Obama’s American Socialism: Decades In The Making, Part II

Author’s Note: First, a personal thank you to Wilma and you know why!!!  Keep up the great work!  Secondly, there is such a volume of information that no one can actually read and digest all of it in just one day.  Also, the spiderweb of Obama’s associations, mentors and funders is not linear; therefore, my condolences for any confusion you may experience while trying to stay with the group.  I had to map this out on a very large whiteboard to keep track myself.   I personally have never seen a candidate with so many anti-American associates protected to valiantly by the MSM.  Meanwhile, the hottest news story is about Governor Palin’s wardrobe….

These articles ARE NOT an attack on Black Liberation Theology, Islam, or other various political viewpoints.  These articles are about putting forward information that is vital to making a decision about hiring the most important executive in our country; the President.  Information that has been unreported except for a few journalists and bloggers, and information that would explain the scrubbing that has been done on so many pro-Obama websites and why the elite, liberal MSM has not reported these facts to the American public; knowing most Americans would come to the same conclusion.  Nobama.  It is up to Americans to make up their minds about who they want steering the country.  Personally, a “dem” President and a “dem” congress leaves me more than uneasy about this country’s future; add the wealth of socialist and anti-almost everything associates, I would not be able to sleep at night.

In Part I, the radical socialist associations that have shaped Barack Obama’s political, American and world view were starting to be explored.  In Part II, another very important influential movement must be shown.  Just as Obama is half white and half black, he has been influenced not only by Alinsky, Cloward, and Piven; he has been influenced by Black Liberation Theology and the Nation Of Islam through Reverend Wright, Louis Farrakhan, and Leah Daughtry; (the Daughtry reference goes to the influence inside the leadership of the Democratic Party).  I will bring us back to the timeline and the beginning of Obama’s political career in due time, but important background needs to be imparted, and this information could explain why the McCain camp has decided not to open this particular can of worms because it could cause some major civil unrest if the whole story were known.  I am putting it forward because Obama’s associations explain his behavior and why he has made choices you and I would not.  Also, the tossing of associates under the bus is another of his trademarks, starting way back when with Alice Palmer.

All of this begs the question: Why does a candidate for President of the United States and Leader Of The Free World hide his past and create a situation where all of this investigative research, and chasing the truth down rabbit holes even has to be done by everyday Americans WHO ARE NOT THE MSM?

When asked for documents, John McCain produced his birth certificate and other important documents immediately.  Barack Obama has not yet produced anything that is verifiably authentic and the election is days away.  Have Americans lost their common sense? Are Americans going to elect someone that has not been vetted as well as one would vet your child’s school, broker, or potential business partner?

Obama’s American Socialism: Decades In The Making

Part II

Islam, Marxism, Black Liberation Theology

Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  We have all heard about him.  We have all heard the “facts” as presented by Team Obama.  He was Obama’s pastor or 20+ years, married Barack and Michelle, baptized their children, and was only speaking volatile sermons when Barack was not in attendance.  The big question back in March and April was “do you believe Barack never heard those sermons?”  The question should have been, “Did Barack and Michelle stay in that church and were close with Rev. Wright because they held the same viewpoint?”  The evidence of associations points to Obama agreeing and moving forward with Reverend Wright’s views well before 1995 and the Million Man March.

What is it that we are not aware of because everyone has been so focused on these little details and the videos of Reverend Wright losing his mind in church?  How about some nuggets of truth?:

From Newsmax back in the good old primary days of January 2008:

“We are a congregation which is unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian,” says the Trinity United Church of Christ’s website in Chicago. “We are an African people and remain true to our native land, the mother continent, the cradle of civilization.” That’s just the beginning. The church has a “non-negotiable commitment to Africa,” according to its website, and its pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. subscribes to what is called the Black Value System. While the Black Value System includes such items as commitment to God, education, and self-discipline, it refers to “our racist competitive society” and includes the disavowal of the pursuit of “middle-classness” and a pledge of allegiance to “all black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System.” It defines “middle-classness” as a way for American society to “snare” blacks rather than “killing them off directly” or “placing them in concentration camps,” just as the country structures “an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.” … In sermons and interviews, Dr. Wright has equated Zionism with racism and Israel with South Africa under its previous policy of apartheid. On the Sunday after 9/11, Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later, Wright suggested that the attacks were retribution for America’s racism. … Obama says he found religion and Jesus Christ through Wright, whom he met in the mid-1980s. He has been attending Wright’s church regularly since 1988. … Just before Obama’s nationally televised campaign kickoff rally last Feb. 10, the candidate disinvited Wright from giving the public invocation. Wright explained: “When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli” to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, “a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”

What this article does not say is this; 10 years after starting to attend TUCC:

Million Man March (1995): In 1995 Obama — along with such notables as Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright — helped organize the Washington, DC-based Million Man March which featured Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Said Obama in the immediate aftermath of the March: “What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African-American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society…. Historically, African-Americans have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white Americans couldn’t care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing.”

