I just caught up with an interview by one of my favorite guys, Hugh Hewitt, of another of my favorite guys, Stanley Kurtz. (It's on Hugh's Townhall blog, which always has plenty of required reading.)
Stanley, of course, has done singularly vital investigative work on Obama's background — you should check out his NRO archive, here, as well as important articles he's recently written in the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal (see. e.g., here, here and here). But Hugh's interview is a real primer for those who haven't delved into it much. It also spotlights an important point that has largely been missed. That is, while there has been focus on the Obama/Ayers tie and the Obama/Khalidi tie, no real attention has been paid to the Ayers/Khalidi tie — which is very strong and tightens the circle significantly.
Specifically, Hugh asked about the strands of the Ayers/Obama connection. After Stanley recounted them in detail, he added this:SK: Now if you lived just a few blocks away from someone, and you’ve been on a foundation together, and at least in the first year, you were on the board together, and then you’re on a panel together, when you run into each other, what are you going to be talking about? Here’s something I also haven’t mentioned. Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers were practically best friends. People don’t know this, and I’m actually saying this for the first time. I haven’t written about this. They were best friends, and we know that Obama had interactions with Khalidi, that Khalidi had held the coffee that kicked off his Congressional campaign, I believe. And Ayers and Khalidi were extremely close if you look at the acknowledgements in their books.
HH: Tell us about Khalidi. Tell us who he is and his role in Obama’s life.
SK: Rashid Khalidi is really, in a sense, the American successor of Edward Said, a very strong advocate for the Palestinians, extremely radical in his views and his opposition to American foreign policy. He was a friend and colleague of Obama. Apparently they used to get together and discuss world affairs. And he’s practically the best friend of Bill Ayers. Bill Ayers features Khalidi in some of his books about how to politicize the teaching for students. So actually, the more you look into it, the more you see that this is not just people running into each other. And again, I object to the idea of just simply counting the times people were together in a room. When you fund Bill Ayers education projects, with hundreds of thousands of dollars, when you as Bill Ayers publish Rashid Khalidi’s essay in your book of collected essays, they might have gone on. That’s a lot without meeting once.
* * *
HH: So Stanley Kurtz, Rashid Khalidi, very close to Barack Obama, read during the break that Khalidi had a farewell dinner in 2003 that Obama was one of the presenters at, and in those remarks, alluded to the numerous dinners he’d had at the home of the Khalidi’s.
SK: Yes.
HH: It simply defies imagination to think that Khalidi was not a bridge between Ayers, that this is not an operating subgroup of Hyde Park, doesn’t it?
SK: Right. I mean, that’s what it seems like when you look, when you read these acknowledgements back and forth between Khalidi and Ayers of how close they are as friends, and you see that Khalidi had dinners at Obama, it really, to think…and then that Khalidi hosted something to kick off Obama’s Congressional campaign, you’ve got to think that Ayers and Khalidi are both talking about Obama, because they’re so close. And you’ve go to think that…it begins to look like a pretty tight network. You know, you can only show what’s actually in the papers, and what are in the documents as far as the number of meetings and everything else. But it sure looks a lot tighter than what we can absolutely see. It looks like a lot more. But it’s hard to show for sure, just like people, I think rightly assume that Barack Obama had to have known a lot more about what Jeremiah Wright was saying all those years than he’s letting on.
ME: Again, these people were drawn to each other because they shared a revolutionary, anti-American ideology — these were not guys who just happened to know each other from the Hyde Park softball league.
Stanley is ever the meticulous scholar — which is why it's so hysterical to read Obamaphiles try to paint him as a right-wing hack. He will go only as far as the hard evidence takes him, so, without speculating on where or when the Ayers/Obama relationship actually began, he deals with what we know for certain, which is that they had enough of a relationship to strike a significant business partnership in 1995.
As readers may recall, I think the relationship traces back years before 1995 — possibly in the Morningside Heights area in the early 80s (when Ayers had just come out of hiding and Obama was at Columbia ... years Obama refuses to discuss), and was almost certainly in place by the late 1980s in Chicago (when Obama and Ayers were both working on education reform and their wives were working at the same law firm). I've laid out my theory (which relies in part on common connections like Khalidi and Edward Said) in this article, called "Why Won't Obama Talk About Columbia?"
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2. Will the Obama circle be unbroken?
Among the Hyde Park friends of Barack Obama was former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi was on the faculty of the University of Chicago, at whose law school Obama was a lecturer. Their children attended the same school. The Khalidis and the Obamas became friends and dinner companions.
