Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Who is the Real Barack Obama? - Updated

Dear Readers:

I’m sure it has not escaped your attention that Governor Palin has been pounding on the Barack Obama/Bill Ayers connection. As fast as the words come out of her mouth, the legacy media and the Obama Campaign are out there telling Americans it is old news, a distraction, not relevant to today.

It doesn’t matter what Ayers did in the ‘60s and it matters even less, what he is doing now. What does matter is the underlying philosophy and agenda as it relates to Obama. The question should not be why did Obama pal around with Ayers, but what did such a brutal radical see in the young Obama?

Obama is so far left, he doesn’t see the radicalism in Ayers and Dohrn and their various cohorts who were and are still influential in Obama’s rise in politics.

I wouldn’t say Obama is a Muslim, but I think the strict Muslim education he got in his most formative years under his step-father’s tutelage set the tone for his Mother to brainwash him with her own far left ‘60s radical views leaving him wide open to the influence of communist/pedophile Frank Marshall Davis starting when Obama was 10, which then played a large part in how he sought out the radical fringe while in college and to advancing the far left radical hatred with his associations in Chicago.

We are pretty much products of the influences of our youth and Obama’s were absolutely without question all anti-American and anti-democracy.

The people who shaped Obama’s warped view of the world were:

Muslim Step-father Lolo Soetoro/his mother/his Muslim father

Frank Marshall Davis:

Davis was a known communist who belonged to a party subservient to the Soviet Union. In fact, the 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii identified him as a CPUSA member.

What’s more, anti-communist congressional committees, including the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), accused Davis of involvement in several communist-front organizations. 

[,,,]

Obama writes in Dreams From My Father that he saw “Frank” only a few days before he left Hawaii for college, and that Davis seemed just as radical as ever. Davis called college “An advanced degree in compromise” and warned Obama not to forget his “people” and not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that ####.”

Davis also complained about foot problems, the result of “trying to force African feet into European shoes,” Obama wrote.
Link

Remember, Frank Marshall Davis was a friend of Obama’s grandfather and apparently his mother had no problem allowing her 10 year old thru college age son from being mentored by and influenced by this communist and admitted pedophile.

So Obama goes off to Occidental College with those words of Davis ringing in his ears.

From Dreams From My Father: “To 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. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling conventions. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.”

“But this strategy alone couldn’t provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerant. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.

Now, there is no proof that Obama and Ayers first crossed paths in New York City after Obama transferred to Columbia University, but Ayers was there at the same time and active with the radical fringe so rampant in those days. It is hard to believe that a young man seeking out these groups would not have crossed paths with Ayers, but the timeperiod has been so scrubbed, the Obama Columbia years are a total mystery.

Many researchers and reporters have highlighted Obama’s secrecy about his years at Columbia University in New York City.  In our recent article on Obama’s friendship with William Ayers, I wrote:

Now the Mainstream Media is onto this story too, and has (finally) noticed that Obama is hiding records from Columbia University, where he completed his undergraduate studies after transferring from Occidental College in California.  To be more precise, it’s not just Obama’s academic files that are missing, but more curiously, the files of his life.  The Wall Street Journal had a story Thursday entitled Obama’s Lost Years:

What can be said with some certainty is that Mr. Obama lived off campus while at Columbia in 1981-83 and made few friends. Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him.

Martin questions whether this mysterious period of Obama’s life has to do with William Ayers:

Is it just a coincidence that Obama and Ayers were on the Columbia campus together? Did they meet and make their initial contact at that time? Link

In any event, somehow, someway, through someone’s recommendation, Obama ends up in Ayers’ hometown of Chicago and at a law firm where Bernardine Dohrn just happened to work and where he also met his very angry wife, Michelle.

So why are William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn important? What did these two see in Barack Obama that made them think he would be open to their friendship?

William Ayers:

‘’I don’t regret setting bombs,’’ Bill Ayers said. ‘’I feel we didn’t do enough.’’ Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970’s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings.

[...]

He writes in his book, Fugitive Days, that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972.

[...]

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ‘’Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.’’

[...]

He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.’s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her ‘’the most dangerous woman in America’’ and ‘’la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.’’ Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married.

In his book Mr. Ayers describes the Weathermen descending into a ‘’whirlpool of violence.

Between 1970 and 1974 the Weathermen took responsibility for 12 bombings, Mr. Ayers writes, and also helped spring Timothy Leary (sentenced on marijuana charges) from jail.

[...]

