berman reported in The Nation that the "[Woods Fund]
gave a $25,000 grant to the Developing Communities Project, which hired
Obama CBS2 in Chicago ran a story with a document showing that Obama's
planned 1987 salary was $25,000, a number that the Obama campaign
confirmed whilst insisting that his original salary was $13,000.
So accounts, to put it mildly, vary. This isn't just a minor
discrepancy; Obama's entire campaign narrative begins with his
tremendous self-sacrifice in taking on what at the time was a reasonable
salary for a young college graduate. Either Obama has lied about
his starting salary or he has neglected to mention that his salary
nearly doubled within 18 months.
The Mailman
According to Allen Hulton, the postman who delivered mail to
the Ayers’ Glen Ellyn home at that time.
"Mrs. Ayers told me that her family had been helping out a brilliant
young black man," Hulton said and whom he believes she said was from
Kenya. Hulton said that over the period of six to ten years that
he delivered mail to the Ayers home he had numerous conversations with
Mrs. Ayers, one conversation with Thomas Ayers and several brief
encounters with Bernardine Dohrn who he said lived at the home for
several months at one point in time. He never met or saw Bill
Ayers at the home.
Hulton explained that he knew Tim Ayers, the son of Tom and brother
of Bill, when they were both students at Glenbard High School, which
draws students from the towns of Glen Ellyn and Lombard, Illinois.
Over time the Ayers' parents became aware of the connection to their son
Tim and that led to a friendlier relationship between Hulton and Tom and
Mary Ayers.
"They tipped me generously at Christmastime," Hulton recalled.
One day Hulton found himself on the sidewalk outside the Ayers home
at 199 N. Montclair Avenue near the corner of Revere Road just after he
had delivered the mail. The house was "very nice and attractive and more
expensive than some in Glen Ellyn because it was closer to downtown, but
it did not stand out among the houses on that block." He said the
largest and most expensive homes were actually on Revere, around the
corner from the Ayers’ home.
As Hulton was on the sidewalk walking away from the Ayers house a
tall and thin young black man was coming up the same sidewalk towards
the Ayers house.
Hulton recalls that Obama said hello and introduced himself and
stopped to chat with him in front of the Ayers house. "I recall that his
ears stuck out a little bit. He was more gaunt then than he appears now.
His name was an unusual one and when I saw his photo during the campaign
it brought back my memory of the event," Hulton said.
Mr. Obama explained that he had taken the train out from Chicago to
visit the Ayers’ in order to thank them for their help with his
"education." At this time, Mr. Obama had recently graduated from
Columbia and would soon enter Harvard Law School. Hulton and Obama
"spoke for a few minutes, first chatting about the Ayers family," Hulton
said. Hulton said he did not learn whether the help Obama received from
the Ayers’ was financial or in some other form.
Hulton agreed that it was an exceptional event to encounter a black
man on his route and that Obama may have felt it prudent to introduce
himself to the letter carrier before approaching the Ayers house. Hulton
usually delivered mail on Montclair at mid-day, "sometimes as early as
11:30 in the morning or as late as 12:30 or 1:00 PM."
During the Joe Arpio Cold Case Posse news conference, mention was made of a former federal employee who had sworn out a statement that
at some point in the early 1980's he'd spoken with Bill Ayer's mother and she
had stated that they were helping this young foreign student (Obama).
The mailman, Allen Hulton, has now been identified and
has come forward with his story.
Obama
joined
the board of the Woods Fund in 1993 and remained until 2002. But
Obama didn’t merely use the Woods Fund to help his fellow man -- he used
it to further his career.
According to a November 29, 2007 report from the Chicago Sun-Times,
"Sen. Barack Obama was on the board of a Chicago charity when his former
boss, Allison S. Davis, came looking for money. At the time, Davis
was a developer represented by the law firm where Obama worked, as well
as a small contributor to Obama’s political campaign funds. He
wanted the charity to help fund his plans to build housing for
low-income Chicagoans."
When Davis approached the Woods Fund, he was building another apartment
building with now convicted felon and Obama friend/fundraiser Tony Rezko.
The Chicago Sun-Times recounts: "Obama agreed. He voted with other
directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago to invest $1 million with
Neighborhood Rejuvenation Partners L.P., a $17-million partnership that
Davis still operates."