As Paul notes below, when Khalidi moved from the University of Chicago to Columbia, Obama attended the dinner honoring Khalidi. Obama saluted Khalidi for "offer[ing] constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases." What a guy.
Last night FOX News reported that Khalidi wrote an obituary for Salah Khalaf (also known as Abu Iyad) when he died in 1991. According to the FOX News report, Khalidi praised Khalaf and said he would be "sorely missed by the Palestinian people to whom he devoted his life."
Khalaf held many PLO posts. In Inside the PLO Neil Livingstone and David Halevy report that Khalaf was the PLO's spymaster, the leader of its security and covert apparatus and the principal link to so-called rejection front elements like Abu Nidal. He directly oversaw the PLO's internal security including Force 17, the Special Operations Group and the Intelligence and Security Apparatus.
Khalaf was also the commander in chief of the terrorist Black September organization. Black September was a PLO front group that answered directly to Yasser Arafat. It is of course best known for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.
Among its other operations was the 1973 seizure of the Saudi embassy in Khartoum. During the operation the American ambassador to Sudan (Cleo Noel) and his deputy chief of misson (George Curtis Moore) were both brutally murdered on Arafat's orders along with the Belgian diplomat Guy Eid. Khalaf was involved in the planning of the operation and directed the seizure of the embassy. (I tell the story of the operation in "How Arafat got away with murder.")
Before they murdered Noel, Moore and Eid, the Black September terrorists demanded the release of Robert Kennedy's assassin Sirhan Sirhan. Obama's friends Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were also big fans of Sirhan Sirhan. FOX News reported this week that Ayers and Dohrn dedicated their 1974 book Prairie Fire to "political prisoners" including Sirhan Sirhan.
I wonder if Obama has had a chance to discuss the fans of Sirhan Sirhan within his circle of friends as he has met up with the members of the Kennedy family who are supporting his election for president. Obama would note that he was only six years old when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Would that cut it? The younger generation of the Kennedy family that lost its father and uncle wasn't much older at the time either.
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3. Ayers-Khalidi Quotes [Stanley Kurtz]
Thanks to Andy for posting below about the Obama/Ayers/Khalidi connection, and to Hugh Hewitt for giving me a chance to discuss it. I’m finding that I simply don’t have time to write up all the material I have on Obama’s troubling background prior to the election. So in lieu of the article I would write if I had more time, let me include some material from the acknowledgments of books by Ayers and Khalidi.
In the acknowledgments of Ayers’ 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent (the book Obama publically endorsed in the Chicago Tribune), he thanks Rashid Khalidi’s wife, Mona Khalidi, calling her a "co-parent:"Thanks to friends and family who provided models and standards and shared struggles of parenting:...Mona Khalidi, sister, friend, and co-parent today....
Thanks to...Mona Khalidi...for careful critical comments.
And in the acknowledgments of his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, Khalidi begins like this:There are many people without whose support and assistance I could not have written this book or written it the way that it was written. First, chronologically and in other ways, comes Bill Ayers. He persuaded me a little over a year ago that I should write this book, and he put me in touch with my editor, Helene Atwan, who has done all that I imagined a good editor could do and more. Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family’s dining room table to do some of the writing for the project....
Bernardine Dohrn continually encouraged me to keep working on the book when I was traveling and at home....
Obviously, the Khalidi and Ayers-Dohrn families were very close, intellectually, personally, and politically. Both Ayers-Dorhn and the Khalidis gave separate campaign events for Obama. Khalidi did exchange ideas with Obama, and it’s hard to believe that Khalidi’s political backing of Obama and exchanges with Obama on the Middle East weren’t thoroughly discussed with Ayers, whom Khalidi would surely have known had a history with Obama at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and on the juvenile crime battle.
Ayers’ 1998 edited book, Teaching for Social Justice, features a contribution by Rashid Khalidi (pp.186-187). Here are some excerpts from Khalidi’s piece:Much of what I do involves teaching for justice, because the very terms I teach about are subversive of so many categories of public knowledge. This is because teaching about the modern Middle East in the United States means confronting a great deal of resistance, notably where the subject of Palestine is concerned....
Beyond generalized prejudices and often not-so-veiled racism against Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Easterners, the main problem comes when I have to confront firmly held and profoundly wrong ideas, particularly one which are widespread in our culture....