Today, Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn, 59, who is director of the Legal Clinic’s Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University, seem like typical baby boomers, caring for aging parents, suffering the empty-nest syndrome. Their son, Malik [named after Malcolm X], 21, is at the University of California, San Diego; Zayd [named for a Black Panther killed in a shootout that claimed the life of a New Jersey State Trooper], 24, teaches at Boston University. They have also brought up Chesa Boudin, 21, the son of David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, who are serving prison terms for a 1981 robbery of a Brinks truck in Rockland County, N.Y., that left four people dead. Last month, Ms. Boudin’s application for parole was rejected. [Note: Malik, born 1977, Zayd, born 1980, Chesa, born 1980 (now working for Hugo Chavez in Venzuela]

So, would Mr. Ayers do it all again, he is asked? ‘’I don’t want to discount the possibility,’’ he said.

[...]

In 1970 came the town house explosion in Greenwich Village. Ms. Dohrn failed to appear in court in the Days of Rage case, and she and Mr. Ayers went underground, though there were no charges against Mr. Ayers. Later that spring the couple were indicted along with others in Federal Court for crossing state lines to incite a riot during the Days of Rage, and following that for
‘’conspiracy to bomb police stations and government buildings.’’ Those charges were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.

During his fugitive years, Mr. Ayers said, he lived in 15 states, taking names of dead babies in cemeteries who were born in the same year as he. He describes the typical safe house: there were usually books by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara’s picture in the bedroom; fermented Vietnamese fish sauce in the refrigerator, and live sourdough starter donated by a Native American that was reputed to have passed from hand to hand over a century.

He also writes about the Weathermen’s sexual experimentation as they tried to ‘’smash monogamy.’’ The Weathermen were ‘’an army of lovers,’’ he says, and describes having had different sexual partners, including his best male friend. Link

So what does it all mean as far as Barack Obama is concerned?

It all hinges on Ayers being what they called a “rich kid radical.” You see, Bill Ayers father, Tom Ayers, was very rich and very well connected in Chicago and it was through his influence that his terrorist bomber fugitive son and his wife were able to integrate back into society.

As Ayers said: “Guilty as sin, free as a bird, it’s a great country.”

Ayers went off to finish his education and landed in New York City at the same time that Barack was at Columbia as we told you above.

But, it was later that they really found each other. Through the machinations of Chicago politics, Ayers was able to get Obama selected as the Chairman and President of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge in 1995. Whether he did this directly or through an intermediary isn’t entirely clear, but what is clear is that the two of them worked closely for the next several years distributing millions of dollars in grant money, for school reform as developed by Bill Ayers, who had gotten the original grant for the Challenge. When the Challenge closed down in 2002, it was judged to be ineffective. It turned down grant requests for math and science and gave it instead to Bill Ayers’ radical friends and associates or their pet school reform projects. [Ask yourself why Obama never mentions his years with the CAC? Why, when it is his only management experience does he leave it off his resume?]

So how did Bill Ayers infect Obama’s world view? Let’s let the expert on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Steve Diamond, explain:

So what is the evidence of the influence of Ayers’ world view on Obama and his presidential candidacy?

First, what is the Ayers’ world view? Ayers is what political scientists call a “neo-stalinist.” Neo-stalinism is an authoritarian form of politics which attempts to control and build social institutions to impose state control of the economy, politics and culture on the general population. It has similarities to the original Stalinism found in the former Soviet Union but it arose in other countries and used slightly different forms and in some instances created regimes that were at odds for various reasons with the Russian regime.

Classic examples of neo-stalinist regimes - regimes that Ayers and people in his political camp respect and support - are the Chavez regime in Venezuela, the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, the Castro regime in Cuba, and the maoist regime in China.

How could such a world view have anything to do with Obama? Well, the route that Ayers and his camp have followed to promote his form of authoritarian politics is a critical policy area: education.

Ayers advocates what he calls a “social justice” approach to education. What that means is the promotion of his authoritarian politics through our public school system. Four key tactics that Ayers supports in order to help implement his world view are:

• the creation of “local school councils” (LSCs) like those that Ayers has promoted in Chicago for the last 20 years;


• “small schools” which Ayers has also promoted since the early 1990s in Chicago and elsewhere; 


• the advocacy of what Ayers and others call “social justice” teaching; and


• the payment of reparations through education spending to correct what he has seen for 40 years as the fundamentally racist nature of American society.

Local school councils and small schools, I should hasten to point out, have nothing to do with improving student test scores and outcomes. That is not their purpose and, in fact, the Ayers camp is actually opposed to objective standards like test scores as a measure of the effectiveness of our schools. The purpose of these entities is to create a political base for Ayers and his band of fellow traveling authoritarians to push their wider political agenda.

Once inside the schools Ayers, who now heads the curriculum division of the leading education professional association, attempts to alter the teaching content of classrooms to include a “politically correct” “social justice” curriculum.