Want a couple more money facts?

Wright sees no reason to believe that Islam may be incompatible in any way with Western traditions. “Islam and Christianity are a whole lot closer than you may realize,” he has written. “Islam comes out of Christianity.”[5] …

Wright detests America’s capitalist economic structure, viewing it as a breeding ground for all manner of injustice. “Capitalism as made manifest in the ‘New World,'” he says, “depended upon slave labor (by African slaves), and it is only maintained by keeping the ‘Two-Thirds World’ under oppression.”[ Wright’s anti-capitalist perspective is reflected in TUCC’s “10-point vision,” whose ideals include the cultivation of “a congregation working towards ECONOMIC PARITY.” (Emphasis in original.) The TUCC mission statement plainly declares its goal of helping “the less fortunate to become agents of change for God who is not pleased with America’s economic mal-distribution!”

This view is entirely consistent with Rev. Wright’s devotion to the tenets of liberation theology, which is essentially Marxism dressed up as Christianity. Devised by Cold War-era theologians, it teaches that the New Testament gospels can be understood only as calls for social activism, class struggle, and revolution aimed at overturning the existing capitalist order and installing, in its stead, a socialist utopia where today’s poor will unseat their “oppressors” and become liberated from their material (and, consequently, their spiritual) deprivations.

An extension of this paradigm is black liberation theology, which seeks to foment a similar Marxist revolutionary fervor founded on racial rather than class solidarity. Wright’s mentor in this discipline is James Cone, author of the landmark text Black Power and Black Theology. Prior to the controversy sparked (in early 2008) by Wright’s racially charged statements and by Wright’s reference to Cone’s influence on his thinking, the website of Wright’s church identified Cone’s writings as required reading for parishioners who wished to more thoroughly understand the church’s theology and mission.

The words “Black Liberation Theology” have been spoken on news stations and in print, but what they have not said is the following quote from James Cone’s own text:

Claiming that “black values” are superior to American values, Cone’s writings posit a black Jesus who leads African Americans as the “chosen people.” “This country was founded for whites, and everything that has happened in it has emerged from the white perspective,” he writes. “What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world.”

…and now we go back to Reverend Wright who was so influenced by James Cone and then influenced Barack Obama enough that Obama named a book after one of Wright’s sermons.

On December 4, 2007, Wright was named as a member of the Barack Obama campaign’s newly created African American Religious Leadership Committee. Other notable members of the Committee included Rev. Joseph E. Lowery and Rev. Otis Moss III. Rev. Wright retired as pastor of TUCC on February 10, 2008. He was replaced by Rev. Otis Moss III. In March 2008, Wright stepped down from Senator Obama’s African American Religious Leadership Committee after videotapes of his controversial sermons had repeatedly ignited fierce public debate and criticism.

…

Wright is a great admirer of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. “When Minister Farrakhan speaks, Black America listens,” says Wright. “Everybody may not agree with him, but they listen … His depth on analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye opening. He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest. Minister Farrakhan will be remembered as one of the 20th and 21st century giants of the African American religious experience. His integrity and honesty have secured him a place in history as one of the nation’s most powerful critics. His love for Africa and African American people has made him an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose.”

Moving on….Louis Farrakhan; who has said that Obama is the Messiah.