Also serving on the Woods Fund at the time was Palestinian activist and
now professor at Columbia University Rashid Khalidi, whose wife headed
the Arab American Action Network (AAAN). The Woods Fund granted
AAAN $40,000 in 2001 and $70,000 in 2002. s Salon magazine wrote,
this was "nepotism, Chicago style."
Khalidi, a former spokesman for Yasser Arafat, held a fundraiser for
Obama in 2000 during his unsuccessful bid for Congress. In 2003,
during a dinner honoring Khalidi for becoming the Edward Said Professor
of Arab Studies at Columbia, Obama warmly praised his friend,
reminiscing about the many meals cooked for him by Khalidi’s wife Mona
and of the discussions he and Khalidi held that were "consistent
reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. … It’s for that
reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that
conversation -- a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona
and Rashid’s dinner table," but around "this entire world."
Bill Ayers served on the Woods board for three years of Obama’s tenure
and remained on the board after Obama departed.
Annenberg
Challenge
The cloak of media invisibility is slowly beginning to lift from
Barack Obama's most important administrative leadership experience,
helming an expensive
educational reform effort in Chicago that failed to produce any
measurable academic gains, according to the project's own final report.
Add in the fact that former Weatherman and admitted terrorist William
Ayers (whom Obama described in the Philadelphia debate as merely a
"neighbor") was head of the operating arm of the Chicago Annenberg
Challenge (CAC), working with Obama on distributing scores of millions
of dollars to grantees in the wards of the city, and you have a topic
that the Obama campaign wishes to avoid at all costs.
In late 1993, Bill Ayers, now an associate professor of education at the
University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus, organized a team to put
together a grant proposal to secure nearly $50 million from the
Annenberg Challenge. The money was to be used by Ayers and company
to bolster the radical Local School Councils reform project that Ayers
and Obama had championed back in 1988 through the ABCs.
The grant application was successful and in early 1995 Barack Obama was
named chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
Ayers was named co-chair of the Challenge's operative and strategic
body, the Chicago School Reform Collaborative. Ayers and Obama
work together for the next five years on raising an additional $60
million in matching money from local foundations and corporations and
using the money to intervene in the governance of the Chicago public
schools.
The Challenge through a multi-million dollar Leadership Development
Initiative intervened in the School Council elections in the middle of
what was known as the Chicago School Wars. At the same time
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was pushing, successfully, to gut the power
of the Councils.
The four plus years (1995-1999) Barack Obama spent as founding chairman
of the board of the CAC represent his track record as reformer, as
someone who reached out in a public-private collaboration and had the
audacity to believe his effort would make things better. At the
time he became leader of this ambitious project to remake the public
schools of Chicago, he was 33 years old and a third year associate at a
small Chicago law firm, Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland.
The
offices of CAC at 115 South Sangamon St. that Obama and
Ayers shared for 5 years were in this building.
This was a big test for him, his chance to cut his teeth on bringing
hope and change to the mostly minority inner city school children
trapped in Chicago schools. And he flopped big time, squandering
lots of money and the time of many public employees in the process.
The "small schools"
movement was heavily funded by CAC. The program focused on
individual schools built around specific political themes to push
students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence."
The teacher education programs served as "sites of resistance" to an
oppressive system.
The point, said Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach
against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism,
thereby forcing social transformation.
The Final Technical Report of the Chicago Annenberg Research Project is
available. From its abstract:
Results suggest that among the schools it supported, the Challenge had
little impact on school improvement and student outcomes, with no
statistically significant differences between Annenberg and
non-Annenberg schools in rates of achievement gain, classroom behavior,
student self-efficacy, and social competence. (It goes on to say
that certain "Breakthrough Schools" receiving special funding and
support did show some trends in improvement although it's not clear
whether that included improvement in student performance.)
Obama has occupied the executive chair two times in his life, one
directing the Law Review and the other chairing the CAC. There's
nothing to show for the first, since Obama wrote nothing, and the second
remains a mystery. All we really know is that $110 million
(including over $60 million in public funds) was spent on a project that
yielded no discernable result -- and how much of it might have been used
to grease the wheels of a political career?
