Professor Gates held fundraiser for Obama

Wow! I just discovered the reason President Barack Hussein Obama reacted with such vehemence when Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested for not corroborating with an Officer verifying his identity after a burglary report in the neighborhood.

Can you imagine! Professor Gates became bent out of shape when an officer who happened to be White asked for identification to confirm Professor Gates was the resident and not a burglar. The reason for Gates’ ire: Professor Gates is an Afro-American and he was not about to racially profiled by a White Police Officer attempting to do his duty.

Dear God in Heaven dude! Just show your ID and call it a night.

Anyway, I believe President BHO became upset not only because of a personal friendship and Gates being a Contributor to past and present political campaigns; BHO is also an ideological fellow traveler with Marxist supporter of radical black ideas Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

JRH 7/27/09 (Hat Tip: ConservativeNewsMedia)

The Demise of democracy? of the nation state?

Here is a WOW piece of writing especially if you are endued with the patience of reading a lengthy essay in a sort of an e. e. cummings format (i.e. the entire is in written in small text rather than grammatical capitalization).

The author begins with a historical perspective working toward the goal of explaining Marxism (and its various Left offshoots) have eroded typical Western and American values. Also the author included Islamic Jihadism as a danger to Western Society for all the Slanted Left Marxist derivatives enable radical Islam by both acting as a social apologist and setting the West up for the intrusion of Islamic values (e.g. Sharia Law) to move into the values vacuum created by the Left.

The Demise of democracy? of the nation state? – Is truly an awesome read. Educate yourself for the sake of your families’ future.

JRH 2/15/09

The Virus of the Islamic Fifth Column

Once upon a time in America there was a Fifth Column of Soviet inspired Communists that had infiltrated the U.S. government. That was a scary thing considering the old Soviet Union wanted to dominate the world with its Soviet Empire under the illusion the “proletarian” class would shake off some kind of false Capitalist bondage that exploited working class people by imposing democratic principles, civil rights and government for the people (as opposed to people for the government).

Another Fifth Column is slowly emerging in the United States with an unlikely comrade in the American Left. I say unlikely because the American Left is propping up Political Islam in America as European governments already have accomplished.

European Islam has proven every bit as violent as Middle Eastern Islam. Indeed, Islam in Europe has demanded and in many cases succeeded to have the tyranny of Sharia Law to supersede the rule of law based on Western principles in European governments.

If this type of Islamic Fifth Column continues to grow in America under the delusion of the freedom of religion, there will be NO freedom in America; particularly there will be NO freedom of religion. Sharia Law is evil.

Act for America has sent out an email alert that exposes how Islamic sympathizers and Muslims have even warped military strategy in America’s military schools to view Islamic murdering terrorists as Hamas to be a victimized “misunderstood” group of Muslims.

THIS IS WHAT IS BEING TAUGHT IN AMERICA’S WAR COLLEGE!

Below is Act for America’s email which is a must read. Then go on to read Patrick Poole’s article describing on form of Islamic interpenetration into Western ideology.

JRH 1/17/09

*********************************

Strategic collapse at the Army War College

Act for America
Email Sent: January 16, 2009

Below you will find an excellent piece by our friend Patrick Poole which addresses a fundamental problem we repeatedly point out – that far too many in our government are either ignorant of, in denial of, or disingenuous about the underlying threat doctrine that drives Islamic terrorism worldwide.


This sentence is particularly alarming:



“Two weeks ago, Ricks reported on a new publication by Army War College research professor Sherifa Zuhur on Hamas and Israel that informs readers that Hamas has been misunderstood due to the misreporting by ‘Israeli and Western sources that villainize the group.’”




So, according to Zuhur, the Hamas organization that is caught on video brainwashing children to hate Israel and kill Jews, training children to be terrorists, and using children as human shields, is not really so bad, but has been “misunderstood” because of reporting that “villianizes” the organization.


Remarkable.


As we have noted many times before, one reason it is essential that we build a formidable grassroots citizen action network is that we must have the “bottom up” strength to successfully push for government policies that truly understand the nature of the threat we face and take the necessary actions to combat it.


We know there are many people throughout the government who share our concerns about political correctness run amok. But when the Army War College publishes a report with absurd claims like Zuhur’s, it should be eminently clear to us that the voices of political correctness are overpowering the voices of sanity and reason.


One action you can take today, if you haven’t already done so, is to sign our petition calling for a UN investigation of Hamas.


ACT for America
P.O. Box 6884
Virginia Beach, VA 23456
http://www.actforamerica.org/

The ZombieTime Goods on BHO Lies about Ayers

WOW! I am certain by now anyone that is half way paying to the Presidential race 2008 is aware of the McCain camp (and more so my fellow Slanted Right writers) saying that Bill Ayers has had a highly influential connection to Barack Hussein Obama.

BHO has brilliantly attempted to fool voters (with the heinous collusion of a pro-Obama Mainstream Media) that he barely known Bill Ayers. I say brilliant because voters are so sold on BHO that his poll numbers have been consistently higher than John McCain’s numbers. I have to reiterate that polls are deceptive for there seem to be as many polls showing nearly double digits in a BHO poll lead while other polls show a mere single digit lead. The incredible point though is the Barack Hussein Obama according to the polls is in the lead.

Now I can understand Leftist voters being gaw-gaw for BHO, after all Leftists are made from the same Left (Communist/Marxist/Socialist) political DNA. I can understand that the stalwart Slanted Right voters are against BHO.

What I cannot understand is how America’s centrist and undecided are leaning toward a Barack Hussein Obama Presidency!

BHO has pulled off one of the greatest character flim-flams in American political history (to date).

I believe I have discovered one of the most definitive blog posts on Bill Ayers. Ayers condemns (or hypes if you are a Leftist) himself in his own words as a murdering Communist bent on the delusion of overthrowing the U.S. government and exterminating Americans who did not tow the fantastical new Communist government line. The number I read was a willingness to kill over 25 million Americans.

I am going to cross post this at SlantRight.com the best that I can. I write “the best that I can” because the ZomieTime.com post has numerous scanned copies of Bill Ayers and wife Bernadine Dohrn’s published American-Terrorist Communist Manifesto entitled Prairie Fire. To view the actual scans GO THERE.JRH 10/25/08 (Hat tip NetRight Nation)
 ***************************
[SlantRight Editor: Because of the Uncertainty of how long SlantRight.com will be operational, I am doing a copy and pasted of the ZombieTime.com article I cross posted there. 3/2/12]

William Ayers' forgotten communist manifesto: Prairie Fire

posted: October 22, 2008
ZombieTime.com

William Ayers is a communist. But don't take my word for it. He said so himself:

We are a guerilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years.

And not some nicey-nice peace-and-love kind of communist. Through his group the Weather Underground, Ayers was planning to "seize power" in a violent communist takeover of the United States:

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.

The quotes above were scanned directly from 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.

After a long search, I was lucky enough to finally get my hands on a copy of the original edition of Prairie Fire, which is now extremely rare and hard to find. It was written in secret while Ayers and his fellow Weather Underground members were still in hiding and on the run, and still actively engaging in bombings and other violent acts.

This essay features many high-resolution scans of quotes and entire pages taken directly from Prairie Fire, which journalists, bloggers and other media members are free to copy and re-post. [SlantRight Editor: Go to ZombieTime.com to view the scans.]