On numerous occasions, Farrakhan has made alliances with avowed foreign enemies of the United States. In January 1996, for instance, he formed a partnership with Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi, who pledged $1 billion to help Farrakhan develop a Muslim political lobby in the U.S.  According to Libya’s official news agency Jana, Qadhafi announced: “We agreed with Louis Farrakhan and his delegation to mobilize in a legal and legitimate form the oppressed minorities –– and at their forefront the blacks, Arab Muslims and Red Indians — for they play an important role in American political life and have a weight in U.S. elections.” The Jana story further stated that Qadhafi and Farrakhan had pledged to fight America from the “inside.”  “Our confrontation with America,” said Qadhafi, “was [previously] like a fight against a fortress from outside, and today [with the NOI alliance] we found a breach to enter into this fortress and confront it.” This was not Farrakhan’s first friendly encounter with Qadhafi. Eleven years earlier, the Libyan strongman had granted NOI a $5 million interest-free loan, in gratitude for which Farrakhan later visited Libya to personally thank his benefactor. Qadhafi once told a crowd of NOI followers at a Chicago convention that he sought to sponsor an armed black revolution in America. On yet another occasion, Farrakhan and his aides — violating a travel ban imposed on Americans by President Reagan — flew to Tripoli to meet with Qadhafi, who Farrakhan has proudly called “a friend,” “a brother,” and “a fellow struggler in the cause of liberation for our people.” In 1996 and again the following year, Farrakhan went on “World Friendship Tours” to exchange pleasantries with government leaders in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Sudan — all of which were on the State Department’s list of nations that supported terrorism. Many times during these tours, Farrakhan publicly denounced the United States as “the Great Satan.” Particularly noteworthy was his visit as an honored guest of Sudan’s Islamic fundamentalist government, which had slaughtered a million black Christians and enslaved hundreds of thousands of its black inhabitants. … Also in February 2008, Farrakhan called Obama “a herald of the Messiah.” “Barack has captured the youth,” said the NOI leader, referring to the passionate support Obama had drawn from young people in America. “And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about. That’s a sign. When the messiah speaks, the youth will hear. And the messiah is absolutely speaking.” Farrakhan is a longtime friend and ally of Michael Pfleger, pastor of Chicago’s Saint Sabina Catholic Church. As of April 2008, he had preached in Pfleger’s church on three separate occasions.

Next up….Father Michael Pfleger:

Pfleger’s views on race were shaped, in large measure, by black radicalism in the 1960s. “I got very educated by the [Black] Panthers — very educated,” Pfleger once told Trumpet magazine, a publication of Rev. Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ. … In February 2003 the Marxist professor Cornel West appeared, at Pfleger’s invitation, as a guest speaker at Saint Sabina. On another occasion, Pfleger invited Kareem Irfan, former Chairman of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, to speak at Saint Sabina on the fourth anniversary of 9/11. A member of the Islamic Society of North America, Irfan has characterized Islamic beheadings of non-Muslims not as acts of evil, but rather as manifestations of “a primordial sense of retaliation and revenge.” … Pfleger has had a longstanding friendly relationship (since the late 1980s) with Barack Obama and has played a significant role as a spiritual advisor for the latter. Between 1995 and 2001, Pfleger contributed a total of $1,500 to Obama’s various political campaigns — including a $200 donation in April 2001, approximately three months after Obama (who was then an Illinois State Senator) had helped steer $225,000 in grants to St. Sabina programs. (After Obama’s 2004 election to the U.S. Senate, he would earmark an additional $100,000 in federal tax money for Pfleger’s work.) … Pfleger is also a great admirer of Louis Farrakhan: “I’ve known the minister [Farrakhan] both as someone who I have great respect for as a prophetic voice, as a mentor but also as a friend and as a brother,” said Pfleger. “We’ve become very close friends over the years. Our families have been close; he’s shared dinner at my house as I have at his many, many times. He has preached from our pulpit here at this church on three different occasions. We’ve worked together on issues not only for this community but in the city and in the nation.”

Cornel West:

In 2008 Senator Barack Obama named West to his presidential campaign’s Black Advisory Council. West is a great admirer of Obama’s former pastor and longtime spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. … Cornel West is a Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University. The recipient of more than twenty honorary degrees and a National Book Award, he is a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America, for which he currently serves as Honorary Chair. He is also a co-chair of Michael Lerner‘s Tikkun Community. … In addition, West is a friend to Louis Farrakhan, among the most influential anti-Semites in America. And in 1999, in his role as then-presidential candidate Bill Bradley’s advisor on blacks, West encouraged Bradley to meet with Al Sharpton (whose own campaign for a U.S. Senate seat West had supported in 1994). … Viewing capitalism as the root cause of these alleged American lusts, the Marxist West warns: “Free-market fundamentalism trivializes the concern for public interest. It puts fear and insecurity in the hearts of anxiety-ridden workers. It also makes money-driven, poll-obsessed elected officials deferential to corporate goals of profit — often at the cost of the common good.” As noted above, West is a proponent of black liberation theology — a variation of liberation theology, which teaches that the New Testament gospels can be understood only as calls for social activism, class struggle, and revolution aimed at overturning the existing capitalist order and installing, in its stead, a socialist utopia where today’s poor will unseat their “oppressors” and become liberated from their material (and, consequently, their spiritual) deprivations. Black liberation theology seeks to foment a similar Marxist revolutionary fervor founded on racial rather than class solidarity. The Christian notion of “salvation” in the afterlife is superseded by “liberation” on earth, courtesy of the aforementioned socialist utopia.