White House Scholar Funded Ayers Group
Aaron Klein says A scholar and charity head
appointed to Obama's White House Fellowships Commission served as a
point man in granting $49.2 million in startup capital to an
education-reform project founded by
Weather Underground terrorist
William Ayers and chaired by Obama.
Documentation shows the
White House fellow, Vartan Gregorian, was central in Ayers' recruitment
of Obama to serve as the first chairman of the project, the
Chicago
Annenberg Challenge -- a job in which Obama worked closely on a
regular basis with Ayers.
Obama also later
touted his job at the
project as qualifying him to run for public office.
Gregorian,
president of Carnegie Corp. charitable foundation, was appointed by
Obama last year as a White House fellow. Born in Tabriz, Iran,
Gregorian served for eight years as president of the New York Public
Library and was also president of Brown University.
In his role
as Brown president, Gregorian served on the selection committee of the
Annenberg Foundation, which funded Ayers' Chicago Annenberg Challenge
with a $49.2 million, 2-to-1 matching challenge grant over five years.
Ayers was one of five founding members of the Challenge who wrote to the
Annenberg Foundation for the initial funding.
Steve Diamond, a
political-science and law professor and a blogger who has posted on
Obama, previously posted a letter from Nov. 18, 1994, in which
Gregorian, serving as the point man on Annenberg's selection committee,
asked Ayers to "compose the governing board" of the Challenge's
collaborative project with "people who reflect the racial and ethnic
diversity of Chicago."
Ayers and other founding Challenge
members then recruited Obama to serve as the project chairman.
Obama and Ayers used the project grant money to fund organizations run
by radicals tied to Ayers, including
Mike Klonsky, a former top
communist activist who was a senior leader in the Students for a
Democratic Society group, a major leftist student organization in the
1960s, from which the Weathermen terror group later splintered.
While the likes of the New York Times, Washington
Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and other news organizations have their
reporters digging for dirt on Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin, John McCain's
choice for vice president, their savior-in-waiting Barack Obama is
getting a free ride at the expense of truth.
It's no secret that the denizens of America's newsrooms want Obama
sitting in the Oval Office, but Americans are being purposely duped by
the Democrat National Committee's volunteer publicists, formerly known
as the mainstream news media.
If it weren't for talk radio and the blogosphere, even what is known
about Obama and his friend, former Weather Underground domestic
terrorist and leader William Ayers, would only be a paragraph or two in
the back pages of most newspapers, or a sentence or two on most TV and
radio news programs.
On Friday night, one of America's top talk show hosts -- who happens to
be an attorney and worked in the Reagan Justice Department as chief of
staff -- recited a list of terrorist acts that would elicit envy from
Osama bin Laden. Mark Levin had his listeners glued to their radios or
PCs as he read the resume of a man who should be serving life in prison
instead of enjoying a tenured professorship at a major university and
entertaining a possible US President in his home.
Because of so-called "prosecutorial misconduct" Ayers escaped what could
have been a life sentence.
As I write this "resume of a terrorist," I find it difficult to
understand how a man who is running for president of the United States
would even know someone as anti-American and destructive as William
Ayers. Plus, Ayers, his wife and their comrades at the Weather
Underground are cop-killers. And Obama doesn't just know him personally
-- he's a close friend with and employee of Bill Ayers.
Barack Obama did a review for Ayers’ 1997 book, "A
Kind and Just Parent," writing, "A searing and timely account of the
juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope
from despair" -- here it is -- these two were as thick as thieves.
Distinguished
Professor
Weather Underground leader turned-academic William Ayers is now so
docile that it never really "bothered anyone in Chicago," that Sen.
Barack Obama had any connection to him, wrote Chicago Sun-Times reporter
Lynn Sweet in the April 18 paper. Along those same lines the
Washington Post's Peter Slevin argued that the '60s radical was now
"considered so mainstream" in Chicago "that [Mayor Richard] Daley issued
a statement on Thursday praising him as a 'distinguished professor of
education' and a 'valued member of the Chicago community.'"
The "Distinguished
Professor's office door
But while he may have forsaken violence long ago, as his blog attests,
Ayers's politics are far from mainstream, and go far beyond the standard
Democratic arguments to withdraw from Iraq. For example, Ayers
wants to pay reparations in Iraq AND Afghanistan and practically
withdraw the U.S. military from the entirety of the Middle East, even in
countries that have longstanding security arrangements with the U.S.