If you're interested only in viewing or downloading the scans taken from Prairie Fire, scroll down this page to see a large selection of shocking quotations which you can use as you see fit. My introductory explanation below simply provides context and elucidates why the text of Prairie Fire is so significant at this very moment in history.

So far in 2008, there has been almost no mention of this manifesto and its insurrectionary goals. It seems as if the media, William Ayers, Barack Obama and his supporters don't want you to know about Prairie Fire. Which is exactly why you need to see it.

How Is This Relevant to the 2008 Presidential Campaign?

There's nothing illegal about being a communist. People in this country are free to hold whatever political beliefs they so choose. I don't know William Ayers, I've never met him (that I'm aware of), and I have nothing against him personally.

This essay only exists to correct and unequivocably debunk claims routinely made by the mainstream media over the last few weeks about William Ayers, his beliefs, and the purpose behind his bombing campaign during the 1970s.

Specifically, when questions arose during the 2008 presidential race about Barack Obama's past associations with William Ayers, many media reports and articles blandly described Ayers as a "Vietnam-era radical" and the Weather Underground as a group that set bombs "to protest against the Vietnam War." Both of these characterizations are demonstrably inaccurate.

Furthermore: Obama and his supporters at first claimed he barely knew who Ayers was, but when public awareness of the connections between Obama and Ayers became too numerous and too strong to deny, Obama's supporters have now begun resorting to a fallback position: that William Ayers wasn't such a bad guy after all, and that it is no shame to be associated with him. The now-standard talking points are:

• Ayers was simply protesting against the Vietnam War, and a lot of people protested against the Vietnam War back then, so there's no shame in that.

• Ayers was never actually convicted of setting any bombs or killing anyone, so there's no real proof that he ever did anything wrong.

• Ayers is now a respected, mainstream, mild-mannered and popular professor, so obviously his political views couldn't have been that extreme.

This essay disproves all of these claims. The text that William Ayers authored in Prairie Fire, and the additional documentary links provided below, prove that:

• Ayers was not simply protesting "against" the Vietnam War. Firstly, he wasn't against war in principle, he was agitating for the victory of the communist forces in Vietnam. In other words: He wasn't against the war, he was against our side in the war. This is spelled out in great detail in Prairie Fire. Secondly, and more significantly, the Vietnam War was only one of many issues cited by the Weather Undergound as the justifications for their violent acts. As you will see below, in various quotes from Prairie Fire and in their own list of their violent actions (and in additional impartial documentary links), Ayers and the Weather Underground enumerated dozens of different grievances as the rationales for their bombings -- their overarching goal being to inspire a violent mass uprising against the United States government in order to establish a communist "dictatorship of the proletariat," in Ayers' own words.

• Ayers and his co-authors freely brag about their bombings and other violent and illegal acts, and even provide a detailed list, most likely typed up by Ayers himself, of the crimes they had committed up to that point. Ayers' list, scanned directly from Prairie Fire, is shown below. He may have escaped conviction due to a legal technicality (the prosecutors failed to get a warrant during some of their surveillance of the Weather Underground), but this in no way means that Ayers was factually innocent of the crimes. As has been widely reported, after the case against him was dropped, Ayers decribed himself as "guilty as hell, free as a bird."

• Just because Ayers tries to appear respectable now doesn't mean that he wasn't a violent revolutionary in the past. In fact, as the text of Prairie Fire shows, Ayers was one of the most extreme extremists in American political history. And as the links given as the end of this essay will prove, Ayers is just as politically radical now as he was back then. He has never renounced the political views he professed in the 1960s and 1970s. The only difference is that now he no longer commits violence to achieve his goals. After his stint as the leader of the Weather Underground, he shifted to a different tactic: to spread his ideology under the aegis of academia. But the goal remains the same: to turn America into a communist nation. Ayers' contemporary writings contain many of the same ideas (and even the same phrases) found in Prairie Fire, just toned down to make them more palatable in polite society.

But Where Is the Obama Connection?

This essay is only about William Ayers' past and present political views. It is not about the connection between Barack Obama and William Ayers. That issue has been covered (and continues to be covered) elsewhere in innumerable news reports and blog postings. Yet as evidence mounts of the extensive and long-standing connection between Obama and Ayers, making their association more and more difficult to deny, Obama's campaign and supporters have started shifting their strategy; Sure, they say, Obama may have had a connection with Ayers, but why is that so bad? Look at William Ayers now: He's a completely respectable man. What -- he protested against the Vietnam War? So did everyone. He's no extremist. I see these arguments made in countless blog posts, comment sections, and even news articles. This essay exists to stop that political escape route. There's no getting around it: William Ayers was a violent communist revolutionary bent on overthrowing the government and "seizing power" in the United States. The proof is on this page. And the only difference between the 1970s William Ayers and the William Ayers with whom Barack Obama has associated is that Ayers no longer uses violence to achieve his goals. But Ayers' underlying political world-view (i.e. communism) has remained the same.

For the record, and just to be complete, here are links documenting some of Obama's many connections to William Ayers:

• Ayers and Obama worked together for years on a school reform program called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

• Ayers and Obama also served together on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a separate charity organization.

• Obama had his political coming-out party in William Ayers' home.

• Ayers mentions Obama by name in a book he wrote in 1997, and mentions that the two are very close neighbors.

• Obama gave a short glowing review of that same Ayers book for the Chicago Tribune.

• Obama and Ayers were both presenters together on a panel about juvenile justice (organized by Michelle Obama).

• Both Obama and Ayers were close friends with the same person, Rashid Kalidi.

• There are also several unverified rumors swirling around that have not been documented: That Ayers may have helped to write part (or all) of Obama's autobiography; that Obama and Ayers shared an office space together for three years, on the same floor of the same building in Chicago; and that Ayers and Obama may have known each other as far back as 1981.


Authorship of Prairie Fire

How do we know that William Ayers himself co-authored Prairie Fire? Doesn't the cover say it's by The Weather Underground as a group, and doesn't mention him specifically?

Well, it's simple enough to prove. Because in the introduction, the four actual authors sign their names -- Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, Billy Ayers, and Celia Sojourn:



… be constant change, that the only possibilities are victory or death.

We have only begun. At this time, the unity and consolidation of anti-imperialist forces around a revolutionary program is an urgent and present strategic necessity. PRAIRIE FIRE is offered as a contribution to this unity of action and purpose. Now it is in your hands.

Bernadine Dohrn
Jeff Jones
Billy Ayers
Celia Sojourn

For the Weather Underground



Of course, in true communist spirit, earlier in the Introduction they mention that the book grew out of "study groups," "conversations" and "struggles" of the entire Weather Underground, but the four members listed above are the ones who actually sat down and wrote the manuscript. And of those four, "Billy" Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were the most educated and literate, and were the acknowledged leaders of the group, so it's almost certain they did the bulk of the writing. (Especially considering, as I'll show below, the similarities between ideas in Prairie Fire and contemporary writings by William Ayers.)

But that's not all. On his own blog, in his own resumé, Ayers lists himself as the author of Prairie Fire. Which is as conclusive as you can get.
________________________________________

The Evidence

The rest of this essay consists primarily of scanned pages taken directly from an actual physical copy of Prairie Fire printed in 1974. As you will notice, the production quality was fairly crude, with some pages being typewritten (possibly by William Ayers or Bernardine Dohrn themselves) with others typeset in varying fonts, and then printed somewhat inconsistently with different densities in different sections of the book. While this may have lent Prairie Fire an air of outlaw authenticity when it first was distributed, it looks rather odd and irregular in the era of computers and modern typography. I only mention this detail here to explain why the various scanned pages and quotes seen below look different from each other.