Are you seeing the pattern here?  Columbia University, Bill Ayers, Cloward, Piven, Alinsky on one side and Black Liberation Theology on the other side dovetailing into a movement to turn America towards socialism.  The Columbia years are shrouded as are all documents about Barack Obama.  We are expected to buy his books and believe what is written in them as being the complete truth.  Columbia University seems to be a hub a radical dissent and during that time, Obama actually did meet and interact with some interesting characters.  And can anyone tell me why Columbia University is such a hub of radical thought? Rashid Khalidi:

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.

More from DiscoverTheNetworks.org:

• Professor of Middle East Studies at Columbia University
• Former PLO operative
• Has justified as legitimate Palestinian “resistance” that results in death of armed Israelis
• Rejects the possibility of a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said (not to worry, we’ll get to Edward Said) Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, and Director of the Middle East Institute (MEI) at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. In his role as MEI Director, Khalidi presides over a $300,000 annual grant from the federal government. He ranks among the most prominent members of the Middle Eastern studies community in the United States. His books are among the most frequently assigned works on the Middle East in American college syllabi. Arab and American media outlets alike seek him out regularly as a leading authority on the Middle East. Khalidi is also a Board of Trustees member of the non-governmental organization MIFTAH; a notable fellow Board member is Khalil Jahshan, President of the Washington, DC-based National Association of the Arab Americans. Khalidi was born in New York in 1950, the son of a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. He earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1970 and a Ph.D. from Oxford in 1974. During the Seventies, Khalidi taught for a brief time at a university in Beirut, where he often spoke to reporters on behalf of Yasser Arafat‘s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, Khalidi was a professor at the University of Chicago, where he served as Director of both the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for International Studies. Khalidi has long cited the late Edward Said as his major academic influence. Following the latter’s death in 2003, Khalidi penned an obituary that valorized Said for “giving a voice to the voiceless” via his “eloquent espousal of the cause of Palestine.” In this context, Khalidi likened Said to another of his idols, Noam Chomsky: “Like Noam Chomsky and very few others, he [Said] managed not only to reshape his own field of scholarly endeavor, but to transcend it, influencing other fields and disciplines, and going well beyond the narrow boundaries of the American academy to become a true public intellectual, and a passionate voice for humanistic values and justice in an imperfect world.” As with Said before him, Khalidi’s involvement with the Palestinian cause goes beyond mere support. News reports — including a 1982 dispatch from Thomas Friedman of the New York Times — suggest that he once served as Director of the Palestinian press agency, Wikalat al-Anba al-Filastinija. Khalidi’s wife, Mona, was reportedly the agency’s main English-language editor between 1976 and 1982. Khalidi so strongly identified with the aims of the PLO, which was designated as a terrorist group by the State Department during Khalidi’s affiliation with it in the 1980s, that he repeatedly referred to himself as “we” when expounding on the PLO’s agenda. Additional evidence of Khalidi’s intimacy with the PLO can be seen in his involvement with the organization’s so-called “guidance committee” in the early 1990s. Khalidi’s 1986 book, Under Siege: P.L.O. Decision-Making During the 1982 War, was dedicated to Yasser Arafat. Opening with a glowing tribute to anti-Israel fighters (“to those who gave their lives during the summer of 1982 … in defense of the cause of Palestine and the independence of Lebanon”), the book offered an airbrushed account of PLO-instigated violence against Israelis and Lebanese. By contrast, Syria’s brutal occupation of Lebanon elicited no criticism from the author. In 1995 Khalidi and his wife founded the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), noted for its view that Israel’s creation in 1948 was a “catastrophe” for Arab people. … Characterizing Israel as a “racist” state that is “basically an apartheid system in creation,” Khalidi claims that the Israeli army is in possession of “awful weapons of mass destruction (many supplied by the U.S.) that it has used in cities, villages and refugee camps.” Khalidi formerly expressed some tepid support for the notion of an Israeli state alongside a Palestinian one. In more recent years, however, he has taken to dismissing such a solution as hopelessly unrealizable. At a February 2005 conference at Columbia, titled “One State or Two? Alternative Proposals for the Middle East,” Khalidi agreed with his Columbia colleague, Joseph Massad, in declaring that the two-state solution was an impractical “utopian vision.” Khalidi further assailed Israel’s very legitimacy, proclaiming it to be “a state that exists today at the expense of the Palestinians,” an existence that “fails to meet the most important requirement: justice.” … Khalidi deceptively styles himself as a “severe critic of Hamas.” But mere days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he rebuked the news media for what he termed their exaggerated “hysteria about suicide bombers.” Scholarly institutions that do not promote anti-Israel propaganda have incurred Khalidi’s wrath. Appearing on Al-Jazeera TV in 2004, Khalidi took aim at the prominent Middle Eastern Studies think-tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). That the non-partisan center is headed by Dennis Ross (a respected diplomat and a former Middle East envoy in the Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush administrations), and that it regularly hosts speakers from the Middle East who are critical of Israel, did not prevent Khalidi from execrating WINEP as “the most important Zionist propaganda tool in the United States.” Khalidi strongly opposed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In an illuminating polemic which he penned for the January 2003 issue of the far-left journal In These Times, Khalidi, even as he conceded that “international terrorism has been sponsored by Iraq,” dismissed the notion that such an invasion could have any legitimate justification. Instead, he put forward a farrago of theories that he described as the “real reasons” for the impending war: “First, it will be fought because of an aggressive, ideological vision of America’s place in the world, propagated by the neo-conservatives who dominate the commanding heights of the American bureaucracy. Their vision proposes unfettered world hegemony for the United States, to be consecrated by the demonstration of U.S. power crushing a weak Iraq. “Second, this war will be fought because of an obsession with control of the strategic resources (read: oil) and geography offered by the Middle East, with the view of neutralizing potential challengers to American hegemony in the 21st century [meaning primarily China].” As Khalidi saw it, the looming war against Iraq was the brainchild of “racist” neo-conservatives who were: (a) doing the bidding of the Israeli Likud party to which they paid an undeclared allegiance; (b) aiming “to make the Middle East safe not for democracy, but for Israeli hegemony”; and (c) acting upon their “racist view that Middle Easterners understand only force.” “For these American Likudniks and their Israeli counterparts,” wrote Khalidi, “sad to say, the tragedy of September 11 was a godsend: It enabled them to draft the United States to help fight Israel’s enemies.”   In March 2008 Khalidi called for the recompense of the Iraqi people for the suffering they had endured at the hands of the U.S. “We owe reparations to the Iraqi people,” he told an audience at Columbia University. Also speaking at that event was the socialist writer Anthony Arnove. Both Khalidi and Arnove called for mass anti-war activism and demanded America’s unilateral withdrawal from Iraq. Khalidi similarly had opposed the first Gulf War in 1991, when he characterized public support for the U.S.-led defense of Kuwait as an “idiots’ consensus.” Khalidi is longtime a friend of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. In the 1990s, Obama and his wife were regular dinner guests at Khalidi’s Chicago home. During the 2000 election cycle, Mr. and Mrs. Khalidi organized a fundraiser for Barack Obama’s unsuccessful congressional bid. In 2001 and again in 2002, the Woods Fund of Chicago, while Mr. Obama served on its board, made grants totaling $75,000 to Khalidi’s Arab American Action Network. In 2003 Obama would attend a farewell party in Khalidi’s honor when the latter was leaving the University of Chicago to embark on his new position at Columbia. In a 2008 interview, Khalidi praised Obama effusively, stating that, if elected President, Obama would be more understanding of the Palestinian experience than other politicians. “He has family literally all over the world,” Khalidi noted. “I feel a kindred spirit from that.” Obama is not the only political figure whom Khalidi has supported. In 2003, for instance, the professor contributed $1,000 to Democrat Jesse Jackson, Jr.‘s congressional campaign. Among the donors to Khalidi’s endowed chair at Columbia are: (a) the United Arab Emirates; (b) the Hauser Foundation, a New York charity headed by Rita Hauser, a controversial philanthropist whose onetime law firm — Stroock, Stroock & Lavan — was registered with the Department of Justice as an agent for the Palestinian Authority until 2001; and (c) the Olayan Charitable Trust, a New York-based charity with ties to the Olayan America Corporation, an arm of the Saudi organization the Olayan Group.

