Congress, Terrorism
In early January, when Barack Obama was just one among many Democratic candidates, we published Swiftboating Obama’s Religion: He Is Not a Muslim. Now that he is the putative Democratic nominee, here is a look at another potentially Swiftboat-able part of his record — his tenuous connections to William Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn, who were members of the Weather Underground in the Vietnam War era — and his one-time professional relationship with Dr. Rashid Khalidi, a one-time PLO media director.
Ayers was a prominent constituent in Obama’s state senate district.
Ayers and Dorhn were involved in the planning and execution of violent protests 40 years ago:
They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper FBI surveillance.
Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, 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.
This never-heard-of-him rightwinger offers a taste of the spin to come from his fellow Noise Machiners:
Ayers, along with his fellow former Weather Underground terrorist wife, Bernardine Dohrn, are among the two most despicable people in living in America. And Obama served on a board with him. That will play well in rural Ohio — for John McCain.
While the Arizona senator was being tortured by his North Vietnamese captors, Ayers was openly cheering for a Communist victory over our troops.
Obama biographer, John K. Wilson, author of “Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest,” and who says he is not affiliated with the Obama campaign, describes Obama’s relationship with with Ayers this way:
In 1995, State Sen. Alice Palmer held an event for supporters at the home of Ayers, where she announced her plans to run for Congress and introduced Obama as her chosen successor. Obama also served on the board of directors for a progressive foundation, the Woods Fund, from 1999-2001, when Ayers was also on the board. In 2001, Ayers gave $200 to Obama’s state senate campaign fund. And Obama and Ayers appeared together on a 1997 panel at the University of Chicago dealing with juvenile justice (Obama also praised Ayers’ approach on the subject in an op-ed he wrote that year), and on a 2002 panel on public intellectuals at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
That’s it.
Put another way: Ayers was a prominent constituent in Obama’s Illinois Senate district.
Former CIA agent Larry Johnson, a Hillary Clinton supporter, has discussed Obama’s professional relationship with Dr. Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor who had ties to the PLO. Here is Johnson’s take:
Dr. Khalidi was a director of the official PLO press agency WAFA in Beirut from 1976 to 1982. During this time the U.S. State Department considered the PLO a terrorist organization and the PLO was involved with terrorist attacks. WAFA was not an independent, unaffiliated news organization. While it is true that the PLO has moderated over time and moved in the mainstream of Palestinian politics, that is not the point. What we are talking about is perception. Dr. Khalidi, notwithstanding his current work, cannot pretend he was some outsider with no ties to the policies and practices of the PLO in the late 70s. That point will be seized on by Republican strategists. I am not saying this is right or fair, but it is reality. So deal with it.
I am not questioning nor challenging Dr. Khalidi’s academic credentials. He is a real professor and has written real books. But he is not some neutral observer. He served on the PLO “guidance committee†at the Madrid peace conference. It does not matter that he was critical of the PLO’s handling of the Oslo peace process. He was still part of the PLO side and the Republican political strategists will focus on that fact.
And Khalidi has direct ties to Obama. These are not imagined. Before getting his job at Columbia University Rashid Khalidi was a Middle East professor at the University of Chicago, where he befriended none other than U.S. presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama. In 2000 Khalidi held a successful fundraiser for Barack. I am not saying or inferring or suggesting that Obama did anything wrong in letting Khalidi hold a fund raiser. But I am willing to bet that it will become an issue in the general election. Barack also played a role in getting funding for Khalidi’s Arab American Action Network during his tenure on the board of the Woods Fund.
While John McCain’s endorsement by the hate group leader, Rev. John Hagee, has received a pass from the “liberal media,” Obama has been criticized for an endorsement by Louis Farrakhan that he did not want. We can expect a lot of controversy about Obama’s relationships with Ayers, Dorhn and Khalidi, but, as John K. Wilson points out, the media will ignore McCain’s endorsement of Oliver North, the for Reagan-Bush appointee who sold arms to Iranian terrorist regime and used the proceeds to fund the Nicarauguan Contras — an act that was specifically forbidden by U.s. law.
Merely a bunch of right-wing nonsense that MOST people are onto by now.
What worries me is all the talk of Obama making a fine Vice President… Where is all this Vice President talk coming from? I fear this is supposed to be preparing us for Hillary being the democratic nominee. Then when Hillary IS NOMINATED and people ARE PISSED, especially young democrats, then McCain and the republicans will be using this against the dems saying, “Look, they can’t even get along within their own party, do you think they can run the country?!” I feel some real dirty politics coming on…
I consider my self an independent.
The facts are the facts; how can you defent Obama’s ties with domestic terror? He wants to be the leader of the free-world, yet he is friendly with individuals that tried to blow up federal buildings, as well as Fort Dix base during a party. That is pure evil. These facts are very real, not made up by some right-wing politician-no spin at all. Look it up your-self.
Barack will never win in a national election regardless of how the press wants to spin things. You watch, Americans will not vote for a man that has a shady past, with ties to un-american groups; they want a patriotic president, that does not associate with terror groups, both foreign and domestic-regardless of the whole democrate/republican association.
I agree he is a charasmatic guy-but has nothing to back it up with. he can’t win, he can’t even win the states that are needed to win a national election.
If he is the nominee he will loose and Mccain will be the next president. I look at Barack’s push to be president something like this-Exp: if a person went to work at a company at an entry level, and after one year of holding a junior position started petitioining the board to be the CEO…they would laugh him out of his job. He came too soon. Had he waited maybe 4 years he would have a shot, but the inexperience, and the background ties to terror will leave him a loser. Watch and learn.
The comment above by Common Sense is about as intelligent as its grammar, spelling and punctuation are correct, which is to say: Not at all.
I like Larry Johnson, but to write an article like this about an American professor as if to imply he was a terrorist without presenting any evidence other than guilt by association, is like saying Larry Johnson was a sponsor of torture since he was a member of the CIA when it was going on. Either Professor Khalidi is a terrorist, or he is not, and so far, based on this evidence, he is not. Does Mr Johnson really want people looking at the questionable ties that the Clintons have with the same light he is using on Obama, like why is she so closely tied to Indian firms while jobs are being outsourced there by the thousands?
Ps: I’ll still vote for whoever the Democratic nominee is. this stuff pales in comparison to what Senator McCave-in has been up to in prostating himself before the GOP power barons.
Woods Fund
Founded by the Woods family, owners of the Illinois-based Sahara Coal Company, a major supplier of coal from its mines to Commonwealth Edison, headed by Thomas Ayers, father of Bill Ayers.
In 1985, the Woods Fund gave a $25,000 grant to the Developing Communities Project (DCP), which allowed DCP to hire Obama, at age 24, as an organizer on Chicago’s South Side. Obama served on the board of the Woods Fund from 1993 until 2002. Bill Ayers
joined the board of the Fund in 1999.
Annenberg Challenge
From its inception in 1995 until 2000, the leaders of the two operative arms of the Annenberg Challenge [CAC Board and CSR Collaborative] were Bill Ayers and Barack Obama.
Obama dismisses Bill Ayers as “some guy who lives in my neighborhood.â€
I can beat that, Cachito. I dismiss William Ayers as some old Vietnam War protester.
Dismissed as “some old Vietnam War protestor”?
The FBI at the time had an officer who infiltrated the Weatherman Underground and stated that William Ayers was “the” central figure in the organization.
They shot several police offers in a bank robbery, bombed many government buildings and killed a decorated police officer who left behind a wife and 9 kids. They shot Officer Schroeder in the back.
These guys weren’t toilet-papering government buildings for fun.
Is Timothy McVeigh going to be considered “some old government protestor from the 90s”?
Que pasa people?
Whatever Bill Ayers did then has nothing to do with Barack Obama, who was 8 years old and living abroad in 1969.
By contrast, McCain was in his 50s when he was the guest of honor at a fundraiser for a woman who shot an abortion doctor, a retired Navy surgeon, and who was called a terrorist by her sentencing judge.
This whole Ayers thing is just a big nothing burger that’s sole purpose is to change the subject from McCain’s lousy campaign and his dangerously bad judgment in picking the Worst Vice Presidential Nominee Ever.
Tom, you’re kind of running your Weathermen together. From what I can gather, William Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn only acted in Chicago, where no one was ever hurt. I am having a hard time coming up online with any links between Ayers and the Boston police officer Schroeder.
I was a fan of Vietnam War protesters, and took a particular interest in the Chicago 7 (or 8, depending on whether you count Bobby Seale), even though I was too young at the time (I was 9 in 1968) to do more than think hippies were cool. Even so, my impression was that outfits like the Yippies and the Weathermen and SDS were kind of loosey-goosey, non-dues-paying groups whose members acted locally even if they took the name of a more renowned club.
Fast forwarding to 1995, when Obama was invited by the Illinois senator to the home of a fundraiser who turned out to be William Ayers. I have spent a good deal of time online trying to see exactly what Ayers did, and why he was allowed to become a college professor and contributor to society if it was much more than protesting the Vietnam War, and have found little in the way of specifics. Hard though it might be to remember, in 1995 the internet was still a nascent technology. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to research Ayers from, say, your local library’s reference section of books and periodicals only?
So whether it’s converting a Vietnam War protester into a terrorist, or holding Obama accountable for not googling Ayers when Google wasn’t even around (I just checked – the company started in 1997), we are wrong to paint the past with brushes from the present. Attempting to do so is why your side is having trouble making these “charges” against Obama stick.