PLEASE NOTE: For each of the full-size scanned pages displayed below, if you click on the image, your browser will open a new window showing a high-resolution version of the scan. I provide the hi-res scans as proof that this evidence is real, and in case anyone wants to inspect the text in more detail.

The individual quoted lines scanned below are already high-resolution, so there is no need to click on them. In a few instances, the quoted sentences start or end in the middle of a line; in those cases, I only display the relevant quote in question; I do not include the text on the remaining portions of the lines.

Underneath each scanned image is a transcription of some (or all) of the text shown, to make things easier for bloggers and journalists to copy and paste the sections which interest them.

(The full book is over 150 pages long, so I necessarily can only present a small selection of pages here. But nearly every paragraph on every page throughout the entire manuscript is jam-packed with the exact same kind of communist/socialist/revolutionary verbiage you see here. If you want to see more, or if you simply want to confirm that all of this is true, I encourage you to seek out your own copy of Prairie Fire; a few copies can still be found in major libraries and through rare book dealers.)

Below the scanned images is a final section providing quotes, links, videos and documentation proving that William Ayers maintained his political beliefs essentially unchanged throughout the '80s, '90s and 2000s, during which time he was accepted into the upper echelons of Chicago society, mingling and working with academics, activists and politicians -- including Barack Obama.

Page 16: The Weather Underground's own list of their terrorist bombings and other crimes

On page 16 of Prairie Fire, Ayers and his fellow co-authors brag about their numerous acts of domestic terrorism, and provide a handy list detailing not only each crime but in most cases the justification for each crime as well. Note an important detail: Most of the stated rationales for the Weather Underground's violent acts have nothing whatsoever to do with Vietnam. This disproves the ubiquitous media assertion that Ayers and the Weather Underground were "Vietnam War protesters."

Also note Wikipedia's list of Weather Underground actions that provides additional details regarding their putative justifications, including bombing a bank "in solidarity with striking Puerto Rican cement workers" and bombing a federal office building due to "the need for women to take control of daycare, healthcare, birth control and other aspects of women's daily lives," among many others which make no mention of Vietnam. Also note that the bombings and other violent acts continued after Prairie Fire was published, and that all the Weather Underground "actions" in 1974 and '75 happened after the United States had already pulled its ground troops out of Vietnam and was no longer an active combatant in the ground war, which would have rendered any Vietnam War protests pretty much meaningless.

Picture portraying a list of bombing the Weather Underground

For the record, to prove beyond any doubt that this is real, click on the small image below to see a high-resolution scan of the entirety of page 16 in full context, including the edges of the book cover, the crease in the center of the book, and so on: PICTURE HERE.

Page 10: The Start of the Chapter 1

The main body of Prairie Fire begins on page 10, after various introductory pages. The following four scanned images are all short quotes taken from page 10. Below each quote is a transcription of the text. The final image of this section shows all these quotes in context in the book on page 10 itself.



We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years.



Here is the same quote repeated again, this time with additional context, in the form of the subsequent two sentences:



We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years. We are deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism.

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.

THE BANNER OF CHE

The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.

Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, political and economic, cultural and military, where all forms are developed in harmony with the armed struggle.
Without mass struggle there can be no revolution.
Without armed struggle there can be no victory.



The following scan shows the full two-page spread of pages 10 and 11. Page 11, as you can see, is a picture of Che Guevara. A full transciption of the text is below the image.



10

The unique and fundamental condition of this time is the decline of U.S. imperialism. Our society is in social and economic crisis and assumptions about the U.S. are turned on their heads. These are hard conditions to live through. But they are favorable for the people and for revolution.
These conditions of constant change demand the weapon of theory. Like people everywhere, we are analyzing how to bring to life the potential forces which can destroy U.S. imperialism.
We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years. We are deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism.
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.
Our intention is to engage the enemy, to wear away at him, to harass him, to isolate him, to expose every weakness, to pounce, to reveal his vulnerability.
Our intention is to encourage the people, to provoke leaps in confidence and consciousness, to stir the imagination, to popularize power, to agitate, to organize, to join in every way possible the people's day-to-day struggles.
Our intention is to forge an underground, a clandestine political organization engaged in every form of struggle, protected from the eyes and weapons of the state, a base against repression, to accumulate lessons, experience and constant practice, a base from which to attack.

THE BANNER OF CHE

The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war. Revolution is the most powerful resource of the people. To wait, to not prepare people for the fight, is to seriously mislead about what kind of fierce struggle lies ahead.
Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, political and economic, cultural and military, where all forms are developed in harmony with the armed struggle.
Without mass struggle there can be no revolution.
Without armed struggle there can be no victory.
It will not be immediate, for the enemy is entrenched and intractable. It will require lengthy, deliberate political and armed




The Introduction

The following four scanned images are all short quotes taken from Prairie Fire's typewritten introduction. Below each quote is a transcription of the text. The final image of this section shows all these quotes in context in the full introduction to the book.



May 9, 1974

Sisters and brothers,

Here is PRAIRIE FIRE, our political ideology - a strategy for anti-imperialism and revolution inside the imperial US.

We undertook this analysis to explain the changes in US and world conditions since the Vietnam ceasefire and to evaluate the consequences of the Vietnamese victory.

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.

PRAIRIE FIRE is written to communist-minded revolutionaries, independent organizers and anti-imperialists



The following scan shows the full two-page spread of the introduction, outlining the Weather Undergound's revolutionary communism, their goal of overthrowing the capitalist system, and ending with the names of the authors -- including "Billy" Ayers. Remember: Click on the image if you want to see a high-resolution version.



May 9, 1974

Sisters and brothers,

Here is PRAIRIE FIRE, our political ideology - a strategy for anti-imperialism and revolution inside the imperial US. It comes out of our own practice of the last five years and reflects a diversity of experiences. This paper is not the product of one or two people, nor even a small handful of us. Rather PRAIRIE FIRE represents the politics and collective efforts of an organization. It has been the focus of our study groups and our political education. It has been chewed on and shaped in countless conversations, struggles and written pages. It has travelled around the country, growing, developing thru the attempt to understand the shape of world forces and the revolutionary possibilities before us. The paper was rewritten four times and collectively adopted as the political statement of the Weather Underground. The twelve-month process of writing PRAIRIE FIRE, squeezed between on-going work and practice and action, has now reached a kind of end-point. A cycle is done.

We undertook this analysis to explain the changes in US and world conditions since the Vietnam ceasefire and to evaluate the consequences of the Vietnamese victory. We have come some distance in evaluating the political situation, the priorities for revolutionary work since we began this writing. Now many more revolutionaries will need to shape and change the paper. The politics cannot be realized unless and until the content of the program is activated in thousands of situations, among thousands of people in the coming period. PRAIRIE FIRE will be a growing thing.

We hope the paper opens a dialectic among those in the mass and clandestine movements; we hope people will take PRAIRIE FIRE as seriously as we do, study the content and write and publish their views of the paper as well as their analysis of their own practice. We will respond as best we can.