The abstract from another Diamond article reads:

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was a $160 million dollar reform effort in the Chicago public school system led by, among others, Barack Obama and Bill Ayers. An analysis of the Challenge suggests that an authoritarian form of politics shared by Ayers and Obama was a critical part of the reform effort. This form of authoritarian radicalism has its roots in the American New Left and Black Power movements. The paper contrasts the authoritarian and anti-union approach of the Challenge with a democratic alternative.

But how did the communist influences of Obama’s youth change? For the answer to that, let’s turn to yet another Diamond article:

Of course, one strong sign of the political impotence of the American CP [Communist Party] as Obama was growing to political maturity was the emergence of new activists in the 1960s who specifically opposed the CP and its politics.  A battle cry of this milieu was opposition to both US and USSR foreign policy, for example.  Thus many thousands of young activists (including me) opposed both the US invasion of Vietnam as well as the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.

But within that movement, another strand emerged as well.  That strand gave birth to a new authoritarian form of politics on the left.  This strand took the view that the U.S. was the main problem on the global scene and drifted into an outlook that said that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

[...]

One leader of this new movement was Che Guevara. Some have argued that he and Castro had broken politically with each other over the close ties between Cuba and Russia. Guevara left to start revolutions elsewhere, with disastrous results, of course.  But the fact that Che became a hero to new authoritarian movements like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and to many in the United States as well is evidence of the perverse attractiveness of this development.

We interrupt this quote for a graphic reminder that Che Guevara is “alive and well” in the Obama campaign:

Obama HQ with Che flag

Continuing:

In the United States the emergence of the Weather Underground was an example of the rise of an authoritarian (stalinist but non-Communist) left in the United States. This movement had to develop its own raison d’etre and for the Weather people, it was the race based notion of “white skin privilege” and “white supremacy” and the crazy tactics that followed - for example, the role that the WU played in the 1981 bank robbery led by the Black Liberation Army in which three people were killed and led to the jailing of WU leader Kathy Boudin for 22 years and her partner David Gilbert for life. These are the kinds of events that Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were also involved in (well, murderous bombings not murderous robberies it appears).

Closely linked to their racialist views, the WU types adopted an idea that the third world was the vanguard of the global revolution together with the black American community. The targets of this revolution were not only US “imperialism” but white workers inside the “belly of the beast.” They argued that white workers, and their politically compromised labor unions, fed off the
backs of third world workers and black Americans (while never explaining why black workers are such strong backers of even white-controlled unions).

Historian Sean Wilentz has recognized the impact of these kinds of views on the Obama campaign. As he recently wrote on the
Huffington Post:

“Having attempted, with the aid of a complicit news media, to brand Hillary Clinton as a racist—by flinging charges that, as the historian Michael Lind has shown, belong ‘in black helicopter/grassy knoll territory,’ Obama’s supporters now fiercely claim that Clinton’s white working class following is also essentially racist. Favoring the buzzword language of the academic left, tinged by persistent, discredited New Left and black nationalist theories about working-class ‘white skin privilege,’ a vote against Obama has become, according to his fervent followers, ‘a vote for whiteness.’”

Wilentz also notes the hostility of the Obama camp to white American workers:

“Culturally as well as politically, Obama’s dismissal of white working people represents a sea-change in the Democrats’ basic identity as the workingman’s party - one that has been coming since the late 1960s, when large portions of the Left began regarding white workers as hopeless and hateful reactionaries.”

Let’s repeat that cruicial statement:

“Culturally as well as politically, Obama’s dismissal of white working people represents a sea-change in the Democrats’ basic identity as the workingman’s party - one that has been coming since the late 1960s, when large portions of the Left began regarding white workers as hopeless and hateful reactionaries.”

There you have it in a nutshell. Include Obama’s seemingly constant trashing of the United States (see his Berlin speech) and his desire to send gobs of money overseas to eliminate world poverty and his desire to radicalize the schools and you can see why Bill Ayers is so important to the discussion.

For instance, Obama’s Global Poverty Act:

On December 7, 2007, Obama introduced the Senate version of the Global Poverty Act of 2007 (S.2433). On February 13, the bill cleared the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, on which Obama and 6 (Biden, Dodd, Feingold, Hagel, Lugar, Menendez) of the bill’s 9 co-sponsors serve. The House version of the bill (H.R.1302) passed by a unanimous voice vote last September 25.  

Here’s an abstract of the proposed legislation:

“To require the President to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the [U.N.] Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.”

If enacted, how much of a financial commitment would that represent to taxpayers?

One estimate is 0.7% of gross national product, or an additional $845 billion over 13 years in addition to existing foreign aid expenditures. So far, this proposal is barely on the MSM radar, but we’re likely hear more about it as a full Senate vote approaches.

Are you following the development of Obama’s world view of anger, alienation, radicalism, racism, and victimhood, especially black victimhood? As a final ingredient, we must add in the influence of Reverend Jeremiah Wright and James Cone with their Black Liberation Theology.