The Weathermen and Obama
Jared Israel's in
depth study of the Weathermen, "The Weathermen Redeemed," Parts 1
through 4, edited by Samantha Criscione, are at the following links.
Israel was co-leader of the Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) caucus, the
force within Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) that opposed the Dohrn/Ayers/Mike Klonsky alliance of Weathermen.
He wants to know what Obama was up to while at Columbia?
Part 5: Israel's 5th part,
"St. Bernardine of Arc, and Broadway Baby," appears never to have
been published.
Americans Must Rise Up Against War
Bill Ayers: "Americans must rise up against war" (12:19)
Former "domestic terrorist" Bill Ayers says he hopes to organize the
biggest ever anti-war movement in the country. Ayers was also
the source of Obama's biggest controversy during last year's
presidential campaign. Russia Today's Anastasia Churkina
caught up with Ayers to find out the truth behind his relationship
with Barack Obama.
Billy's Back
Unrepentant domestic terrorist, and
self-described communist,
William "Bill" Ayers, is seeking to create a peace movement, "I think
that what we need is a peace movement, and I'm trying to build one."
Ayers want to create a "peace" movement to "save" Obama's posterior,
saying, "With any luck, the peace movement, the justice movement can
save his (Obama's) presidency. ... So to me the injunction is to get
busy and build a movement," Ayers stated in an April 2009 interview with
The Commentary Factory.com.
When asked how he plans to build his
"peace movement," Ayers
replied: "Well, I mean, how do you build a
movement? How do you build a civil rights movement or peace movement? Look at history. All kinds of ways, but what we need is to stop spending
billions of dollars on war and we need to invest in being a nation among
nations and giving up on the insanity of thinking we can conquer the
world."
But he'll have to interrupt his recent activities. Lately, Ayers has been involved with pro-Palestinian activism, and last
month, Ayers and his wife, Weather Underground co-founder Bernardine
Dohrn, were involved in provoking chaos on the streets of Egypt in an
attempt to enter the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to join in solidarity
with the territory's population and leadership.
The protests
were led by Jodie Evans, co-founder of Code Pink, a
far-left activist organization formed in 2002 to protest America's war
in Iraq. The group previously met with Hamas and with leaders of the
Taliban. During the Iraq war, Evans delivered $600,000, in cash
and supplies, to the Fallujah insurgents -- our enemy. Evans, who
has been described as "the face
of the Democrats' future," was a
fundraiser and financial bundler for Obama's presidential campaign.
One of Obama's greatest
campaign lies was describing
Bill Ayers as, just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood."
Ayers,
not to be outdone, lied
that he knew Obama only slightly: "I think my relationship with Obama
was probably like that of thousands of others in Chicago and, like
millions and millions of others, I wished I knew him better."
In fact, in 1985, Bill
Ayers' Woods Fund put up the money
for Obama to move from New York to Chicago. In 1985 the foundation
gave a $25,000 grant to the Developing Communities Project (aka the
"DCP"), which hired Obama, at 24, as an organizer on Chicago's
economically depressed South Side." Later, Obama joined the board
of the Woods Fund in 1993 and remained until 2002.
In 1989, Obama
was a summer intern at Michelle Obama's law firm,
Sidley & Austin. Michelle was Barack's summer adviser. One
of Michelle's co-workers was Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers' terrorist
wife.
In 1993, Barack Obama was named the the founding Chairman
of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Bill Ayers
organized the team to put together a grant proposal to secure nearly $50
million from the Annenberg Challenge. The money was to be used by
Ayers and company to bolster the radical Local School Councils reform
project that Ayers and Obama had championed back in 1988 through the
ABCs. Ayers personally selected
Obama to serve as chairman, and Obama served on the board for eight
years until the Challenge ended in 2003. During this time, Obama
and Ayers shared an office.
In 1995, a small group of people
came to the communist, Bill Ayers' house, to learn that the communist,
Alice Palmer, was stepping
down from the state senate and running for Congress. Said the
communist, Dr. Quentin Young,
a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, "[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor."
And, of
course, Obama and Ayers both hung out in the faculty lounge at the University of Chicago.