Our movement urgently needs a concrete analysis of the particular conditions of our time and place. We need strategy. We need to battle for a correct ideology and win people over. In this way we create the conditions for the development of a successful revolutionary movement and party. 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. Getting from here to there is a process of coming together in a disciplined way around ideology and strategy, developing an analysis of our real conditions, mobilizing a base among the US people, building principled relationships to Third World struggle, and accumulating practice in struggle against US imperialism.

PRAIRIE FIRE is written to communist-minded revolutionaries, independent organizers and anti-imperialists; those who carry the traditions and lessons of the struggles of the last decade, those who join in the struggles of today. PRAIRIE FIRE is written to all sisters and brothers who are engaged in armed struggle against the enemy. It is written to prisoners, women's groups, collectives, study groups, workers' organizing committees, communes, GI organizers, consciousness-raising groups, veterans, community groups and revolutionaries of all kinds; to all who will read, criticize and bring its content to life in practice. It is written as an argument against those who oppose action and hold back the struggle.

PRAIRIE FIRE is based on a belief that the duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution. This is not an abstraction. It means that revolutionaries must make a profound commitment to the future of humanity, apply our limited knowledge and experience to understand an ever-changing situation, organize the masses of people and build the fight. It means that struggle and risk and hard work and adversity will become our way of life, that the only certainty will be constant change, that the only possibilities are victory or death.

We have only begun. At this time, the unity and consolidation of anti-imperialist forces around a revolutionary program is an urgent and pressing strategic necessity. PRAIRIE FIRE is offered as a contribution to this unity of action and purpose. Now it is in your hands.


Bernardine Dohrn
Jeff Jones
Billy Ayers
Celia Sojourn

For the Weather Underground




Dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan (among others)

The following snippet is taken from the book's dedication page, and shows that the Weather Underground dedicated the book to Robert F. Kennedy's killer Sirhan Sirhan, among many other now-obscure '60s-era radicals, criminals and revolutionaries:

Here's the two-page spread of the dedication page and copyright page in high-resolution, showing the full list of people to whom the book is dedicated:

As an aside: Note how, on the copyright page, the authors state that the public is "free to utilize the material" in the book "for political debate and study." That is exactly how it is being used in this essay, though I think it's not quite the kind of debate that William Ayers originally had in mind! Also note that my reproduction of their material, as per their instructions, is true and accurate, and that I am not "profiteering" from it because this site has no ads and does not generate any income whatsoever.

Page 40: Strategies for Revolution

Page 40 of the manuscript is typical: It outlines the Weather Underground's strategies for overthrowing the United States. Among the many strategies are: eliminating the feeling of patriotism among the general public, destroying the government from within, and starting a mass insurrection among the lower classes. The three scanned quotes are followed by a full page 40 with them in context:



Our job is to tap the discontent seething in many sectors of the population, to find allies everywhere people are hungry or angry, to mobilize poor and working people against imperialism.

We have an urgent responsibility: to destroy imperialism from within in order to help free the world and ourselves from its grasp.

Our final goal is the destruction of imperialism, the seizure of power, and the creation of socialism. Our strategy for this stage of the struggle is to organize the oppressed people of the imperial nation itself to join with the colonies in the attack on imperialism. This process of attacking and weakening imperialism involves the defeat of all kinds of national chauvinism and arrogance; this is a precondition to our fight for socialism.




Page 41: The Definition of Socialism

Ever since the word "socialism" was brought up in the campaign by "Joe the Plumber," to whom Obama said he intends to "spread the wealth around," there has been much discussion among pundits about what the word "socialism" really means, and whether or not it's a bad thing.

Well, William Ayers had his own definition of socialism, which he spelled out on page 41 of Prairie Fire. Because it's relevant to current events, let's look at what the word "socialism" meant to left-wingers not too long ago:



Socialism is the total opposite of capitalism/imperialism. It is the rejection of empire and white supremacy. Socialism is the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the eradication of the social system based on profit. Socialism means control of the productive forces for the good of the whole community instead of the few who live on hilltops and in mansions. Socialism means priorities based on human need instead of corporate greed. Socialism creates the conditions for a decent and creative quality of life for all.



Here's page 41 in full:

Page 13: Vietnam Is Only One Aspect of the Global Communist Revolution

Page 13 discusses how the Vietnam War is only one component of the overall drive for worldwide communism. The following quotes speak for themselves:



We made the choice to become a guerrilla organization at a time when the Vietnamese were fighting a heroic people's war, defeating half a million troops and the most technologically advanced military power. In our own hemisphere Che Guevara urged that we "create two, three, many Vietnams," to destroy U.S. imperialism by cutting it off in the Third World tentacle by tentacle, and opening another front within the U.S. itself. At home, the struggle and insurrection of the Black liberation movement heightened our commitment to fight alongside the determined enemies of the empire.
This defined our international responsibility and our duty as white revolutionaries inside the oppressor nation. We are part of a wave of revolution sparked by the Black liberation struggle, by the death of Che in Bolivia in 1967, and by people's war in Vietnam.

Revolution is a fight by the people for power. It is a changing of power in which existing social and economic relationships are turned upside down. It is a fight for who runs things, in particular, for control by the people of what we communists call the means of production



Page 128: Views on Israel, the Palestinians and Mideast Oil

The following quote is taken from page 128, from the portion of Prairie Fire having to do with the Middle East. I include it here to show the amazing consistency of the radical left-wing view of the area -- the issues and arguments remain almost unchanged from 1974 to today: ending Zionism, no "war for oil," stopping U.S. support for Israel, etc. Aside from a few current events details, this exact same text could have appeared in any contemporary left-wing essay about the Middle East. This shows that what once was a radical communist view has now become mainstream:

[SlantRight Editor: Read ALL of page 128 to view the quote ZombieTime.com is referring to.]

Ayers' Current Views

At the beginning of this essay, I wrote that William Ayers is a communist. And while I certainly have shown that he was a communist, has he changed his stripes since 1974? Has he ever renounced the ideologies he embraced in Prairie Fire (and elsewhere)?

In short: No. He still maintains the same belief systems. To this day, he sticks to the exact same phraseologies to describe his unchanged political philosophy.

This section explores William Ayers' current beliefs about communist ideology. And why is this relevant? Because if he believed it in 1974, and still believes it in 2008, then he almost certainly continued to believe it in 1995-2006, the period during which Barack Obama had his associations with Ayers. There is no evidence whatsoever that Ayers went through some "right-wing phase" (which would have been totally out of character) nor had any diminuation of his political fervor. As far as anyone can tell, and according to Ayers himself, he has had a consistent and unchanged philosphy from the 1960s up until the present.

What this means is that William Ayers was a communist when Barack Obama associated with him.

So, let's get to the evidence about whether or not Ayers has changed his views.

On April 12, 2002, Ayers said during an interview with a college radio station:

I considered myself partly an anarchist then and consider myself partly an anarchist now. I mean I'm as much an anarchist as I am a Marxist.... I'm very open about what I think and nobody here is surprised by what I think.
...
Is one of those regrets that I took extreme measures against the United States at a time of tremendous crisis? No it is not. I don't regret that. The people of the world are being exploited and oppressed and militarized by the great imperialist powers, led by the United States. That is the situation today in my view.
...
And I'm not sorry about anything that I participated to try to end that war or against that government that was waging that war.

