http://tinyurl.com/6e2cft
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Have you ever been a friend or business associate of a terrorist? Not
someone who, to your shock and horror, turned out secretly to have bombed
government buildings. No, the question is whether youve ever befriended an
unreconstructed radical whose past was well known to you when you entered
his orbit and walked through doors he opened for you. Have you been chummy
with an unapologetic terrorist who, years after youd known and worked
closely with him, was still telling the New York Times he regretted only
failing to carry out more attacks and that America still makes me want to
puke?
Barack Obama has.
An organization called the American Issues Project, backed by Dallas
investor Harold Simmons, is running a campaign ad which highlights Obamas
troubling relationship with William Ayers. Ayers is a former member of the
Weathermen terrorist organization that bombed the Pentagon, the U.S.
Capitol, various police headquarters, and other targets in the early 1970s.
The Obama campaigns rejoinder is three-pronged: The first shot was an Obama
response ad, which fails to offer any substantive explanation of why Obama
maintains ties to Ayers. Obamas second move was to launch a heavy-handed
effort to pressure television stations into rejecting the ad by promising
financial retaliation against the stations and their advertisers which
effort has apparently succeeded in intimidating Fox and CNN. The capper is a
desperate call for the Justice Department to muzzle political speech through
the prospect of a criminal investigation a demand that provides a
disturbing sneak peak into what life would be like under an Obama Justice
Department.
Needless to say, none of this is justified. If Obama has a good explanation
for his ties to Ayers, he ought to give it. In the meantime, raising
questions about that relationship is entirely legitimate.
Obamas campaign has acknowledged that the candidate and Ayers are friends.
Though Obama has more recently minimized Ayers as just a guy who lives in
my neighborhood, it is clear that the relationship was much deeper than
that. Ayers and his fellow-terrorist wife, Bernadine Dohrn (who has spoken
admiringly of the infamous Manson Family murders), are icons in Chicagos
hard-left circles, to which Obama sought entrée as a young community
organizer. In 1995, they hosted a fundraiser that helped launch his career
in Chicago politics.
Ayers has never abandoned his indictment of America as an imperialist hotbed
of racism and economic exploitation. He has merely shifted methods from
violent extortion to academic indoctrination. Through his perch as a
professor of education at the University of Illinois, he has been a
ceaseless critic of the criminal-justice system (he is essentially opposed
to imprisoning even the most violent criminals) and a proponent of what he
calls education reform but what is actually the use of the classroom to
proselytize for the Lefts political agenda.
Writing in the Chicago Tribune in 1997, Obama called A Kind and Just Parent,
Ayers polemic on the Chicago court system, a searing and timely account.
Michelle Obama, then a dean at the University of Illinois, invited Ayers to
participate in a panel with her husband, then a state senator who, the
program explained, was working to block proposed legislation that would
throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system.
Obama apologists dismiss all this as guilt by association based on a
single joint appearance. But it was far from the only one.
In fact, by 1997 Obama and Ayers were collaborators on a far more
significant level. They sat together for several years on the board of the
Woods Fund, a left-wing Chicago charitable organization. There, they doled
out tens of thousands of dollars to such beneficiaries as the Trinity Church
(where Obama was a longtime member and where another Obama mentor, Jeremiah
Wright, preached a radical, anti-American brand of Black Liberation
Theology) and the Arab American Action Network (co-founded by Rashid
Khalidi, a Yasser Arafat apologist who has supported attacks against Israel
and now directs Columbia Universitys notorious Middle East Institute,
founded by Edward Said).
- - -
They do a nice job of connecting the dots. Either the facts are accurate or
they aren't.
All you'll hear from the campaign, I'm sure, is the usual screed in which
the words "right-wing" and "swift-boat" drown out what amounts to a
half-hearted "so what?" Either that or he'll finally, and reluctantly, throw
Ayers under the Great Big Obama School Bus with Jeremiah, Tony R. and his
grandmother ("a typical white person"), and officially "Get thee behind me
Satan" him. Like that's believable anymore.
- Bob
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