When Obama was unable to deliver
a manuscript of "Dreams..." to Random House, he turned to Bill Ayers to
help him finish what was to become a work of fiction, supposedly on the
advice of wife, Michelle. Thanks to the help he received from the
skilled Ayers, Obama was able to submit a manuscript to his editors.
Obama lied to cover up the 20-year plus relationship, and his
long-time friend and associate Bill Ayers lied right along with him --
remember, both these guys strongly believe that the end does justify the
means.
And, there are those that believe Obama first met Ayers in
1981-1982, while Obama was at Columbia College and Ayers was 371 yards
down the street at Bank Street College, where he was working towards an M.A. in
Early Childhood Education.
Surprise! Surprise!
Aaron Klein says the group behind the Gaza
flotilla that engaged in deadly clashes with Israeli commandos today
counts among its top supporters the friends and associates of Barack
Obama, namely the founders of the Weather Underground terrorist
organization, William Ayers and
Bernardine Dohrn, as well as
Jodie Evans, the leader of the radical activist organization Code
Pink.
Earlier today, Israeli navy commandos raided the six-ship
flotilla, encountering heavy resistance and live fire from the
activists. Several activists were killed and dozens of others were
reportedly injured, as were several of the Israeli commandos.
The flotilla was organized by the Free Gaza Movement, a coalition of
leftist human rights activists and pro-Palestinian groups engaged in
attempts to break a blockade imposed by Israel on the Hamas-controlled
Gaza Strip.
Ayers, Dohrn and Evans' Code Pink have led several
recent Free Gaza Movement initiatives, including attempted marches into
the Gaza Strip. Dorhn was in the Middle East just last month on behalf
of the movement. Ayers and Dohrn were close associates for years
with Obama, while Evans was a fundraiser and financial bundler for
Obama's presidential campaign.
In January, Ayers, Dohrn and
Evans were involved in provoking chaos on the streets of Egypt in an
attempt to enter Gaza with the Free Gaza Movement to join in solidarity
with the territory's population and leadership.
The three helped
to stir riots after the Egyptian government refused to allow a large
number of protesters to enter neighboring Gaza. Eventually, the
protesters accepted an Egyptian offer of allowing about 100 marchers
into Gaza. Once in the territory, those marchers were reportedly
met on the Gaza side by Hamas' former Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.
At the time of the march, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., wrote a
letter in support of a "humanitarian delegation from Massachusetts"
to Gaza. Members of Ayers', Dohrn and Evans' group documented on
their blogs how Kerry's letter was used at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo
while attempting to pressure Egypt to let their group into Gaza.
Images of the letter were also posted on the Electronic Intifada
website run by Ali Abunimah, who was with Evans' group in Egypt and who
spoke at pro-Palestinian events in the 1990s alongside Obama. In
one such event, a 1999 fundraiser for Palestinian "refugees," Abunimah
introduced
Obama on stage.
Kerry's office previously met with Code Pink
members. Sarah Roche-Mahdi of Code Pink also is a member of the United
for Peace and Justice Palestine Task Force, which met with Kerry's
staffers.
Kerry last year became the most senior U.S. politician
to visit the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, although at the time he did
not meet with Hamas leaders.
Dohrn later wrote on a blog that
she was briefly detained at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo following the
January protests there by her group: "Bill and I went to the American
Embassy at 10 a.m. and asked to see the ambassador. We were
ushered into a holding pen a block away from the embassy building where
we joined 35 people already there, surrounded by Egyptian soldiers," she
wrote.
Related:
Obama administration concerned about Gaza incident -- I wonder why?
Little Billy's Bombings
Born
December 26, 1944
Glen Ellyn, DuPage Co.,
IL
Married
1982
Degree
1968
B.S. American Studies,
University of Michigan
Fact
October 7, 1969
Bombing of Haymarket
Police Statue in Chicago
Fact
December 6, 1969
Bombing of several
Chicago Police cars parked in a precinct parking lot at 3600
North Halsted Street, Chicago, IL
Fact
December 1969
Attended WUO War
Council, Flint MI
Fact
Between 1969 and 1981
Terrorist bomber, Leader
of the Weather Underground
Fact
February 13, 1970
Bombing of several
police vehicles of the Berkeley, California, Police
Department
Fact
February 16, 1970
Bombing of Golden Gate
Park branch of the San Francisco Police Department, killing
one officer and injuring a number of other policemen
Fact
March 6, 1970
Bombing in the 13th
Police District of the Detroit, Michigan
Fact
May 10, 1970
Bombing of The National
Guard Association building in Washington, D.C.