In a now-famous 2003 sermon, Wright charged that an ingrained, abiding racism in American society is at fault for many of the troubles African-Americans face, and he thundered, “No, no, no, not God bless America! God damn America — that’s in the Bible — for killing innocent people.”

Wiki describes Black Liberation Theology as:

This theology maintains that African Americans must be liberated from multiple forms of bondage — social, political, economic and religious. In this new formulation, Christian theology is a theology of liberation—“a rational study of the being of God in the world in light of the existential situation of an oppressed community, relating the forces of liberation to the essence of the gospel, which is Jesus Christ,” writes Cone. Black consciousness and the black experience of oppression orient black liberation theology—i.e., one of victimization from white oppression. This liberation involves empowerment and seeks the right of self-definition, self-affirmation and self-determination. Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago is the one church frequently cited by press accounts, and by Cone as the best example of a church formally founded on the vision of Black liberation of theology.

So in Barack Obama’s world, a world painted by men like Davis, Ayers and Wright, America is the real enemy of the world and blacks are victims of white racist oppressors. It isn’t just Bill Ayers, unrepentant domestic terrorist, we should concentrate on, but the world view and core values that he represents and shares with Obama and helped to foster during the years they worked on the radical education goals of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Small Schools Workshop. To understand the real Barack Obama, you need to be aware of the role his early Muslim education played and the communist influence of Frank Marshall Davis and you must understand who Bill Ayers is and what he stands for. And you need to understand, as well, how the Black Liberation Theology of Rev. Wright fits in and helps cement Barack’s world view.

And then you need to ask yourself, does Barack Obama represent your America, the America of your heart and soul, the America you want your children to grow up in? Do you really want them indoctrinated in a school devoted to political correctness and social justice, or would you rather they learned English, math, science and history?

Obama & Friends - History Of Radicalism


Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

UPDATE:

Don’t believe it when Obama says he didn’t know about Ayers’ radical views:

Stanley Kurtz:

Obama was perfectly aware of Ayers’ radical views, since he read and publicly endorsed, without qualification, Ayers’ book on juvenile crime. That book is quite radical, expressing doubts about whether we ought to have a prison system at all, comparing America to South Africa’s apartheid system, and contemptuously dismissing the idea of the United States as a kind or just country.

Sol Stern at City Journal:

Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. (If you find the metaphor strained, consider that Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union in the 1930s, did, in fact, depict Stalin as a great land reformer who created happy, productive collective farms.) For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that “Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education—a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation,” and then, as in days of old, raised his fist and chanted: “Viva Presidente Chávez! Viva la Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!”

RELATED:

• Obama Is Already Pushing His Radical Socialist Agenda On America In His Education Bill

A very disturbing firt-hand personal story about Bill Ayers and date rape or maybe better called pimping his date:

• Remembering a Sixties Terrorist

When you see all the associations and organizations of the far left of Barack’s world in list form, it is all rather mind boggling.

• Barack’s World

This section of DiscoverTheNetworks examines Barack Obama’s connections to a number of key individuals and organizations. In some cases, these affiliates are notable for the leftist views and objectives they share with Obama. In other cases, they are notable for their collaboration with Obama in controversial or unethical activities. In all cases, they offer a window into Barack Obama’s values and priorities. Taken as a whole, they verify Thomas Sowell’s observation that Obama has “spent decades aiding and abetting people who hate America.”

Gateway Pundit: Obama was weaned in the school of radicalism and Marxism.

• Airing Out Ayers

Left unasked and unanswered - how did they *not* meet in 1988?  There was a major push for school reform in Chicago in 1987-88.  Although he intended to leave his Developing Communities Project in May 1988 prior to entering Harvard Law School, per his autobiography (p. 289) Obama was involved in the school reform effort:

“The months passed at a breathless pace, with constant reminders of all the things left undone.  We worked with a citywide coalition in support
of school reform.”

The ABCs Coalition was formed in March 1988 (p. 20) and was coordinated by Bill Ayers (photo).

Yet Obama never met the fellow coordinating this 1988 coalition.  And years later, after all his hard work in creating the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Bill Ayers graciously assented to Obama becoming chairman even though the two men had never met, Obama had no background in education, and no one had reviewed Obama’s qualifications with Bill Ayers.  Uh huh.  Well, that is Obama’s current story - let’s see if they stick to that through the election.

• Obama & Radical Fr. Pfleger Held Prayer & Protests Together

Sen. Barack Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2004 that he had three spiritual advisors: radical Jeremiah Wright, radical James Meeks, and radical Father Michael Pfleger.

But, radical Father Pfleger was more than a spiritual guide for Obama.
They also held protests together: