Post-American Presidency (11 page)

In the sixties, Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were members of the Weather Underground, a communist terrorist group
that planted bombs at the Pentagon, the Capitol building, and other government buildings. Ayers himself planted a bomb at a statue commemorating police casualties during the 1886 Haymarket riots in Chicago. When a bomb he was hoping to use to kill American soldiers in New Jersey exploded prematurely in a house, Ayers became for ten years a fugitive from justice, but all charges against him were dropped in 1980 when an FBI program that was investigating the Weathermen was accused of improprieties.

Ayers, however, remains unrepentant, saying in 2001: “I don’t regret setting bombs… I feel we didn’t do enough.”
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Leaving his terrorist activities behind, Ayers served his cause as part of the Left’s long march into the institutions. He became a respectable professor at the University of Chicago. One of his neighbors was an ambitious young man named Barack Hussein Obama. In 1995, Obama launched his political career with a run for the Illinois State Senate, and he began his campaign with a fundraising event at the Chicago home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
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Later, State Senator Obama wrote a glowing endorsement of Ayers’s book
A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court
.
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And when Obama served as board chairman of a philanthropic group known as the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, that group gave over $600,000 in grants to the Small Schools Workshop, an organization founded by Ayers and headed by Mike Klonsky, leader of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (CP-ML), a Maoist party in the United States.
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For his part, Obama was dishonest about the significance of this association, dismissing the aging terrorist as a casual acquaintance: Ayers, said Obama, was merely “a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received an official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from [
sic
] on a regular basis.” The terrorist
attacks? “Now, Mr. Ayers is a 60 plus year old individual who lives in my neighborhood, who did something I deplore 40 years ago when I was six or seven years old. By the time I met him, he was a professor of education at the University of Illinois.”

Yet records don’t justify his having been so dismissive. Ayers and Obama were also both board members of Chicago’s Wood Fund between December 1999 and December 2002. According to the
Chicago Sun-Times
, “that board met four times a year, and members would see each other at occasional dinners the group hosted.”
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The old terrorist Bill Ayers, who just happens to live in Barack Obama’s old neighborhood, but who hardly knows the president and has had only the slightest casual contact with him over the years, visited the White House twice between January and October 2009.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited only once during that span.
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In late January 2010, the White House denied that Ayers, Wright, and Farrakhan had visited the White House:

But reports that the White House visitors list featured William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright were circulating as early as October 2009. And even at that time, many people claimed that these visitors were other people with the same name. Yes, if you do an Intelius search for William Ayers or Jeremiah Wright, there are a lot of them. It is easy to
dismiss. But Louis Farrakhan? There aren’t too many Louis Farrakhans in America, especially with a family member by the name of Nasir Farrakhan, who is also on the visitors list. Nasir Farrakhan is Louis Farrakhan’s son. Every family member supposedly went on a “tour.” Louis Farrakhan met with “someone” in the East Room.

And remember, Obama blocked access to the visitors list.
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The White House had to be sued for the records to be released.
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JEREMIAH WRIGHT AND BARACK OBAMA

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ, of which Obama was a member for twenty years, had roots in both Islam and economic radicalism: “But Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity United’s guiding principles—what the church calls the ‘Black Value System’—included a ‘Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.’”
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Wright was also a close associate of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who in November 2009 offered a doggerel version of Obama’s lofty post-American internationalism: “America,” he declared, “has run out of time. It is the time of the setting of the sun on the Western world.”
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Jeremiah Wright was a committed Marxist, as he himself confirmed in an address in September 2009: “My work with liberation theology, with Latin American theologians, with the Black Theology Project and with the Cuban Council of Churches taught me 30 years ago the importance of Marx and the Marxist analysis of the social realities of the vulnerable and the oppressed who were trying desperately to break free of the political economics undergirded by this country that were choking them and cutting off any hope of a possible future where all of the people would benefit.”
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The Fight The Smears Web site says that Obama “has never been
a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ.”
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The New York Times
reported in 2007 that Obama was baptized at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988.
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Details, however, are sketchy and contradictory: a year later,
Newsweek
stated that Obama was baptized “in the early 1990s.”
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Was Obama baptized at all? The truth of this matter is elusive. However, the positions of the Trinity United Church of Christ, which Obama attended for twenty years, are not elusive in the least: black nationalism and socialism were always on the agenda—and it is significant that the Christianity preached in the Trinity United Church of Christ is a far-left variety that focuses upon few of the features of Christianity that distinguish it from Islam, or at least from the black nationalist amalgam of Islam, Christianity, and racial identity that is the hallmark of that peculiarly American brand of Islam, the Nation of Islam.

When Obama became a member of Trinity United Church in 1991, he accepted what the church calls “the Black Value System,” a race-based code of ethics that encourages black separatism, warning black Americans to shun the middle-class life as a white trap, and to patronize only black-owned businesses. As Jeremiah Wright put it, “We are an African people, and remain true to our native land, the mother continent.”
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Not to America.