Fact
June 9, 1970
Bombing of The New York
City Police Headquarters
Fact
July 27, 1970
Bombing of The Presidio
army base in San Francisco, CA
Fact
October 8, 1970
Bombing of Marin County
courthouse
Fact
October 10, 1970
Bombing of Queens
traffic-court building
Fact
October 14, 1970
Bombing of The Harvard
Center for International Affairs
Fact
March 1, 1971
Bombing of The United
States Capitol
Fact
August 29, 1971
Bombing of the Office of
California Prisons
Fact
September 17, 1971
Bombing of The New York
Department of Corrections in Albany, NY
Fact
October 15, 1971
Bombing of William
Bundy's office in the MIT research center
Fact
May 19, 1972
Bombing of The Pentagon
Fact
May 18, 1973
Bombing of the 103rd
Police Precinct in New York
Fact
September 28, 1973
Bombing of ITT
headquarters in New York and Rome, Italy
Fact
March 6, 1974
Bombing of the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare offices in San
Francisco, CA
Fact
May 31, 1974
Bombing of The Office of
the California Attorney General
Fact
June 17, 1974
Bombing of Gulf Oil's
Pittsburgh headquarters
Fact
September 11, 1974
Bombing of Anaconda
Corporation
Fact
June 16, 1975
Bombing of Banco de
Ponce in New York
Fact
September 1975
Bombing of the Kennecott
Corporation
Fact
October 20, 1981
Brinks robbery in which
several members of the Weather Underground stole over $1
million from a Brinks armored car near Nyack, New York. The
robbers murdered 2 police officers and 1 Brinks guard.
Several others were wounded.
Degree
1987
MEd, Columbia University
Address
1993
4811 S Kimbark St,
Chicago, IL
Fact
1995
Co-Author of "Dreams
From My Father" by Barack Obama
Bernadine's Bombings
Born
January 12, 1942
Chicago, Cook Co., IL
Graduation
June 1959
Whitefish Bay High
School, Milwaukee Co., WI
Education
1960
Degree
1963
B.A. Political Science,
University of Chicago
Degree
June 9, 1967
JD, University of
Chicago
Fact
July 1969
Met with Fidel Castro
and representatives of the PRG of South Vietnam in Havana,
Cuba
Fact
September 24, 1969
Arrested by Chicago
Police
Fact
October 7, 1969
Bombing of Haymarket
Police Statue in Chicago, IL
Fact
October 1969
Arrested by Chicago
Police
Fact
December 6, 1969
Bombing of several
Chicago Police cars parked in a precinct parking lot at 3600
North Halsted Street, Chicago, IL
Fact
Between 1969 and 1981
Terrorist bomber, Leader
of the Weather Underground
Fact
February 13, 1970
Bombing of several
police vehicles of the Berkeley, California, Police
Department
Fact
February 16, 1970
Bombing of Golden Gate
Park branch of the San Francisco Police Department, killing
one officer and injuring a number of other policemen
Fact
March 6, 1970
Bombing in the 13th
Police District of the Detroit, Michigan
Fact
May 10, 1970
Bombing of The National
Guard Association building in Washington, D.C.
