By Cliff Kincaid
April 23, 2008
Obama admitted to exchanging ideas with Ayers on an irregular basis but did not say what those ideas were.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama tried to deflect a question about his relationship with terrorist Bill Ayers by saying that he “engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8-years-old” and that he was now a professor and a neighbor. The real issue is whether Obama shares Ayers’ communist views. Obama admitted to exchanging ideas with Ayers on an irregular basis but did not say what those ideas were. But we know that Ayers, rather than just being a 1960s “radical,” was a member of a Marxist-Leninist communist group.
The Weather Underground, or Weathermen, wasn’t just home-grown and domestic in nature, although it had evolved from the so-called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which laid siege to college campuses and tried to take over administration buildings. Their openly proclaimed goal was world communism and they had links to hostile foreign powers.
“We’re revolutionary communists,” Ayers himself said in 1969.
The FBI said that the Weather Underground had more contacts abroad than the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA.
Which brings up
another so far unmentionable aspect of Obama’s background―the role of his childhood mentor, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis. This is the hard-core Soviet apologist who filled Obama’s head full of anti-American thoughts at a tender age.
About Ayers, Obama said that he’s not somebody he exchanges ideas with “on a regular basis.” What ideas? And does that mean he communicates with him on an occasional basis? We need more questions and answers.
But in a posting on the far-left Huffington Post website, Ayers’ brother, Rick Ayers, accused Senator Hillary Clinton of McCarthyism for daring to comment on Obama’s ties to this communist terrorist when the subject came up in the April 16 Democratic presidential debate. Such a charge of “McCarthyism” is designed to intimidate not only Clinton but the media.
Does the phony charge of “McCarthyism” prevent the media from exploring the more critical issue of Frank Marshall Davis’s influence on Obama?
The Davis connection is essential to understanding why Obama would exchange any ideas at all with Ayers. At this point in his life, after he had moved from Hawaii, where he listened to Davis’s Marxist “poetry” and anti-American and pro-Soviet rants, Obama was receptive to the kinds of “ideas” that Ayers would offer to him. The media should demand to know what those ideas were.
The False Veneer
Obama has been clever to appear bipartisan and moderate, despite a very liberal voting record. He let his guard down in a big way when he not only endorsed but sponsored the Global Poverty Act, funneling a massive amount of foreign aid (by one informed estimate $845 billion) to Africa and the rest of the world, perhaps as partial reparations for slavery. It is curious that Obama doesn’t talk about this bill, which is on the verge of Senate passage, and it is strange that the major media don’t mention it, either. It is a potential budget buster that sheds light on Obama’s worldview.
The “exchange” of views with Ayers and others of his ilk may also shed light on what Obama might do in other areas, such as the critical field of education, where the federal government has assumed a larger role. It turns out that Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, another former communist terrorist, are now specializing in the education and the raising of young people. They even have a book coming out on the subject.
Obama himself seems to have some strange ideas on child-rearing, having brought his young children to hear Sunday sermons from a pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who has exhibited anti-American and anti-white tendencies and sentiments.
The Foreign ConnectionFor his part, Ayers wasn’t just a terrorist; he was a communist terrorist aligned with and manipulated by Moscow’s communist apparatus, operating through Cuba, against the United States. Many members of the group traveled to Cuba, sometimes to meet with the Vietnamese communists, and others went directly to Hanoi, North Vietnam. One of their stated objectives was to prevent the U.S. from stopping a communist takeover of Vietnam. They succeeded, with the acquiescence of a liberal Congress, which cut off U.S. aid to the South Vietnamese government, and more than 58,000 American soldiers died in vain.
Senator John McCain was an American prisoner of war being tortured by the North Vietnamese communists while Ayers and his comrades were giving aid and comfort to McCain’s torturers.
The FBI was desperate to apprehend Ayers and his comrades because they were operating with foreign support and direction and the dozens of bombings they carried out between 1969 and 1975 did an estimated $100 million in damage. A policeman had been killed in San Francisco by a bomb planted by the Weather Underground at a police station. Seven others were injured. Eight were injured in the Weather Underground bombing of the New York City police department. Fifty-nine policemen were injured in a riot the Weather Underground promoted in Chicago.
If anything, ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos was too timid in his questioning of Obama during the April 16 debate. Here’s how Stephanopoulos put it:
A gentleman named William Ayers, he was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that. And in fact, on 9/11, he was quoted in the New York Times, saying, ‘I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.’ An early organizing meeting for your state senate campaign was held at his house and your campaign has said you were ‘friendly.’ Can you explain that relationship for the voters and explain to Democrats why it won’t be a problem?”
A “gentleman” named Bill Ayers? The only reason he’s not in prison today is because the FBI employed allegedly illegal break-ins as part of their search for members of the group. FBI officials thought the break-ins were justified on national security grounds but terrorist lawyers would have had any charges against them thrown out.
Some of the terrorists, of course, did go to prison. Kathy Boudin went to prison for her involvement in an October 20, 1981, armed terrorist assault that left Nyack, New York Police Sgt. Edward O’Grady, Patrolman Waverly Brown and Brinks guard Peter Paige dead. A
website, memorial and scholarship have been created in their honor.
David Gilbert also went to prison for his role in that assault. He co-authored the SDS booklet, “U.S. Imperialism,” whose first page includes a quote from the Communist Manifesto. He wrote the book, No Surrender: Writings from an anti-imperialist political prisoner, which includes an endorsement on the back cover from Ward Churchill, the disgraced college professor who achieved notoriety for comparing 9/11 victims to Nazis.
Other titles from the “SDS lit list” of June of 1969 included, Which Side Are You On? US History in Perspective, Cuba vs U.S Imperialism, and Cultural Revolution in China. SDS literature regularly referred to police as “pigs.”
Hillary Clinton, during the debate in which the subject of Ayers came up, meekly noted that Obama “served on a board with Mr. Ayers for a period of time, the Woods Foundation, which was a paid directorship position.” Notice how Senator Clinton referred to “Mr. Ayers,” after Stephanopoulos had called him a “gentleman.”
In rebuttal, Obama noted that “President Clinton pardoned or commuted the sentences of two members of the Weather Underground, which I think is a slightly more significant act than me serving on a board with somebody for actions that he did 40 years ago.”
So both of them have something to answer for. And so does George Soros.
The Soros ConnectionOne of the terrorists pardoned by Clinton was Linda Evans, who became a
“Soros Justice Fellow,” named after the controversial left-wing billionaire, George Soros, who spent millions of dollars to defeat President Bush in 2004. She was given a Soros grant to “increase civic participation of former prisoners.”
This is the same Linda Evans, according to an FBI report, who said that during a trip to Hanoi in 1969 she was shown an anti-aircraft gun, cradled it in her arms, and “wished an American plane would fly over.”
For her part, Dohrn in 2004 was advertised as a featured speaker at the Baltimore branch of the Open Society Institute, a group funded by Soros. Her topic was discipline in schools.
You can see what they have in mind for America’s youth in how Chesa Boudin turned out. He was raised by Dohrn and Ayers because his real parents, Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, had gone to prison. Chesa Boudin, who went to Yale, where he was a leader of the Yale Coalition for Peace, was selected as a Rhodes Scholar and is a big fan of “The Venezuelan Revolution,” which just happens to be in the title of a book that he co-authored that is sympathetic to the brand of communism being promoted by Hugo Chavez. He reportedly lived in Venezuela so he could support the Chavez government. “To our fathers and mothers, who brought politics to our lives,” says the acknowledgements. They sure did.
Chesa Boudin is also an editor of “Letters From Young Activists,” a 2005 book about a new “movement” for “progressive social change” that includes a preface from Bernardine Dohrn, who praises the “young militants” for trying to change the world. The book includes an endorsement from convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal and gives thanks to “lifelong activist and educator Bill Ayers.”
“Dear Dad,” writes Chesa Boudin in a letter published in the book. He tells his father, convicted and incarcerated terrorist David Gilbert, that “Che Guevara would have described your revolutionary spirit as guided by love.”
It turns out that Bill Ayers’ brother, Rick, who accused Hillary of McCarthyism, is also an “educator.” He was a teacher at Berkeley High School, where he developed a program that sent students to foreign countries like Cuba and Mexico to learn about “social justice.” The author of a book about teenage slang, he has teamed up with his brother and Bernardine Dohrn to edit
the forthcoming book, Zero Tolerance, advertised as an argument against using tough discipline in schools.
Apparently, school officials are just supposed to let student troublemakers have the run of the place, like the SDS tried to do on college campuses.
The Obama Youth MovementAn objective observer might conclude that Ayers, Dohrn and their comrades are now dedicated to creating a new student and youth movement, like the one they participated in which eventually developed into a full-blown terrorist organization that killed our fellow citizens and tried to eliminate the “Thin Blue Line” of police separating us from the criminals.
In this new crusade, they not only have an inspiring leader, Barack Obama, who attracts young people with his promise of “change,” but a moneybags named Soros, who has funded causes such as rights for convicted felons and legalization of dope.
“I have very high regard for Hillary Clinton, but I think Obama has the charisma and the vision to radically reorient America in the world,” Soros recently told Judy Woodruff of Bloomberg Television. “I think that he has shown to be a really unusual person.”
On April 8, according to Politico’s Ben Smith, Soros
hosted a dinner that spawned a new group,
Progressive Media USA, which plans on spending $40 million to defeat McCain’s presidential bid and ensure the election of the Democratic candidate, which Soros hopes will be Obama.
After Hillary’s attack over Ayers backfired and led to charges of McCarthyism, Senator John McCain brought it up, noting on ABC’s “This Week” program that Ayers was an “unrepentant terrorist.” At the same time, McCain said he would not question Obama’s patriotism.
But the patriotism of Frank Marshall Davis can certainly be questioned. And Obama should be asked why he referred to this pro-Soviet communist in his book only as “Frank.”