As the video notes, Obama was working directly with Ayers within days of this interview being given -- and for years prior and afterward.

Continuing in the same video, Ayers gave a TV interview in January of 2004 in which he hits on some of the exact same themes and uses some of the same phraseology he used in Prairie Fire:



If we were being fair and open-minded, then if you looked around at the world today, you would say the greatest purveyor of of violence, as King said, is our own government. ...
...
White supremacy and racism continues to be the dagger point of American democracy. I do believe that. I believed it then, I believe it now.




In Prairie Fire, one can find many references to the United States government promoting violence, to white supremacy, and to racism. It's quite obvious nothing has changed in Ayers' philosophy.

Next, let's turn to Bill Ayers' own personal blog, where he posts his own writings.

On April 20, 2006, Ayers posted an open letter in which he wrote:



We were anti-authoritarian, anti-orthodoxy, communist street fighters.
...
I want to embrace...draft resisters, deserters, tax avoiders...
...
If we know we hope to achieve a democratic and socialist world, a culture of life and love, our strategy and tactics are informed by filling that vision out on the ground...
...
I went to Camp Casey in August precisely because I'm an agnostic about how and where the rebellion will break out, but I know I want to be there and I know it will break out...
...
Opposing aggressive war is always urgent, but for revolutionaries we need to both be fully activated in the opposition...




What more need be said?

On November 7, 2006 Ayers posted this essay on his blog describing his visit to a conference in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela -- an essay which sounds like it could be a missing chapter from Prairie Fire, and which Ayers concludes by shouting "Viva Presidente Chavez!"

And just a few months ago on June 28, 2008, Ayers describes himself in this posting on his blog as a "socialist" when it comes to economic policy.

All of this is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. To this day, nearly every word that Ayers utters and every sentence that he writes hews to the exact same communist line. You can easily find hundreds more examples yourself just by browsing through his blog or simply by Googling his name and searching for his writings and speeches, almost all of which still revolve around notions promulgated in Prairie Fire.

William Ayers is a communist. By his own description. He was a communist then, he is a communist now, and he was a communist for the entire time that Barack Obama worked with him and was associated with him.
________________________________________

Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese communists, whom William Ayers was glorifying and praising, themselves imprisoned and tortured for over five years a young pilot by the name of John McCain. Here's a newly discovered video of McCain taken in January of 1968 as he lay injured in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war hospital shortly after his capture. What's heart-rending about it is that he does not yet know that he will spend the next five years being tortured by William Ayers' comrades:

John McCain POW

Additional Links

New York Times: Obama and '60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths

In 2001, the New York Times reviewed Ayers' fictionalized "memoir" Fugitive Days and called it "maddeningly evasive... one of those books that tell by not telling."

Excellent article by David Horowitz about Ayers; the source of the quote in which Ayers describes himself as "Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country."

Excerpt of video interview with Larry Grathwowl

Undercover agent Larry Grathwohl, who had infiltrated and joined the Weather Underground, described their post-revolution governing plans for the United States in this video taken from the 1982 documentary "No Place to Hide." The Weather Underground openly discussed exterminating 25 million Americans who refused to be "re-educated" into communism.

Here's a transcript of his interview:



I bought up the subject of what's going to happen after we take over the government. We, we become responsible, then, for administrating, you know, 250 million people.

And there was no answers. No one had given any thought to economics; how are you going to clothe and feed these people.

The only thing that I could get, was that they expected that the Cubans and the North Vietnamese and Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.

They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education centers in the southwest, where we would take all the people who needed to be re-educated into the new way of thinking and teach them... how things were going to be.

I asked, well, what's going to happen to those people that we can't re-educate; that are die-hard capitalists. And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these re-education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill. 25 million people.

I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.

And they were dead serious."

-- Larry Grathwohl, former member of the Weather Underground


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The ZombieTime Goods on BHO Lies about Ayers
John R. Houk
© October 25, 2008
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William Ayers' forgotten communist manifesto: Prairie Fire

ZombieTime.com Home Page

Obama's Political Mentors: Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn

The next time Barack Hussein Obama says he was unaware that Bill Ayers or Bernardine Dohrn were murdering thug Communist terrorists homegrown in an America and hate the American way of life, KNOW THAT BHO IS LYING!

The next time someone asks BHO or one of his Campaign spokesman when there was awareness that Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were murdering terrorists and you read or hear this answer (or a combination of answers): I was eight years old when the Ayers and Dohrn were terrorists or Let’s talk about the economy instead because that is more relevant than the character of people in my early days of politics or I never knew until recently Ayers was a terrorist or Let’s not talk about Ayers being a terrorist, lets talk about John McCain being one of the Keating Five.

Then KNOW that Barack Hussein Obama is dodging a truthful answer and is liar particularly when Campaign surrogates say the lie “Asked and answered.” The Ayers connection has been asked a plethora of times and answered with mystifying non-corroborated denials and a tap dance of obfuscation.JRH 10/9/08
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[SlantRight Editor: Due to the uncertain nature of SlantRight.com archives, below is the rest of the post. 4/15/2012] 

Meet Some More of Barack Obama’s Political Mentors:
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn

Traditional Values Coalition
October 8, 2008

“What a country [America]. It makes me want to puke.” – Bill Ayers, 2001
“I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” – Bill Ayers, Sept. 11, 2001

CAUTION: Some of this content may be offensive.

October 8, 2008 – During the last few months, TVC has been reporting on Senator Barack Obama’s political allies and his political views. This is another in this ongoing series.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are unrepentant domestic terrorists. During the 1970s, they were part of the Weatherman, a Communist splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society.

In his biography, Fugitive Days, Ayers brags about his involvement in bombing the New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the U.S. Capitol Building in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972. Ayers described the day he bombed the Pentagon with these words: “Everything was absolutely ideal. … The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And, the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.” Dohrn is as heartless as her husband. During one anti-war rally, she praised the Manson family for murdering Sharon Tate and others: “Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” At another rally, Dohrn said: “Bring the revolution home, kill your parents – that’s where it’s at.”

Ayers, Dohrn and the Weatherman were responsible for 30 bombings around the country. He and his wife spent the next 10 years as fugitives from the FBI. In 1980, they surrendered to authorities, but all charges were dropped against them due to improper surveillance.

Where are Ayers and Dohrn today? Bill Ayers is the “Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He instructs teachers how to indoctrinate children with liberal ideals.

Bernardine Dohrn is the Director of Children and Family Justice Center at the Northwestern University, a law professor at Northwestern University Law School.

Obama Gets His Start In Ayers’ Home

Although Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) initially told reporters that Ayers was just a guy who lived in the same neighborhood – and that he barely knew him – facts have emerged showing this to be untrue.

It now appears that Obama has known Ayers and Dohrn since at least 1987. Ayers was an activist at the time with the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, and Obama’s Developing Communities Project was a member of this leftist alliance.

There are also possible connections between Obama and Dohrn through the law firm of Sidley & Austin. Dohrn was at this firm from 1984-1988. Michelle Obama also worked at Sidley & Austin, beginning in 1988. She met Barack at Sidley & Austin when he came on as a summer associate.

In 1995, Obama was introduced to Ayers and Dohrn by Illinois state Senator Alice Palmer who had hand-picked Obama to replace her in the Senate. Palmer was a well-known Communist sympathizer and decades-long supporter of the Soviet Union.