Fact
June 9, 1970
Bombing of The New York
City Police Headquarters
Fact
July 27, 1970
Bombing of The Presidio
army base in San Francisco, CA
Fact
October 8, 1970
Bombing of Marin County
courthouse
Fact
October 10, 1970
Bombing of Queens
traffic-court building
Fact
October 14, 1970
Bombing of The Harvard
Center for International Affairs
Fact
March 1, 1971
Bombing of The United
States Capitol
Fact
August 29, 1971
Bombing of the Office of
California Prisons
Fact
September 17, 1971
Bombing of The New York
Department of Corrections in Albany, NY
Fact
October 15, 1971
Bombing of William
Bundy's office in the MIT research center
Fact
May 19, 1972
Bombing of The Pentagon
Fact
May 18, 1973
Bombing of the 103rd
Police Precinct in New York
Fact
September 28, 1973
Bombing of ITT
headquarters in New York and Rome, Italy
Fact
March 6, 1974
Bombing of the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare offices in San
Francisco, CA
Fact
May 31, 1974
Bombing of The Office of
the California Attorney General
Fact
June 17, 1974
Bombing of Gulf Oil's
Pittsburgh headquarters
Fact
September 11, 1974
Bombing of Anaconda
Corporation
Fact
January 29, 1975
Bombing of the State
Department
Fact
June 16, 1975
Bombing of Banco de
Ponce in New York
Fact
September 1975
Bombing of the Kennecott
Corporation
Fact
October 20, 1981
Brinks robbery in which
several members of the Weather Underground stole over $1
million from a Brinks armored car near Nyack, New York. The
robbers murdered 2 police officers and 1 Brinks guard.
Several others were wounded.
Fact
1982
Served 7 months in jail
Address (Facts Pg)
1982
520 W 123rd #5w, New
York, NY
Occupation
Between 1984 and 1988
Sidley Austin law firm,
Chicago, IL
Occupation
1991
Professor, Northwestern
University
Bernardine Dohrn Exposes The "Real
Terrorists"
Former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
and Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn speaks to NewsClick
India, in November 2010. During the interview, Dohrn describes who the "real terrorist are -- you.
Barack Obama began his political career in this woman's living room.
One of the best known contacts between Obama, Dohrn and hubby
Bill Ayers was when the
couple hosted a "meet and
greet" for Obama at Ayers' house in Hyde Park -– an upper middle class
neighborhood
on Chicago's south side, where Obama now lives as a neighbor of Louis
Farrakhan.
"I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill
Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the
senate and running for Congress," said
Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent
Chicago physician, socialist and advocate for single-payer health care, of the
informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. "[Palmer]
identified [Obama] as her successor."
A Chicago-based
blogger named Maria Warren -- whose writing suggested she was to the
left of Obama -- recalled watching the candidate give a "standard,
innocuous little talk" in 1995, in the Ayers' living room when Obama was
running for the state Senate.
"They were launching him," Warren wrote, "introducing him to the Hyde
Park community as the best thing since sliced bread."
Ayers and Dohrn are simply the most visible of the far left supporters
who propelled Barack Obama's early political career. The woman who
touted Obama at the Ayers meeting,
Alice Palmer, herself a
communist, was into community organizing like Obama.
Dohrn served seven months in a NYC federal jail in 1983 for refusing to
testify before a grand jury investigating the Brinks robbery of 1981, in
which two policemen and a security guard were killed.
In 1979,
Dohrn worked in a baby boutique,
Broadway Baby, where stolen customer ID's were
used to rent trucks used in the series of robberies culminating in the
1981 slaughter in which 9 kids lost their fathers, the youngest of which
was six-months.
Because of her criminal convictions, Dohrn, who received a law degree
from the University of Chicago in 1967, was refused admission to the New
York bar.
Nonetheless, she was hired as a legal clerk by Sidley and Austin, a
major Chicago law firm, in their New York office in 1984. Howard
Trienens, then managing partner of the firm, recently told the Chicago
Tribune that he arranged the hiring of Dohrn as a favor to his fellow
Northwestern University trustee and classmate, Tom Ayers, Bill's father. Tom
Ayers' firm, Commonwealth Edison, has used Sidley as outside counsel for
many years. She later worked in their Chicago office when she and
Bill Ayers moved back to Chicago in 1987.
In 1989, Obama was
a summer intern at the corporate law firm Sidley Austin LLP in Chicago
where
he met Michelle Robinson, his summer
adviser. Michelle's friend and fellow staffer was Bernadine Dohrn.
The relationship between the Obamas and the Ayers
is close and has spanned twenty years.
That's a tight little clique in Chicago.
They're All In This Together
Asked during the 2008 presidential campaign about
his relationship with the left-wing radical Bill Ayers, Barack Obama
replied that Ayers was just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood."
He implied that to even bring that questionable relationship out of the
shadows was a mean-spirited, guilt-by-association political tactic.
Ayers, Obama went on, had done something deplorable "forty years ago
when I was six or seven years old."