Things get harder when such misunderstandings, which at times are honest and innocent, are combined with the "idiot wind" which blows whenever government policy is discussed, and the lemmings in the media and the inside-the-beltway chorus echo whatever those in power are saying. It is nevertheless vitally important to try to talk sense about such things, whether about the Gulf war back in 1991, or about the "peace process" today, which has so far given us a lot of process and very little peace."
For more on Khalidi, see this post by Martin Kramer.
It’s also of interest that in the back of Teaching for Social Justice Ayers includes a list of books he believes can serve as "resources for teaching for change." Among those books is Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.
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4.Obama Praised 'Searing and Timely' Book by Ayers
"Barack Obama, who has consistently downplayed his relationship with William Ayers during his presidential campaign, once gave a glowing endorsement of a book by the former domestic terrorist and was mentioned by name in the book itself.
A blogger unearthed the Dec. 21, 1997, endorsement in the Chicago Tribune and posted photographs of the praise for Ayers' book on Zombietime.com Saturday.
Featured next to a smiling photograph of himself, then-State Senator Obama called Ayers' book, "A Kind and Just Parent: Children of the Juvenile Court," a "searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair."
The book, which details life at the Chicago Juvenile Court prison school, mentions Obama by name on page 82 when it describes Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood:
"Our neighbors include Muhammad Ali, former mayor Eugene Sawyer, poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and writer Barack Obama. Minister Louis Farrakhan lives a block from our home and adds, we think, a unique dimension to the idea of 'safe neighborhood watch': the Fruit of Islam, his security force, has an eye on things twenty-four-hours a day."
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5. Focusing on the Obama-Khalidi ties
"Obama and Khalidi go back to their days at the University of Chicago where Obama was, by his own admission, a frequent dinner guest of Khalidi. As a member of the board at the Woods Foundation, Obama also steered about $70,000 to the Arab American Action Network - an anti Israeli organization run by Khalidi's wife Mona."
[...]
"His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been "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 lived in the same Hyde Park neighborhood as Obama and Bill Ayers. There has been speculation that another reason Obama doesn't want that LA Times tape out in public view is that Bill Ayers - a good friend of Khalidi also - is seen on the tape with Obama."
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6.
While teaching at the University of Chicago, Khalidi and his wife lived in the Hyde Park neighborhood near the Obamas. The families became friends and dinner companions.source
In 2000, the Khalidis held a fundraiser for Obama's unsuccessful congressional bid. The next year, a social service group whose board was headed by Mona Khalidi received a $40,000 grant from a local charity, the Woods Fund of Chicago, when Obama served on the fund's board of directors.
[...]
"Though Khalidi has seen little of Sen. Obama in recent years, Michelle Obama attended a party several months ago celebrating the marriage of the Khalidis' daughter."
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7.
"The party featured encomiums by many of Khalidi's allies, colleagues, and friends, including Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator, and Bill Ayers, the terrorist turned education professor. It was sponsored by the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), which had been founded by Khalidi and his wife, Mona, formerly a top English translator for Arafat's press agency."source
[...]
"Back in April, the Times published a gentle story about the fete. Reporter Peter Wallsten avoided, for example, any mention of the inconvenient fact that the revelers included Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, Ayers's wife and fellow Weatherman terrorist. These self-professed revolutionary Leftists are friendly with both Obama and Khalidi - indeed, researcher Stanley Kurtz has noted that Ayers and Khalidi were "best friends." (And - small world! - it turns out that the Obamas are extremely close to the Khalidis, who have reportedly babysat the Obama children.)
Nor did the Times report the party was thrown by AAAN. Wallsten does tell us that the AAAN received grants from the Leftist Woods Fund when Obama was on its board - but, besides understating the amount (it was $75,000, not $40,000), the Times mentions neither that Ayers was also on the Woods board at the time nor that AAAN is rabidly anti-Israel. (Though the organization regards Israel as illegitimate and has sought to justify Palestinian terrorism, Wallsten describes the AAAN as "a social service group.")"
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8.
"Rashid and Mona Khalidi became close friends of Barack and Michelle Obama during the time when both Barack and Rashid taught at the University of Chicago (1992-2003). At a lavish farewell party for Khalidi in Chicago in 2003, when Khalidi left his prestigious position at the University of Chicago for an even more prestigious one at Columbia University in New York, Obama gave Khalidi a glowing eulogy. He said that he and his wife Michelle had been frequent dinner guests of the Khalidis, and that the Khalidis had frequently babysat for the Obama children."source
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9.