From DiscoverTheNetworks.org; Edward Said:

The Palestine Monitor Website’s official biography of Edward Said declares that he “was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, Palestine. In the 1947 partition of Palestine, he and his family became refugees and moved to Cairo where they lived with relatives.” In truth, however, Said was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt. He received a master’s degree from Princeton University, and a doctoral degree from Harvard. He thereafter took a position as a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. One of academia’s most influential radical theorists, Said is best known for his extremely influential 1978 book Orientalism, which holds that it is impossible for Westerners to write valid accounts of Middle Eastern affairs because their ideas are tainted by cultural biases — and a sense of cultural and intellectual superiority. In The Weekly Standard, Stanley Kurtz writes: “The founding text of postcolonial studies, Orientalism effectively de-legitimated all previous scholarship on the Middle East by branding it as racist. Said drew no distinction between the most ignorant and bigoted remarks of nineteenth-century colonialists and the most accomplished pronouncements of contemporary Western scholars: All Western knowledge of the East was intrinsically tainted with imperialism.”

and now, the Obama link to Edward Said:

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 tooke 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.”

Two more players; the first is Ali Abunimah; Vice President of the Arab American Action Network (which has received money from The Woods Fund).  According to DiscoverTheNetworks.org:

Born in Washington, DC on December 29, 1971, Ali Abunimah is a Palestinian American who serves as the Board of Directors Member for the Chicago-based Arab American Action Network. He is also a co-founder of the Electronic Intifada website, which was created by activists affiliated with the International Solidarity Movement. His personal website, abunimah.org, acts as a clearinghouse for his writings, which are fiercely hostile toward Israel and the United States.

But these are not the most interesting facts.  From Militant Islam Monitor:

IsraelNN.com) Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama is currently hiding his anti-Israel views in order to get elected, according to a well-known anti-Israel activist. The activist, Ali Abunimah, claimed to know Obama well and to have met him on numerous occasions at pro-Palestinian events in Chicago. In an article he penned for the anti-Israeli website Electronic Intifada, Abunimah wrote: “The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing. “As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, ‘Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.’ He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy [and said:] ‘Keep up the good work!'” …

Barack, Michelle, Edward and Mariam Abunimah’s report included a photo of Obama with his wife Michelle seated at a table with virulently anti-Israeli Professor Edward Said and his wife Mariam, in what Abunimah said was a May 1998 Arab community event in Chicago at which Said gave the keynote speech. In an interview earlier this year for the leftist radio show “Democracy Now!,” a daily TV and radio news program hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Abunimah said he knew Obama for many years as his state senator “when he used to attend events in the Palestinian community in Chicago all the time.” “I remember personally introducing him onstage in 1999, when we had a major community fundraiser for the community center in Deheisha refugee camp in the occupied West Bank,” he recounted. “And that’s just one example of how Barack Obama used to be very comfortable speaking up for and being associated with Palestinian rights and opposing the Israeli occupation.” About face ‘to get elected’ The Arab-American activist went on to say: “In 2000, when Obama unsuccessfully ran for Congress I heard him speak at a campaign fundraiser hosted by a University of Chicago professor. On that occasion and others Obama was forthright in his criticism of US policy and his call for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”

“Obama’s about-face is not surprising,” Abunimah wrote. “He is merely doing what he thinks is necessary to get elected and he will continue doing it as long as it keeps him in power.” When Obama first ran for the Senate in 2004, the Chicago Jewish News interviewed him on his stance regarding Israel’s security fence. He accused the Bush administration of neglecting the “Israeli-Palestinian” situation and criticized the security fence built by Israel to prevent terror attacks: “The creation of a wall dividing the two nations is yet another example of the neglect of this Administration in brokering peace,” Obama was quoted as saying. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/125656