Otherwise, Obama insisted,
Ayers was a paragon of virtue: a respectable fixture in mainstream
Chicago, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on a
foundation board focused on education that included "Republicans,
bankers, lawyers." Ayers had even worked for, and was a good
friend of, Mayor Richard M. Daley. The Obama campaign at once
launched a crusade to distance Obama from Ayers. It went so far as
to actually defend the man who had implicated himself in terror bombings
in his own 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days.
In fact, Ayers and his
wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were radical Marxist revolutionaries in the
Vietnam War era. They were founders of the Weather Underground, a
violent terrorist arm of Students for a Democratic Society. Both
were eventually indicted in federal court, and Dohrn by the State of
Illinois. Rather than face a trial they jumped bail and
disappeared into the underground in 1970. After they resurfaced 11
years later, both were admitted into the halls of academia. Ayers
became a Distinguished Professor of Education and a Senior University
Scholar at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Incredibly, Dohrn
became a law professor at Northwestern.
The American Spectator
has developed information that demonstrates, without any doubt, that
Ayers and Dohrn have spent a lifetime advocating and practicing the
strategies and tactics of Marxism. That includes the violent
overthrow of the United States government. It also involves
treasonous cooperation with revolutionary Communist governments in
China, North Vietnam, and Cuba during the 1960s and '70s and, until the
fall of the Eastern Bloc, governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union. But unlike many of their compatriots from those days of
violence and turmoil, Ayers and Dohrn are completely unrepentant about
their past activities. To this day, they continue to support
destruction of the American free enterprise system and its replacement
with a Marxist utopia.
What, then, is the relationship between
these two hard-core leftist revolutionaries and Barack Obama, and why is
it important?
Click
here to read the most detailed report I've seen on Ayers, Dohrn and
Obama.
Still Terrorizing
Jim Hoft
says that on October 20th, 2011 the
Obama-endorsed Occupy Chicago activists
invited unrepentant domestic terrorist turned University of Illinois
professor,
Bill Ayers, to lead a "teach-in" on the
virtues of confrontational tactics. The teaching session was
dubbed "non-violent disobedience" in the anti-capitalist revolution.
Bill Ayers told the young leftists about how he met with the North
Vietnamese to discuss fomenting revolution in America. The meeting
was held on the street in downtown Chicago. The young activists
lapped it up.
So, who else noticed that the local news
cameraman shook Ayers’s hand at the beginning of the clip?
"Today I'm Going To End Capitalism"
At Occupy Union Square, March 30, 2012, Bill Ayers said, "I get up
every morning and think...today I'm going to end capitalism."
March 2013
In an
exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, former Weather Underground
leader Bill Ayers opened up about his days as a domestic terrorist as
well as his past relationship to Barack Obama.
Ayers confirmed that him and Obama were "friendly" back when he was
in Chicago:
"David Axelrod said we were friendly, that was true; we served on
a couple of boards together, that was true; he held a fundraiser in
our living room, that was true; Michelle [Obama] and Bernardine were
at the law firm together, that was true. Hyde Park in Chicago is a
tiny neighborhood, so when he said I was "a guy around the
neighborhood," that was true. Today, I wish I knew him better and he
was listening to me. Obama’s not a radical. I wish he were, but he’s
not."
On the Weather Underground, Ayers claimed that the group "certainly
crossed lines of propriety and legality" but "never killed or injured
anybody."
"So what we did was a lot of vandalism," he added.
In fact, several people did end up losing their lives in the
Greenwich Village bombing in 1970. Members of the Underground were
assembling a bomb when it prematurely detonated, killing the three
people assembling the bomb instantly and injuring two others. That was
in addition to the radical group bombing other domestic targets where
luckily no one was killed.
Ayers distanced himself from the incident, saying it "would have been
a terrible tragedy and an act of terror, and they blew themselves up."
"I feel nothing but sadness and sorrow about that, and at the same
time, I’m actually very glad that they were never able to bring it to
fruition," he added.
He did, however, say he does not regret being extreme in his
opposition of the Vietnam war.
"Am I sorry about things we did in those days? Absolutely. I’m sorry
we were stupid. I’m sorry we were young. I’m sorry we were naïve," Ayers
said.
