[Vision2020] Why Won’t Obama Talk About Columbia?

[No Weatherman]

This article is less objective than usual but the writer does a good
job filling in some blanks.


Why Won't Obama Talk About Columbia?
The years he won't discuss may explain the Ayers tie he keeps lying about.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
Barack Obama does not want to talk about Columbia. Not even to his
good friends at the New York Times, who've so reliably helped him
bleach away his past — a past neck-deep in the hard Left radicalism he
has gussied up but never abandoned.

Why? I suspect it is because Columbia would shred his thin
post-partisan camouflage.

You might think the Times would be more curious. After all, the
Democrats' presidential nominee has already lied to the Gray Lady
about the origins of his relationship with Weather Underground
terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Back in May, in a cheery
profile of Obama's early Chicago days, the Times claimed (emphasis is
mine):

"Mr. Obama also fit in at Hyde Park's fringes, among university
faculty members like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, unrepentant
members of the radical Weather Underground that bombed the United
States Capitol and the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. Mr. Obama
was introduced to the couple in 1995 at a meet-and-greet they held for
him at their home, aides said."

Now look, anyone who gave five seconds of thought to that passage
smelled a rat. Ayers and Dohrn are passionate radical activists who
lived as fugitives for a decade. There's no way they held a political
coming-out party for someone who was unknown to them. Obviously, they
already knew him well enough by then to feel very comfortable. They
might have been sympathetic to a relative stranger, but sponsoring
such a gathering in one's living room is a strong endorsement.

And now, even the Times now knows it's been had. In this past
weekend's transparent whitewashing of the Obama/Ayers tie, the paper
claimed that the pair first met earlier in 1995, "at a lunchtime
meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper[.]" That storyline
is preposterous too, but it is also a marked revision of the paper's
prior account (which, naturally, reporter Scott Shane fails to
mention).

Why the change? The tacit concession was forced by Stanley Kurtz and
Steve Diamond — whom the Times chooses not to acknowledge but who
hover over Shane's sunny narrative like a dark cloud.

Despite all manner of stonewalling by Obama, Ayers and their allies,
these commentators have doggedly pursued information about the Chicago
Annenberg Challenge. That's the $150+ million "education reform" piggy
bank substantially controlled in the nineties by Ayers and Obama, who
doled out tens of millions of dollars to Leftist radicals — radicals
who, like their patrons, understood that control over our
institutions, and especially our schools, was a surer and less risky
way to spread their revolution than blowing up buildings and
mass-murdering American soldiers. As Diamond observes, in a 2006
speech in Venezuela, with Leftist strongman Hugo Chavez looking on,
Ayers exhorted: "Teaching invites transformations, it urges
revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!"

Be clear on that much: Whether clothed as a terrorist or an academic,
Ayers has made abundantly clear in his public statements, both before
and after he established a working relationship and mutual admiration
society with Obama, that he remains a revolutionary fueled by hatred
of the United States. And while Obama now ludicrously pleads ignorance
about Ayers's terrorism — the terrorism that made the unabashed Ayers
an icon of the Left — understand that this rabid anti-Americanism is
the common denominator running through Obama's orbit of influences.

Yes, Ayers is blunter than Obama. As he so delicately told the Times,
America makes him "want to puke." The smoother Obama is content to say
our society needs fundamental "change." But what they're talking about
is not materially different.

Such sentiments should make Obama unelectable. So, when it comes to
his own radical moorings, Obama is engaged in classic liar behavior.
He changes his story as the facts change — and the burden is always on
you to dig up the facts, not on him to come clean. Yesterday, asked to
comment on the Ayers relationship, David Axelrod, Obama's top
political adviser, hilariously chirped, "There's no evidence that
they're close." Translation: Get back to us when you can prove more
damaging information — until then, we don't need to further refine our
perjury.

And then Axelrod gave us still more lies: "There's no evidence that
Obama in any way subscribed to any of Ayers' views."

Oh yeah? Well, Mr. Axelrod, how do you explain Obama's breathless
endorsement of Ayers's 1997 Leftist polemic on the criminal-justice
system, A Kind and Just Parent? As Stanley Kurtz has recounted,
Ayers's book is a radical indictment of American society: We, not the
criminals, are responsible for the violent crime that plagues our
cities; even the most vicious juvenile offenders should not be tried
as adults; prisons should eventually be replaced by home detention;
American justice is comparable to South Africa under Apartheid.
Obama's reaction? He described the book as "a searing and timely
account" — a take even the Times concedes was a "rave review."

Obama and Ayers shared all kinds of views. That is why they worked so
well together at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), funding the
likes of Mike Klonsky, a fellow SDS and Maoist associate of Ayers who,
as Steve Diamond relates, used to host a "social justice" blog on
Obama's campaign website. With Obama heading the board of directors
that approved expenditures and Ayers, the mastermind running its
operational arm, hundreds of thousands of CAC dollars poured into the
"Small Schools Workshop" — a project begun by Ayers and run by Klonsky
to spur the revolution from the ground up.

Precisely because they shared the same views, Obama and Ayers also
worked comfortably together on the board of the Woods Fund. There,
they doled out thousands of dollars to Jeremiah Wright's Trinity
Church to promote its Marxist "black liberation theology." Moreover,
they underwrote the Arab American Action Network (AAAN) founded by
Rashid Khalidi, a top apologist for Yasser Arafat. As National
Review's David Pryce-Jones notes, Khalidi once directed WAFA, the
terrorist PLO's news agency. Then, like Ayers, he repackaged himself
as an academic who rails at American policy. The AAAN, which supports
driver's licenses and public welfare benefits for illegal aliens,
holds that the establishment of Israel was an illegitimate
"catastrophe."