Wright, of course, drew controversy during the campaign for his exaggerated race-baiting and hateful statements in support of his protégé’s presidential campaign. And Obama, after a good deal of hesitation, ultimately threw Wright under the bus for these and other statements:

Obama’s repudiation of this race hate was welcome, albeit tardy and politically motivated. Wright’s remarks during the campaign, however, were not likely to have differed significantly in philosophy from remarks he had made over the course of twenty years—while Barack Obama sat and listened.

And there were signs that Obama did listen. Wright preached after 9/11 that America had gotten what it deserved—that the attacks were just desserts for the atomic bombs exploded in Japan: “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and the black South Africans, and now we are indignant. Because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yard. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
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This was Obama’s spiritual adviser. The man whose sermon inspired the title of Obama’s second autobiography,
The Audacity of Hope
.

Asked during a visit to Japan in November 2009 whether he thought the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, Obama ducked the question. Were Wright’s condemnations of those bombings still ringing in his ears? Of course, there were plenty of other radical Leftists from whom Obama might have picked up this idea. But the coincidence was notable.
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Now it certainly seems as if Barack Obama, with his schemes to nationalize health care, the auto industry, and more, has absorbed and
adopted as his own some of Wright’s principal preoccupations—and is intent on making the nation as a whole disavow the “pursuit of middleclassness.”

These are not just insignificant associations. Obama and Wright are still close; despite Obama’s public repudiation of Trinity United Church of Christ during his presidential campaign, and bitter words from Wright about the severing of their relationship, Wright has visited the White House at least once since his onetime protégé became president.
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And Wright’s race-baiting Christianity of resentment has also left its mark on Obama’s handling of racial issues as president.

OBAMA AND ODINGA

In an August 2006 campaign stop, Illinois senator Barack Obama thundered against corruption: “My own city of Chicago, Illinois, has been the home of some of the most corrupt local politics in American history over the years, from patronage machines to questionable elections.”

But he wasn’t speaking in Chicago. Barack Obama was in Kenya.

“Here in Kenya, there is a crisis,” Obama said, “a crisis that’s robbing an honest people of the opportunities they fought for.”
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Although he didn’t mention him by name, he was attacking the president of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, and appeared with Kibaki’s chief opponent, Raila Odinga. Foreshadowing his own presidential campaign slogan, Obama declared, “Kenyans are now yearning for change.”
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Alfred Mutua, a spokesman for the Kibaki government, accused Odinga of “using Senator Obama as his stooge, as his puppet.”
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Mutua was magnanimous about Obama’s apparent naïveté: “It is now clear that he was speaking out of ignorance and does not understand Kenyan politics, we earlier thought he was mature in his assessment
of Kenyan and African politics. We forgive him because it is his first time in the Senate and he is yet to mature into understanding issues of foreign policy.”
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So if Obama’s grasp of Kenyan politics was weak at best, what might have moved him to campaign for Raila Odinga? Odinga and Obama’s father were both Luos from the same area of Kenya, and Odinga claimed to be Obama’s cousin; however, Obama’s uncle contradicted him, saying that there was no blood relationship between the two men.
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Blood no, but ideology yes: Obama’s support for Odinga is consistent with his other associations: Odinga is a socialist who is enough of a hard-core true believer to have named his son Fidel.
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Odinga’s history suggests that he is more of a Marxist than a social democrat: his father, longtime Kenyan opposition leader Oginga Odinga, was a communist. The East German government gave Raila Odinga a scholarship to Technical University Magdeburg, from which he graduated in 1970.
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Odinga also had troubling ties to Islamic hard-liners, although the exact nature of those ties was hotly disputed. Odinga reportedly made a fortune in the oil industry by making a deal with the Al-Bakri Group of Saudi Arabia; Abdulkader al-Bakri, the CEO of the Al-Bakri Group, has been identified as a sponsor of Al-Qaeda.
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Odinga also cultivated ties with Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi.
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Odinga campaigned against the Kibaki government’s cooperation with the U.S. war on terror, making an issue out of the extradition of a group of accused Al-Qaeda operatives, some of whom the Odinga camp maintained were innocent. “Our government will not be held at ransom to extradite Muslims to foreign lands,” thundered Odinga at a campaign rally.
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And with Muslim Kenyans, the message resonated: “Islamic outrage,” observed Joshua Hammer of
The New York Times
, “had placed the incumbent, Kibaki, on the defensive and provided Raila Odinga with a tool to rally the support of Kenya’s Muslims.”
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Nor was that all. Just a month before the December 27 election, controversy broke out over a Memorandum of Understanding that Odinga had purportedly signed on August 29, 2007, with Sheikh Abdullahi Abdi, chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum (NAMLEF), an umbrella organization comprised of the nation’s principal Islamic groups.
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The memorandum had Odinga promising “within six months” to “rewrite the Constitution of Kenya to recognize Sharia as the only true law sanctioned by the Holy Qur’an for Muslim declared regions.”
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Odinga, according to the memorandum, would recognize “Islam as the only true religion” and give Islamic leaders an “oversight role to monitor activities of ALL other religions.” Christian preaching, alcohol, and pork would be banned.
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