Ayers and Dohrn held Obama’s first political fundraiser in their living room to help launch his political career.

In addition, Bill Ayers founded the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Foundation, and Obama became the chairman of the board of this group only months after his first run for political office. While serving on this foundation, Ayers and Obama distributed millions of dollars for educational projects. Ayers described his views on education as socialist indoctrination in an interview he gave to the Communist publication, Revolution in October, 2006. Ayers says that education can’t be separated from politics – and applauded John Dewey’s socialist policies that have so greatly influenced public education.

In 1997, Obama’s wife Michelle invited Ayers to be on a panel discussing racism and the juvenile justice system. Ayers was joined on the panel by Barack Obama, a senior lecturer at the time at the University of Chicago law school. Michelle was working as Associate Dean of Student Services and Director of the University Community Service Center.

The Obama-Ayers-Dohrn connection extends to their involvement in the Woods Fund of Chicago. This foundation is involved in community organizing, arts and culture and working with low-income individuals and housing issues. This multi-million dollar enterprise is aided by grants from numerous leftist foundations, including the infamous Tides Foundation, Trinity United Church of Christ (where Obama attended church for 20 years), and ACORN, the notorious corrupt organization that routinely engages in voter fraud – and was involved with Obama in forcing banks to make risky loans to unqualified applicants.

Obama’s Palestinian Terrorist Friend

Ayers is a board member of the Woods Fund and Obama also served on the board. In 2002, the fund gave a grant to the Northwestern University Law School Children and Family Justice Center where Ayers’ wife, Bernadine, was employed.

Also serving on the Woods Fund board was a Palestinian activist named Rashid Khalidi, who is now a Columbia University professor. Khalidi was the former spokesman for Islamic terrorist Yasser Arafat. Khalidi was instrumental in having Iranian’s tyrannical president, Mahoud Ahmadinejad, come to Columbia University last year to give his anti-American, anti-Israel speech.

Obama and his wife Michelle and Khalidi and his wife were close friends. Leaders of this foundation donated more than $24,000 to Obama’s political campaign in Illinois.

Obama once said of Khalidi and the meals and discussions they shared together 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.”

Khalidi is rabidly anti-Israel and repeatedly accuses American officials of being “Zionist” stooges. He once called Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz “a fanatical, extreme right-wing Zionist.”

Khalidi believes Israel is not a democratic ally of America but an “apartheid system in creation” and a destructive “racist” state.

“Why Obama pals around with domestic and international terrorists and calls them his friends raises serious questions about his loyalties and judgment to lead this nation,” said TVC Executive Director Andrea Lafferty. “Voters should seriously consider the character issue when they vote in November.”

Donate to the important educational and Christian lobbying work of TVC!
____________________________
This TVC Newsletter continues with Additional Reading and Resources located at the end. After the “Additional Reading and Resources” there are of a series of links to YouTube videos that highlight the very thing Barack Hussein Obama does NOT want you to see.

Russia Re-builds Old Communist Relations in Latin America

Russia may not be the Communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics any more; however it is clear the Russian government wishes to challenge world’s example of the longest constitutional democracy in existence, i.e. the United States of America.

Russia is aiding Iran toward nuclear Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Russia is contacting old Communist buddies Cuba and Nicaragua about financial and weapon aid. There is a hint of a Russian military base being established in Cuba. Apparently the placing of a (spy) satellite launch base is even closer to a certainty in Cuba.

Venezuela and Russia are or have engaged in recent naval joint war games in the Caribbean in which Russian vessels and aircraft probably carried nuclear weapons.

Now Chavez and Putin are talking about building nuclear plants in Venezuela. And just like Iran, the claim is for peaceful nuclear energy. Only doofus would believe that any more than Iran’s hot nuclear program is for peaceful nuclear energy.

I am certainly not an expert on ideological state of affairs in Russia, but I am guessing the old ex-KGB Putin is closer to the Communist ideology than any other political thinking.

JRH 10/2/08

Obama's Leftism

Joshua Muravchik writes about how Barack Hussein Obama is quite enigmatic about his past associations and that his life has been surrounded by Communism as well as racist black Supremacism.
JRH 10/1/08
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UPDATED from SlantRight.com archive site 7/10/15
+++
Obama's Leftism

By Joshua Muravchik
September 30, 2008
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Commentary magazine
Publication Date: October 1, 2008

Introducing himself to the nation at the 2004 Democratic national convention, Barack Obama spoke not only of his black father, "born and raised in a small village in Kenya," but of his white mother, "born in a town . . . in Kansas" to a father who "worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression" before enlisting in military service "the day after Pearl Harbor." What brought them together was "a magical place, America," he said, adding, "I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage . . . knowing that . . . in no other country on earth, is my story even possible."

Not only was Obama the real, living embodiment of America's racial diversity. He was a dazzling presence, outshining the party's nominee with his look, stage presence, oratorical mastery, and the brilliance of his rhetoric. Nor was that all. This avatar of reconciliation talked of transcending divisions not just racial but political and ideological. He spoke lovingly of country and movingly of God and family in a way that had eluded the Democrats since their sharp turn to the Left when the party nominated George McGovern in In the speech's highlight, Obama said:

[T]here is not a liberal America and a conservative America--there is the United States of America. . . . We worship an "awesome God" in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Four years later, Obama is the Democratic nominee, and even his occasional shrill attacks on his opponent seem to have chipped away little of the cornerstone of his own candidacy: the promise to bring us, all of us, together. Can he do that? Is he well-suited to raise the curtain on a new post-partisan, post-ideological era?

From his record in office, it would hardly seem so. Non-partisanship does not just mean Democrats coaching Little League, lovely as that is, but cooperating with members of the other party in developing compromise solutions to national problems. The Senate has a particularly rich tradition of such bipartisanship, but Obama appears never to have participated in it. On the contrary: according to Congressional Quarterly, which measures how often each member votes in accordance with or at variance from the majority of his own party, Obama has compiled one of the most partisan of all voting records.

Last year, for example, the average Senator voted with his own party 84 percent of the time; Obama voted with his party 96 percent of the time. In the prior two years, his number was 95 percent, making him the fourth most partisan member of the Senate. And not just partisan, but also highly ideological. In 2007, according to the National Journal, Obama's voting record made him "the most liberal Senator." Throughout his Senate career, according to Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the dean of liberal advocacy groups, Obama voted "right" 90 percent of the time. Actually this is misleading, since ADA counts an absence as if it were a vote on the "wrong" side. If we discount his absences, Obama voted to ADA's approval more than 98 percent of the time.

This touches directly on the question of what, beyond the platitudes of unity, hope, and change, Obama himself believes in. His voting record is one indication. Another is his intellectual evolution.

_____________

Abandoned by his father when he was still too young to remember him and then sent at age ten by his mother to live in Hawaii with her parents, who enrolled him in a prestigious prep school, Obama spent much of his teen years searching for his black identity. Late in his high-school career he found a mentor of sorts in Frank Marshall Davis, an older black poet. According to Herbert Romerstein, former minority chief investigator of the House Committee on Internal Security, FBI files reveal Davis to have been a member of the Communist party not only in its public phase but also when it officially dissolved and went underground in the 1950's.