Khalidi, who regards Israel as a "racist" "apartheid" state, supports
Palestinian terror strikes against Israeli military targets. It's
little surprise that he should be such a favorite of Ayers, the
terrorist for whom "racism" and "apartheid" trip off the tongue as
easily as "pass the salt."

And it's no surprise that the like-minded Obama would be a fan.
Khalidi, after all, has mastered the Arafat art of posing as a
moderate before credulous Westerners while (as Martin Kramer
documents) scalding America's "Zionist lobby" when addressing Arabic
audiences. The Obama who decries "bitter" Americans "cling[ing] to
guns or religion" when he's in San Francisco but morphs into a
God-fearing Second Amendment enthusiast when he's in Pennsylvania —
like the Obama who pummels NAFTA before labor union supporters but has
advisers quietly assure the Canadians not to worry about such campaign
cant — surely appreciates the craft.

Obama and Ayers not only demonstrated their shared view of Khalidi by
funding him. They also gave glowing testimonials at a farewell dinner
when Khalidi left the University of Chicago for Columbia's greener
pastures. That would be the same Columbia from which Obama graduated
in 1983.

Khalidi was leaving to become director of Columbia's Middle East
Institute, assuming a professorship endowed in honor of another Arafat
devotee, the late Edward Said. A hero of the Left who consulted with
terrorist leaders (including Hezbollah's Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah) and
was once photographed hurling rocks at Israelis from the Lebanese
border, Said was exposed by researcher Justus Reid Weiner as a fraud
who had created a fictional account of his childhood, the rock on
which he built his Palestinian grievance mythology.

We know precious little about Obama's Columbia years, but the Los
Angeles Times has reported that he studied under Said. In and of
itself, that is meaningless: Said was a hotshot prof and hundreds of
students took his comparative-lit courses. But Obama plainly
maintained some sort of tie with Said — a photo making the Internet
rounds shows Obama conversing with the great man himself at a 1998
Arab American community dinner in Chicago, where the Obamas and Saids
were seated together.

Said had a wide circle of radical acquaintances. That circle clearly
included Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. When they came out of hiding
in the early 1980s (while Obama was attending Columbia), Ayers took
education courses at Bank Street College, adjacent to Columbia in
Morningside Heights — before earning his doctorate at Columbia's
Teachers College in 1987.

Said was so enamored of Ayers that he commended the unrepentant
terrorist's 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days — the book in which the haughty
Ayers brags about his Weatherman past — with this glowing dust-jacket
blurb:

"What makes Fugitive Days unique is its unsparing detail and its
marvelous human coherence and integrity. Bill Ayers's America and his
family background, his education, his political awakening, his anger
and involvement, his anguished re-emergence from the shadows: all
these are rendered in their truth without a trace of nostalgia or
'second thinking.' For anyone who cares about the sorry mess we are
in, this book is essential, indeed necessary, reading."

Sorry mess, indeed. For his part, Ayers is at least equally enthralled
by Said, of whom, even in death, Ayers says "[t]here is no one better
positioned . . . to offer advice on the conduct of intellectual
life[,]" than the man who was "over the last thirty-five years, the
most passionate, eloquent, and clear-eyed advocate for the rights of
the Palestinian people."

After they left Columbia, both Obama and Ayers went to Chicago: Obama
to become a "community organizer" (the director of the Developing
Communities Project, an offshoot of the Gamaliel Foundation dedicated
to Saul Alinsky's principles for radicalizing society); Ayers, two
years later, to teach at the University of Illinois. Diamond details
how they both became embroiled in a major education controversy that
resulted in 1988 reform legislation.

Ayers's father, Tom Ayers, a prominent Chicago businessman, was also
deeply involved in the reform effort. Interestingly, in 1988, while
Obama and Ayers toiled on the same education agenda, Bernadine Dohrn
worked as an intern at the prestigious Chicago law firm of Sidley
Austin — even though she could not be admitted to the bar due to her
contempt conviction for refusing to cooperate in a terrorist
investigation. How could that happen? It turns out that Sidley was the
longtime outside counsel for Tom Ayers's company, Commonwealth Edison.
That is, Ayers' father had pull at the firm and successfully pressed
for the hiring of his daughter-in-law.

The next summer, though he had gone off to Harvard Law School (another
impressive accomplishment he prefers not to discuss), Obama returned
to the Windy City to work as an intern at Sidley. Dohrn was gone by
then to teach at Northwestern. A coincidence? Maybe (Diamond doesn't
think so), but that's an awful lot of coincidences — and a long trail
of common people, places and experiences — for people who purportedly
didn't know each other yet managed to end up as partners in
significant financial and political ventures.

In short, Bill Ayers and Barack Obama moved in the same circles, were
driven by the same cause, and admired the same radicals all the way
from Morningside Heights to Hyde Park. They ended up publicly admiring
each other, promoting each other's work, sitting on the same boards,
and funding the same Leftist agitators.

You could conclude, as I do, that it all goes back to a formative time
in his life that Obama refuses to discuss. Or you could buy the fairy
tale that Bill Ayers first encountered an unknown, inexperienced,
third-year associate from a small Chicago law-firm over coffee in 1995
and suddenly decided Barack Obama was the perfect fit to oversee the
$150 million pot of gold Ayers hoped would underwrite his revolution.
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=NjY4YzdhMDBkZGQ3ZmU2MTUzYjdkMzc5ZjUzYmViZWM=