"Michelle Obama in 1997 organized a university event in which she invited her husband, Sen. Barack Obama, and former Weathermen radical Bill Ayers to serve on a panel discussion about whether child murderers should be tried as adults.source
Both Barack Obama and Ayers served on the side that opposed treating offending minors as adults."
[...]
In 1995, Barack Obama served as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, or CAC, which was founded by Ayers and billed itself as a school reform organization. Ayers also served as co-chairman of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one of the two operational arms of the CAC, from its formation in 1995 until 2000.
WND reported that in an interview during his failed congressional bid in 2000, Obama cited his CAC job as evidence of his qualification for public office.
Also in 1995, the first organizing meeting for Obama's state senatorial campaign reportedly was held in Ayers's apartment. In a widely circulated article, WND first reported Obama served on the board of the Wood's Fund, a liberal Chicago nonprofit, alongside Ayers from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the Fund's website. Tax filings showed Obama received compensation of $6,000 per year for his service in 1999 and 2000.
The "Friends of Barack Obama" campaign fund lists a $200 campaign contribution from Ayers April 2, 2001.
The two appeared together as speakers at several public events.
Ayers' wife, Bernadine Dohrn, also has served on panels with Obama. Dohrn, once on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted List, was described by J. Edgar Hoover as the "most dangerous woman in America." Ayers and Dohrn raised the son of Weathermen terrorist Kathy Boudin, who was serving a sentence for participating in a 1981 murder and robbery that left four people dead.
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10.
"Barack Obama served on the board of directors of Woods Fund of Chicago from 1993 to 2001. During that time, the tax exempt foundation made some interesting grants, including one to Obama's church, Trinity United Church of Christ, headed by Rev. Jeremiah Wright at the time. Grants were also made to ACORN, a left wing voter registration group and to a partnership for constructing low income housing. The fund also used Northern Trust for financial services, which is the same company that provided Obama his 2005 mortgage.source
In 2001 the board of directors included Obama, William Ayers, the former Weather Underground radical terrorist, and serving as chairman was Howard J. Stanback who headed New Kenwood LLC, a limited liability company founded by now-convicted felon Tony Rezko and Allison Davis, Obama's former boss at the law firm of Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland."
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11.
SK: Well, Hugh, I think they had a genuine political partnership. As far as we know for certain, it began in about early 1995 when Barack Obama became the chairman of the board of a small education foundation, not too small, because it had ultimately more than $100 million dollars to dispense. But Barack Obama became chairman of the board of something called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation that was essentially founded by Bill Ayers. Now this foundation had two operating bodies, the board, which Obama chaired, and something called the collaborative, which Bill Ayers chaired. And so the two were effectively working together at this foundation, and what’s more, the foundation was giving a lot of money to Bill Ayers’ personal education projects, and the projects of his allies. And as, since the board was in charge of giving out that money, Obama effectively was funding Bill Ayers’ very radical education projects for years on end.source
[...]
But earlier today, I linked to a University of Chicago press release that had Michelle Obama praising a panel that featured Barack Obama and Bill Ayers on juvenile justice, another one of this pattern of contacts. It defies belief to try and pass this off as a casual acquaintance. They’re simply collaborators on many things. And I don’t know, but can you give a number, a minimum number of meetings they had to have been at together, Stanley Kurtz?
SK: Meetings where they absolutely had to have been at together? I can only give you a ballpark right here. I would say that beyond the six board meetings that the Obama campaign is talking about, there had to be at least another half dozen more. But frankly, I think it’s highly likely that it goes way beyond that. I mean, these two were on a small committee of four people charged with hammering out the bylaws that created this foundation. Now can you do that in one meeting, or do you need more meetings? Do you have to have some phone calls and some e-mail going back and forth? How long does it take to create a foundation? I would say that involves a fair amount of contact. So there had to be contact there as you say, and I wrote about this extensively in an article called Barack Obama’s Lost Years. Obama and Ayers were on this panel arranged by Michelle Obama. Really, it was for the purpose of undermining the Illinois juvenile justice bill, which Bernardine Dohrn was also fighting at exactly this period. They were definitely doing…and this was at the same time, by the way, that Barack Obama endorsed, publicly endorsed in the Chicago Tribune, Bill Ayers’ book on juvenile justice. Now if you lived just a few blocks away from someone, and you’ve been on a foundation together, and at least in the first year, you were on the board together, and then you’re on a panel together, when you run into each other, what are you going to be talking about? Here’s something I also haven’t mentioned. Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers were practically best friends. People don’t know this, and I’m actually saying this for the first time. I haven’t written about this. They were best friends, and we know that Obama had interactions with Khalidi, that Khalidi had held the coffee that kicked off his Congressional campaign, I believe. And Ayers and Khalidi were extremely close if you look at the acknowledgements in their books.