According to Obama, Davis told him that a white person "can't know" a black person, and that the "real price of admission" to college was "leaving your race at the door." Perhaps influenced by this, he reports that at college,

[t]o avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

Despite Obama's tone of self-mockery, the passage discloses the milieu in which he immersed himself. In this light, it is not surprising that, upon graduation, he decided on a career as a "community organizer," even if it was none too clear to him what exactly that meant. As he confesses in his early memoir Dreams from My Father (1995):

When classmates . . . asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly. Instead I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House . . . . Change in the Congress . . . . Change in the mood of the country . . . . Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. . . . I'll organize black folks.

Thanks to a grant from a left-wing foundation, he was hired by a small group of white protégés of Saul Alinsky, the original apostle of "community organizing." Alinsky's institutional base was the Industrial Areas Foundation, which he called a "school for professional radicals" and whose goal he announced to be "revolution, not revelation." As Obama himself would put it, there were "two roles that an organizer was supposed to play . . . getting the Stop sign [and] the educative function. At some point you have to link up winning that Stop sign . . . with the larger trends, larger movements." In other words, "community organizer," to Obama and his colleagues and mentors, was a euphemism for professional radical.

It was in the course of trying to mobilize churches for political protest that Obama met Jeremiah Wright. When the controversy surrounding the pastor arose this year, Obama denied being present when Rev. Wright delivered his most incendiary sermons, commenting that he was like "an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don't agree with." But this was evasive. By Obama's own testimony, the reason other ministers directed him to Wright was that Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ was steeped in politics.

Thus, Obama writes that Wright had "dabbl[ed] with liquor, Islam, and black nationalism" before returning to Christianity and studying, among other things, "the black liberation theologians." Whoever and however many these theologians may have been, Wright invoked only one on the church's website. "The vision statement of Trinity United Church of Christ," in Wright's words, was "based upon the systematized liberation theology that started in 1969 with the publication of Dr. James Cone's book, Black Power and Black Theology."

What was that theology? Here are two tiny snippets of Cone's thought: "Christianity and whiteness are opposites," and "there will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness." In addition to a cross superimposed on a map of Africa, the website declares: "We are an African people, and remain 'true to our native land,' the mother continent, the cradle of civilization." It defines Trinity as, among other things, "a congregation committed to the historical education of African people in diaspora, a congregation committed to liberation." When Obama joined the church in the 1980's, it did not yet have a website, but he tells of a brochure that, while condoning the pursuit of income, warned congregants against the "psychological entrapment of black 'middle classness.'" The liberationist music was playing back then, too.

At Trinity, Obama attempted to enlist Rev. Wright in his protest campaign, and the pastor sought to recruit Obama to the church. Evidently both succeeded, though at the time Obama says he was so far from religion that he "could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly." But when he began to participate in Trinity's services he discovered he was not unique in his ambivalence. Of the other congregants, he would observe:

Not all of what these people sought was strictly religious. . . . It occurred to me that Trinity, with its African themes, its emphasis on black history, [was] a redistributor of values and circulator of ideas. Only now the redistribution didn't run in just a single direction from the schoolteacher or the physician . . . to . . . the sharecropper or the young man fresh from the South. . . . The flow of culture now ran in reverse as well, the former gang-banger, the teenage mother, had their own forms of validation--claims of greater deprivation, and hence authenticity.

The first time Obama attended services at Trinity, Wright delivered a sermon (it was titled "the audacity of hope") whose theme was: "white folks' greed runs a world in need." Twenty years later, when it was revealed that Wright's church had honored Louis Farrakhan, that Wright had traveled with Farrakhan to visit the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, and that in his sermons Wright had beseeched God to "damn America," charged the U.S. government with inventing the AIDS virus in order to kill black people, and claimed that Israel and South Africa had colluded to invent an "ethnic bomb" to kill blacks and Arabs while leaving whites unharmed--when all this was revealed, Obama, under pressure from the Hillary Clinton campaign, declared himself "shocked" at Wright's vitriol. But in truth not only was he aware of Wright's views, they were what had drawn him to Trinity church in the first place.

_____________

Obama left Chicago after three years to attend Harvard Law School. As he would explain, "I had things to learn . . . , things that would help me bring about real change." After graduating with honors in 1991, he returned to the Windy City to join the small law firm of Judson Miner, an activist who had been attorney to Mayor Harold Washington.

Within three years of his return, he also became deeply involved with Bill Ayers, a former leader of the so-called Weather Underground. This leftist terrorist group, akin to the German Baader-Meinhof gang or the Italian Red Brigades, specialized in bombing government buildings. Ayers later wrote boastfully that he had personally carried out an attack on the Pentagon. Ayers's wife and closest collaborator was Bernardine Dohrn, whose views were so extreme that they seemed to cross a line from ultra-leftism to Satanism. At a meeting of the Weather Underground, she hailed the murders then recently committed by Charles Manson's demented followers. "Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach!" she exulted, giving a three-fingered salute to signify a fork.

After the pair emerged from hiding in 1980, a court dismissed the main charges against Ayers on the grounds that the government had used an illegal wiretap. He pled guilty to possessing explosives, but served no time. The net outcome inspired him to gloat that he was "guilty as hell and free as a bird." Dohrn served seven months. Then they both went respectable, but without changing their views. Ayers posed for a picture stomping on an American flag, and in 2001 he told the New York Times: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

The details of Obama's association with Ayers remain somewhat shrouded because both Ayers and Dohrn have refused to discuss it, while Obama and his spokesmen have prevaricated about it. When, during one of the televised primary debates, George Stephanopoulos asked about his connection to Ayers, Obama replied:

This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense.

Later, Obama's campaign manager, David Axelrod, added: "Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school." If this is true, Ayers's children must be slow learners, since they are thirty-one and twenty-eight while Obama's are nine and six. But Obama's own reply, though less bald-faced than Axelrod's, was thoroughly disingenuous. Thanks to the meticulous investigations of the Left-leaning blogger Steven Diamond (globallabor.blogspot.com), the story of Obama and Ayers's collaboration has been seeping into the public record despite extraordinary efforts to seal it.

After escaping punishment for his crimes, Ayers received degrees in education and became an advocate of school reform in Chicago. In particular, he propounded a "radical" project in the late 1980's that was inspired by New York City's disastrous experiment decades earlier in "community control." Ayers's project was championed by a coalition called the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools (ABC's); according to Diamond, one member of the "alliance" was the Developing Communities Project (DCP), the group for which Obama worked as an organizer. If so, then it is likely that the two met back then, since the DCP was a tiny organization and Obama was most likely its representative.

In any event, in 1994, when the philanthropist Walter Annenberg put up $500 million to help the nation's public schools, Ayers submitted a grant proposal that secured $50 million for an entity called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The word "challenge" signified that the recipients were required to find double the amount in matching funds; this they did, disposing altogether of some $160 million.

The ostensible purpose of the project was to reinvigorate Chicago's flagging decentralization project. Ayers devised a structure made up of three connected elements, of which the main two were the Collaborative, or operational center, and the Board, with overall financial control. Ayers named himself to head the Collaborative; Barack Obama, apparently by Ayers's choice, became chairman of the Board.

So it is conceivable that the two met as late as 1994, but this hardly seems likely. Would anyone yield control of the purse to someone he did not already know well and trust thoroughly? And what exactly were Obama's credentials in the field of school reform, unless he had been active in the ABC's with Ayers in the 1980's? At the very latest, the two must have met sometime after Obama returned from Harvard in late 1991 or early 1992, well before he was chosen to chair the board in 1995.