The photo and the caption.  Some of my readers may recognize Michelle and Barack from other photos taken the same night. This photo from 1998 has been circulating on the Internet for a while now, but nobody seems to ask a very basic question: Why was a relatively obscure State Senator seated next to the high and mightily Keynote speaker, Edward Said, at this May 1998 Arab community dinner in Chicago? These types of events ordinarily do not have random seating. Someone obviously thought it important to seat Obama next to the Palestinian radical and guest of honor. Why? In the next article in the series, we will be following the money of Rezko, Auchi and Soros among others and showing the intricate web that has been woven between all of the “organizations” backing Barack Obama. And now, for something completely different but back to the original William Ayers.  I have verified that Prairie Fire is a true and actual manifesto. Once again, ChristmasGhost sent me a link to more Bill Ayers disturbing documentation.  Zombietime has obtained a copy of Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, Political Statement of the Weather Underground.  Please make sure you take the time to read this whole article.  Some bread crumbs to add to the trail from Zombie:

Ayers was not simply protesting “against” the Vietnam War. Firstly, he wasn’t against war in principle, he was agitating for the victory of the communist forces in Vietnam. In other words: He wasn’t against the war, he was against our side in the war. This is spelled out in great detail in Prairie Fire. Secondly, and more significantly, the Vietnam War was only one of many issues cited by the Weather Undergound as the justifications for their violent acts. As you will see below, in various quotes from Prairie Fire and in their own list of their violent actions (and in additional impartial documentary links), Ayers and the Weather Underground enumerated dozens of different grievances as the rationales for their bombings — their overarching goal being to inspire a violent mass uprising against the United States government in order to establish a communist “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in Ayers’ own words.

May 9, 1974 Sisters and brothers, Here is PRAIRIE FIRE, our political ideology – a strategy for anti-imperialism and revolution inside the imperial US. It comes out of our own practice of the last five years and reflects a diversity of experiences. This paper is not the product of one or two people, nor even a small handful of us. Rather PRAIRIE FIRE represents the politics and collective efforts of an organization. It has been the focus of our study groups and our political education. It has been chewed on and shaped in countless conversations, struggles and written pages. It has travelled around the country, growing, developing thru the attempt to understand the shape of world forces and the revolutionary possibilities before us. The paper was rewritten four times and collectively adopted as the political statement of the Weather Underground. The twelve-month process of writing PRAIRIE FIRE, squeezed between on-going work and practice and action, has now reached a kind of end-point. A cycle is done. We undertook this analysis to explain the changes in US and world conditions since the Vietnam ceasefire and to evaluate the consequences of the Vietnamese victory. We have come some distance in evaluating the political situation, the priorities for revolutionary work since we began this writing. Now many more revolutionaries will need to shape and change the paper. The politics cannot be realized unless and until the content of the program is activated in thousands of situations, among thousands of people in the coming period. PRAIRIE FIRE will be a growing thing. We hope the paper opens a dialectic among those in the mass and clandestine movements; we hope people will take PRAIRIE FIRE as seriously as we do, study the content and write and publish their views of the paper as well as their analysis of their own practice. We will respond as best we can. Our movement urgently needs a concrete analysis of the particular conditions of our time and place. We need strategy. We need to battle for a correct ideology and win people over. In this way we create the conditions for the development of a successful revolutionary movement and party. We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build the new society. Getting from here to there is a process of coming together in a disciplined way around ideology and strategy, developing an analysis of our real conditions, mobilizing a base among the US people, building principled relationships to Third World struggle, and accumulating practice in struggle against US imperialism. PRAIRIE FIRE is written to communist-minded revolutionaries, independent organizers and anti-imperialists; those who carry the traditions and lessons of the struggles of the last decade, those who join in the struggles of today. PRAIRIE FIRE is written to all sisters and brothers who are engaged in armed struggle against the enemy. It is written to prisoners, women’s groups, collectives, study groups, workers’ organizing committees, communes, GI organizers, consciousness-raising groups, veterans, community groups and revolutionaries of all kinds; to all who will read, criticize and bring its content to life in practice. It is written as an argument against those who oppose action and hold back the struggle. PRAIRIE FIRE is based on a belief that the duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution. This is not an abstraction. It means that revolutionaries must make a profound commitment to the future of humanity, apply our limited knowledge and experience to understand an ever-changing situation, organize the masses of people and build the fight. It means that struggle and risk and hard work and adversity will become our way of life, that the only certainty will be constant change, that the only possibilities are victory or death. We have only begun. At this time, the unity and consolidation of anti-imperialist forces around a revolutionary program is an urgent and pressing strategic necessity. PRAIRIE FIRE is offered as a contribution to this unity of action and purpose. Now it is in your hands. Bernardine Dohrn Jeff Jones Billy Ayers Celia Sojourn For the Weather Underground