Barack Obama's Ties to a Terrorist

If the media focused on Barack Obama's relationship with William Ayers as much as it does on Sarah Palin's firing of her former public safety commissioner, the 2008 presidential election would be over.

Being a news junkie, I didn't realize until recently how few people even know who William Ayers is, and how even fewer know about his relationship to Senator Obama. I first began this realization a couple of days ago when I mentioned the Obama-Ayers relationship to my wife, only to find out that she had no idea who William Ayers is.

The next day at work, I asked a well-respected colleague, one who I know tries to keep up on current events and issues, if he knew who Ayers is. Again, he did not. A little later, another colleague, who happens to be a history teacher, began talking to me about Obama. When I mentioned the Ayers relationship, he got a confused look on his face. I then asked him if he knew who William Ayers is, and he said, "Yeah, I know who he is, but I didn't know that he had a relationship with Obama."

So for those who don't know, William Ayers is an unrepentant domestic terrorist. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was a leader of a group known as the Weathermen, or the Weather Underground. This militant left-wing organization of self-described revolutionary Communists carried out more than 20 bombings between 1970 and 1975.

One bomb, intended for American soldiers attending a dance at Fort Dix, N.J., accidentally detonated prematurely, killing three of the Weather Underground's own members. Successful bombings included the 1970 bombing of the New York City Police headquarters, the bombing of the U.S. Capitol in 1971, and the bombing of the Pentagon in 1972. Ayers later wrote about the Pentagon bombing, “It turns out that we blew up a bathroom and, quite by accident, water plunged below and knocked out their computers for a time, disrupting the air war [in Vietnam] and sending me into deepening shades of delight.”

A fugitive wanted by the FBI for ten years, Ayers eventually gave himself up, only to be set free on a legal technicality. After his release, Ayers taunted authorities by announcing, "Guilty as sin, free as a bird -- what a country, America."

Ayers remains unrepentant, saying in a September 11, 2001 New York Times interview, “I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough.”

After ending his career as a domestic terrorist, but without regretting what he did, Ayers started a second career and is now a "Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago," which tells us something about our public university system.

So where is the Obama connection?

In an Obama/Clinton debate in April, George Stephanopoulos asked Obama if he could explain his relationship with William Ayers for the voters. Obama attempted to give the impression that there is no relationship with Ayers beyond just a casual acquaintance as a result of living in the same neighborhood.

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.

Here's what Obama did not say about the relationship.

On April 2, 2001, William Ayers made a $200 campaign contribution to the "Friends of Barack Obama" State Senate campaign fund. OK, I'll be fair. Thousands of contributions were made to that campaign, and Mr. Obama cannot be held responsible for knowing about every one of them. However, he certainly did know about all of the following:

*Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, another former Weather Underground member who was once on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted List, helped to launch Obama's political career by hosting a fundraiser for him in Ayers' home in 1995.

*Also in 1995, Ayers co-founded a non-profit organization for school reform in Chicago known as the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) and made Obama the first chairman of the board of the organization

*While Obama was chairman of the CAC, Ayers himself was co-chair of the CAC's operative and strategic body, the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, which reviewed proposals for CAC grants and made recommendations to the board.

One of the first grants the CAC awarded went to a project called the Small Schools Workshop, headed by an early associate of Bill Ayers named Mike Klonsky. Klonsky was chairman of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (CPML) from 1977 to 1981. After Klonsky traveled to China in 1977 the CPML was recognized by the Chinese Communist Party as its official sister party in America.

Years later, in 1991, Ayers called on Klonsky to head up the newly formed Small Schools Workshop, and when the CAC was formed in 1995, under the chairmanship of Obama and Ayers, the organization gave Klonsky's Workshop a grant of $175,000.

*Obama served on the "Leadership Council" of the Chicago Public Schools Education Fund, the successor to the CAC, alongside Ayers' father in 2001 and 2002 and with Ayers' brother from 2001 through 2004.

*Obama served on the board of another non-profit, the Woods Fund of Chicago, from 1993 to 2001; the last three of those years (1999, 2000, 2001) he served along side William Ayers.

In 2001, the last year that Obama and Ayers served together on the board, the Woods Fund grants included the following:

*$6,000 to Obama's church, Trinity United Church of Christ, headed by Rev. Jeremiah Wright
*$75,000 to ACORN, a left wing voter registration group with a history of election fraud.
*$40,000 grant to the Arab American Action Network, a group co-founded by Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, a harsh critic of Israel who just happens to have held a political fundraiser for Barack Obama in 2000.

Does it sound to anybody that Barack Obama's relationship with terrorist William Ayers is nothing more than just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood"? It sounds to me like Barack Obama wants to hide his real relationship with Ayers, and I can't blame him.

As I said before, if this information were widely known, this election would be over. Unfortunately, we barely hear a mention of any of this in the mainstream media.

It's up to us to get this information to as many people as possible. We cannot allow Barack Obama to become President of the United States. I would encourage everyone who agrees with me to do everything you can to do what the mainstream media will not do: spread the truth about Barack Obama.