For the next four to five years, the two worked together to raise the matching funds and disburse small grants to local organizations pushing the reform program. It could only have been an intimate partnership. When Obama decided to run for the state senate, his first fund-raising event was held in the home of Ayers and Dohrn. In 1997, Ayers published a book about juvenile justice, A Kind and Just Parent, which Obama blurbed as "a searing and timely account." The two also served together on the board of the leftist Woods Fund from 1998 until 2001.

This is what is now public about the relations between Obama and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. There may be much more, so far successfully hidden by all concerned; but even these facts suggest that Ayers was among Obama's closest collaborators.

_____________

Obama's turn to electoral politics signified no change in his basic ideological orientation. As his wife Michelle put it: "Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He's a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change." ("I take that observation as a compliment," Obama said as late as 2005.)

Obama's target was a legislative seat held by Alice Palmer, who had decided to make a run for the U.S. Congress. She introduced Obama in Democratic-party circles as her anointed successor. (After a later falling-out, the two would dispute whether her support had amounted to a formal endorsement or merely, as she claimed, "an informal nod.") Like others among his mentors or patrons, Palmer, too, was a radical, a member of the executive body of the U.S. Peace Council, the least disguised of Soviet front organizations. She had made multiple pilgrimages to the Soviet Union, and in 1986 attended the 27th Congress of the Soviet Communist party, telling the party paper on her return that the Soviets "plan to provide people with higher wages and better education, health and transportation, while we in our country are hearing that cutbacks are necessary in all of these areas." According to a later story in the same paper, Palmer visited Moscow again the following year to attend the World Congress of Women sponsored by another Soviet front organization.

In his campaign for the Illinois senate, Obama was endorsed by the New Party (NP), a coalition of socialists, Communists, and other leftists. According to the newsletter of the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, whose members were said to constitute 15 percent of the Chicago New Party, "Once approved, candidates must sign a contract with the NP [which] mandates that they must have a visible and active relationship with the NP." Apparently, Obama signed such a pledge. After winning the primary (unopposed because his lawyers had succeeded in knocking all three opponents off the ballot), he appeared at a New Party membership meeting to voice his thanks.

Entering the national political scene eight years later, Obama did not, to be sure, appear as a radical, but he still bore the earmarks of the world in which he had been immersed for twenty years. He called himself "progressive," a term of art favored by veterans of the hard New Left, like Tom Hayden, as well as by old-time Communists. Early this year his wife Michelle, lacking his tact, would kindle controversy by saying that his success in the presidential primaries made her feel proud of her country for the first time. The comment, a faux pas that she was soon at pains to explain away, flowed logically from her view, expressed in her standard stump speech, that our country is a "downright mean" place, "guided by fear," where the "life . . . that most people are living has gotten progressively worse."

This year, Obama appeared before Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network (whose official slogan is "no justice, no peace") to seek its support. The candidate praised Sharpton as "a voice for the voiceless and . . . dispossessed. What National Action Network has done is so important to change America, and it must be changed from the bottom up." Given Sharpton's long career of reckless racial demagogy, it might seem shocking that a mainstream candidate should be seeking his blessing, but in this, at least, Obama was not unique: all of the 2008 Democratic aspirants did so. He did, though, strive to separate himself from the pack:

If there is somebody who has been more on the forefront on behalf of the issues that you care about and has more concrete accomplishment on behalf of the things you're concerned about, then I am happy to see you endorse them. I am happy to see you support them. . . . But I am absolutely confident that you will not find that, because there is nobody who has stood fast on these issues more consistently each and every day, than I have. That is something that I know.

As it happened, Sharpton, a consummate wheeler-dealer, kept his options open for a while. But other radicals, soft and hard, rushed to embrace Obama, often waxing rapturous in their support. Robert Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel enthused in The Nation that Obama's was "a historic candidacy," from which "new possibilities will be born." Michael Lerner wrote in Tikkun that the "energy, hopefulness, and excitement that manifests [sic] in Obama's campaign" was reminiscent of "the civil-rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, and the movement for gay liberation." Most remarkably, Tom Hayden himself joined the chorus by breaking a New Left taboo against "red-baiting" and laying bare some of Hillary Clinton's own far-Left history--this, in retaliation for the Clinton campaign's revelations about Obama's radical background.

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Even after declaring his candidacy, and despite a certain inevitable sidling rightward, Obama still reflected the presuppositions of a radical worldview. In one notable remark, he said of voters in economic distress that in their desperation they "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Chastised for his condescension, he responded: "I said something that everybody knows is true." This was elitism of a very specific kind--the mentality of the community organizer, according to which people in the grip of "false consciousness" need to be enlightened as to the true nature of their class interests, and to the nature of their true class enemies.

The same suppositions are again evident in Obama's stances on international issues. Iraq, as he sees it, is only a symptom. "I don't want to just end the war . . . I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place." And what would that mindset be? In a 2002 speech that he frequently cites, he said the war resulted from

the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors . . . to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne . . . the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income . . . the arms merchants in our own country . . . feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.

In this litany of global perfidy, the issues of Saddam Hussein's murderous dictatorship, of American security, of the future of freedom, shrink to inconsequentiality next to the struggle of the oppressed against their American capitalist overlords.

When it comes to Iran, Obama has acknowledged that the regime presents a problem. But his actions--he opposed the Kyl-Lieberman amendment designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization--as well as his rhetoric imply that the greater danger emanates from George W. Bush (who is allegedly seeking "any justification to extend the Iraq war or to attack Iran"). Likewise on defeating terrorism, where he rejects the America-centric focus that Bush has given to the issue; instead, in the words of his aides, Obama's main goal is to "restore . . . our moral standing"--that is, to put an end to our aggressive ways.

Even the events of 9/11 could not shake Obama from the mindset that the enemy is always ourselves. The bombings, he wrote, reflected

the underlying struggle--between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together; and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us.

In this reading, the lessons to be learned from the actions of Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta are that we must accept multiculturalism at home and share our wealth abroad.

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In sum, Obama comes to us from a background farther to the Left than any presidential nominee since George McGovern, or perhaps ever. This makes him an extremely unlikely leader to bridge the divides of party, ideology, or, for that matter, race. If he loses, it will be for that reason (though many will no doubt adduce different explanations, including of course white racism, to which every GOP victory since Nixon's election in 1968 has been attributed).

And if he wins? Without a doubt, it will be a thrilling moment. But the enduring importance of that landmark event will depend on the subsequent effectiveness of his presidency. If his tenure--like that of, say, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter--should end by inviting scorn, then it may open as many wounds as it heals. On the other hand, it is not unimaginable that he may rise to the challenge of the office and govern from the center, as he will have to do to succeed. This, however, would truly involve reinventing himself, a task for which his intellectual and ideological background furnishes few materials.

With his sharply partisan speech to the Democratic national convention in late August, Obama appeared to zag to the Left after months of zigging toward the center in hopes of winning over independent voters, which had stirred cries of alarm among some of his leftist supporters. Others among them, however, were and are nothing fazed. As The Nation's Robert Dreyfuss explained, they "put their faith in the Senator's character and innate instincts." Heaven help us, they are probably right.
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Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at AEI.
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