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12. Obama's terrorist pals wrote about the need to encourage "organizers" who will work in "communities" and use "audacity" to bring about "socialism" in America.
"Coincidence? The image on the left shows the Weather Underground Organization logo in 1975, and the Obama for President campaign logo in 2008. (Zomblog)
Obama's terrorist pals down the street who kicked off his political career in their living room published a newspaper in 1975 where they urged their followers to work in communities to organize change.
Where have we heard that story before?
Zomblog posted this rare first edition of their newspaper
This post at Zomblog is guaranteed to freak you out.
***
Osawatomie: the Weather Underground newspaper
Zomblog has obtained an extremely rare copy of the first issue of Osawatomie, a newspaper published by the Weather Underground in 1975. Noteworthy passages are reproduced below, along with exact transcriptions. The full pages, with each passage in context in high resolution, are found at the bottom of this post.
Much of Osawatomie, which was written at a time when the Dohrn-Ayers wing of the Weather Underground was transitioning from terrorism to “working from the inside” for revolution, concerns itself with the need to encourage “organizers” who will work in “communities” and use “audacity” to bring about “socialism” in America.
Don’t believe me? Read the quotes for yourself, and see them in context on the full pages below.
Rather than analyze the significance of the parallels between the ideas in Osawatomie, Barack Obama’s personal history as a “community organizer,” and the strategies, slogans and goals of his campaign for the presidency, I will let you the reader decide for yourself."Revolutionaries must be organizers."
"There are serious antiracist organizers building a revolutionary base in working class communities - in neighborhoods, shops, mills, mines, social institutions. There are those who are working among women, GI's, vets, prisoners, among youth, students and the unemployed in every part of the country. There are some who have been at it for years and some who have just begun. Thousands more are needed; and each particular piece of work will have to be linked up into a whole. We need to out-organize the sophisticated and well-financed forces of George Meany, Louise Day Hicks, Ronald Reagan, George Wallace and Albert Shanker. Organizers need to crush this reactionary leadership with a revolutionized torrent of people."
"But revolutionaries expect adversity, expect to be fought every inch of the way by an entrenched ruling class, expect to confront danger and demoralization and overcome it, with creativity and audacity.
Theory and ideology are important tools, and we should make study of Marxism-Leninism an important part of our work."
"Organizers must be intimately aware of every problem and each injustice, and they must show that underneath each particular problem lies another problem, and another and another until you reach the system of imperialism itself. The system is designed to create problems for poor, Third World and working-class people. Organizers need to find small solutions to small problems and great solutions to great problems. Our solutions should be drastic.
We need to build a successful struggle, strong organization and a winning revolutionary party. This is a process, which will not emerge full-blown from our minds. It will emerge and change and grow from practice. We know where to begin.
It is with all this in mind that we have created OSAWATOMIE, the revolutionary voice of the Weather Underground Organization."
"Left analysis is seen mainly in papers circulated among leftists, left solutions are heard mainly in meetings of the left. And what a shame! Because some of that analysis and some of those solutions make sense, describe concrete conditions, prescribe real remedies. Some of that interpretation of events could provide needed leadership in struggle. But isolated from the people, the makers of history and the carriers of change, it is useless.
The immediate task for the left is this: organize the masses of people against imperialism and for revolution. Pull together friends and comrades, whether three or thirty. Explain the roots of the current economic and social crisis. Fight for jobs and for funds for urgent relief programs. Wealth should be taken from the Pentagon budget and used to rebuild our cities, schools and hospitals."
"the system itself is inhuman, and socialism is a real alternative; the energy crisis is the fault of Rockefeller and the oil companies, not the Arab people; unemployment is caused by capitalism not "illegal aliens" stealing jobs; war in Indochina or the Mideast is part of the problem, not the solution; political and social action can change things."
"the Weather Underground Organization's development. Like all our work, OSAWATOMIE is guided by a commitment to struggle, a determination to fight the enemy, the certainty that we will see revolution in our lifetime"
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