There’s a direct philosophical lineage from the domestic terrorism of the sixties to the candidacy of Barack Obama. It’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room that the mainstream media refuses to talk about. That is an egregious failure of the Fourth Estate, because at the time of the last Congressional election (2006), 56.6 million of the 135.8 million citizens registered to vote were born after these events took place. That’s the last election for which we have data — we can assume that by now more than half of the voters are unaware of the criminal origins of the political genre for which Obama is the figurehead.

In 1959, socialists in the United States formed a national network of college organizations for students who were culturally very far left, called the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Forming the core of the 1960s counter-cultural movement known collectively as the New Left, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a radical organization that aspired to overthrow America’s democratic institutions, remake its government in a Marxist image, and help America’s enemies defeat her sons on the battlefield in Vietnam. The group developed from the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the youth branch of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy.

In 1968 events took a truly sinister turn, as an extremely radical faction took control of the SDS, advocating violence.

Weatherman (known colloquially as The Weathermen) was a political faction elected in 1968 to lead the radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)…. Emerging in 1969 as the most militant wing of the SDS’s Revolutionary Youth Movement, the fledgling Weatherman issued a “manifesto” eschewing nonviolence and calling instead for armed opposition to U.S. policies; advocating the overthrow of capitalism; exhorting white radicals to trigger a worldwide revolution by fighting in the streets of the “mother country”; and proclaiming that the time had come to launch a race war against the “white” United States on behalf of the non-white Third World….

FBI files from 1976, recently made public under the Freedom of Information Act, confirm the connections between Weatherman, Havana, and Moscow. Weatherman leaders … traveled illegally to Havana … to engage in terrorist training. There, camps set up by Soviet KGB Colonel Vadim Kotchergine were educating Westerners both in Marxist philosophy and urban warfare.

William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were early leaders of The Weathermen.

William Charles “Bill” Ayers (born 1944) is an American professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, known for his work in school reform and community organizing. While a radical activist during the political upheavals of the 1960s, Ayers went underground for eleven years starting in 1969 as a co-founder of the violent and radical Weatherman group…. In 2001, the New York Times reported that Ayers admitted in his biography that “he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972.”

Bernadine Dohrn (born 1942), who became Ayers’ wife while they were both fugitives, is an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and the Director of Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center. In July 1969, representing The Weathermen, she traveled to Cuba to conspire with representatives of the North Vietnamese and Cuban governments.

While Dohrn led the Weathermen, the organization conducted a series of bombings against the U.S. government and symbols of authority in the early 1970s, bombing federal buildings and police stations. Dohrn was a principal signatory on the group’s “Declaration of a State of War” in 1970 that formally declared “war” on the U.S. Government, and completed the group’s transformation from political advocacy to violent action….

William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were devoted to destroying our government and our way of life. On May 21, 1970 an audiotape recorded by Dohrn announced a declaration of war on the United States.

Hello. This is Bernardine Dohrn.

I’m going to read A DECLARATION OF A STATE OF WAR.

This is the first communication from the Weatherman underground.

All over the world, people fighting Amerikan imperialism look to Amerika’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire.

Black people have been fighting almost alone for years. We’ve known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution…. Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way.…

Now we are adapting … classic guerrilla strategy … to our own situation here in the most technically advanced country in the world.

Che taught us that “revolutionaries move like fish in the sea.” The alienation and contempt that young people have for this country has created the ocean for this revolution.

That was the first of four Communiqués issued by Dohrn. From Communiqué #4 issued on September 18, 1970:

LSD and grass, like the herbs and cactus and mushrooms of the American Indians and countless civilizations that have existed on this planet, will help us make a future world where it will be possible to live in peace.

Now we are at war.

With the NLF and the North Vietnamese, with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Al Fatah, with Rap Brown and Angela Davis, with all black and brown revolutionaries, the Soledad brothers and all prisoners of war in Amerikan concentration camps we know that peace is only possible with the destruction of U.S. imperialism.

Ayers and Dohrn remained federal fugitives for several years, participating in numerous acts of domestic terrorism. They caught a break through a bureaucratic foul-up at the FBI, which caused some charges to be dropped:

Over the next decade, the Weathermen claimed credit for 25 bombings but eventually the movement broke apart, and Dohrn and Ayers began a life together in New York, still underground. Ten years later, Dohrn and Ayers finally turned themselves in, in Chicago. Federal bombing conspiracy charges had been dropped because of improper FBI surveillance.

Upon rejoining society, Ayers and Dohrn completed their educations and became university professors. Eventually, they became affiliated with the Democratic party machine of Chicago’s Mayor Richard M. Daley.

That’s how William Ayers got where he was. When he came out of hiding because the federal government was unable to prosecute him (because of government misconduct), he got a degree in education from Columbia and then moved to Chicago and got a job on the education faculty of the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle. How did he get that job? Well, it can’t have hurt that his father, Thomas Ayers, was chairman of Commonwealth Edison (now Exelon) and a charter member of the Chicago establishment. As Mayor Richard M. Daley said recently, in arguing that the Ayers association should not be held against Obama, “His father was a great friend of my father.”

Ayers was tapped by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley to help found the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform program. Since 1999 he has served on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, an anti-poverty, philanthropic foundation….

Also a part of that Democratic machine was communist sympathizer Alice Palmer, a sitting Illinois state senator. When she decided to run for the US Congress in 1995, she presented her then protégé Barack Obama as her chosen successor. This announcement that launched his political career was made at an elite gathering of Chicago liberals at the home of none other than William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

In 1995, Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well-known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former members of the terrorist Weather Underground.

“I remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the Senate and running for Congress,” says Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care. “(Palmer) identified (Obama) as her successor.”

Palmer lost a primary fight for the Congressional race, and decided to keep her Illinois senate seat, but Barack turned on his mentor and things got nasty.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Obama operatives flooded into the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners on Jan. 2, 1996, to begin the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of Palmer and three other lesser-known contenders for her Illinois state Senate seat. They kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama’s Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.

The important point here is that the political career of Barack Obama was engendered in a group of liberal Chicago communist-affiliated America-hating radicals. Until he cosmetically reinvented himself for the national spotlight, everything he said and did, and everything his wife said and did, bespoke anger and resentment toward our country. His associates continue to reflect that attitude.

“God damn America” is their refrain.

William Ayers, with whom Obama continued to be assoicated on educational projects in Chicago, is still unrepentent. He was photographed in 2001 proudly stomping on the American flag. Apparantly, experience and affluence have not tempered his hatred of America.

Nor, likely, has time mellowed the racially prejudiced Obamas — Michelle, who was never proud of her country, and Barack, who disdains the ordinary folk who cling to their God and their guns. In previously published documents they cannot suppress, such as Michelle’s very childish thesis, and in careless remarks that they let slip in unguarded moments, their pervasive resentment and disdain is revealed. Voters would be wise to see through the recent veneer of civility to the litter of animosity and anti-Americanism that is strewn along the last two decades of the Obama family’s path.

References:

US Census Bureau — Voting and Registration Tables for 2006

American Issues Project — Weather Underground Timeline (PDF format)

Chicago Magazine — No Regrets

Discover The Networks — STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY (SDS)

Discover The Networks — WEATHERMAN

Weather Underground — Communiqué #1 May 21, 1970

Weather Underground — Communiqué #2 June 9, 1970

Weather Underground — Communiqué #3 July 31, 1970

Weather Underground — Communiqué #4 September 18, 1970

Public Broadcasting System — Transcript of interview in 1996 with Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers

Yahoo! — Alice In Obamaland

U.S. News and World Report — Obama Needs to Explain His Ties to William Ayers