Swiftboating Obama: A Look Inside Bogus Right Wing Claims He Has Terror Ties

Posted by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review at 6:48 AM on March 11, 2008.

In early January, when Barack Obama was just one among many Democratic candidates, we published Swiftboating Obama's Religion: He Is Not a Muslim. Now that he is the putative Democratic nominee, here is a look at another potentially Swiftboat-able part of his record — his tenuous connections to Michael Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn, who were members of the Weather Underground in the Vietnam War era — and his one-time professional relationship with Dr. Rashid Khalidi, a one-time PLO media director.


Ayers was a prominent constituent in Obama’s state senate district.
Ayers and Dorhn were involved in the planning and execution of violent protests 40 years ago:

They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb -- designed to kill army officers in New Jersey -- accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper FBI surveillance.

Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she's an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.

Ayers, along with his fellow former Weather Underground terrorist wife, Bernardine Dohrn, are among the two most despicable people in living in America. And Obama served on a board with him. That will play well in rural Ohio — for John McCain.

While the Arizona senator was being tortured by his North Vietnamese captors, Ayers was openly cheering for a Communist victory over our troops.

In 1995, State Sen. Alice Palmer held an event for supporters at the home of Ayers, where she announced her plans to run for Congress and introduced Obama as her chosen successor. Obama also served on the board of directors for a progressive foundation, the Woods Fund, from 1999-2001, when Ayers was also on the board. In 2001, Ayers gave $200 to Obama's state senate campaign fund. And Obama and Ayers appeared together on a 1997 panel at the University of Chicago dealing with juvenile justice (Obama also praised Ayers' approach on the subject in an op-ed he wrote that year), and on a 2002 panel on public intellectuals at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

That's it.

Put another way: Ayers was a prominent constituent in Obama’s Illinois Senate district.

Former CIA agent Larry Johnson, a Hillary Clinton supporter, has discussed Obama’s professional relationship with Dr. Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor who had ties to the PLO. Here is Johnson’s take:

Dr. Khalidi was a director of the official PLO press agency WAFA in Beirut from 1976 to 1982. During this time the U.S. State Department considered the PLO a terrorist organization and the PLO was involved with terrorist attacks. WAFA was not an independent, unaffiliated news organization. While it is true that the PLO has moderated over time and moved in the mainstream of Palestinian politics, that is not the point. What we are talking about is perception. Dr. Khalidi, notwithstanding his current work, cannot pretend he was some outsider with no ties to the policies and practices of the PLO in the late 70s. That point will be seized on by Republican strategists. I am not saying this is right or fair, but it is reality. So deal with it.

I am not questioning nor challenging Dr. Khalidi's academic credentials. He is a real professor and has written real books. But he is not some neutral observer. He served on the PLO "guidance committee" at the Madrid peace conference. It does not matter that he was critical of the PLO's handling of the Oslo peace process. He was still part of the PLO side and the Republican political strategists will focus on that fact.

And Khalidi has direct ties to Obama. These are not imagined. Before getting his job at Columbia University Rashid Khalidi was a Middle East professor at the University of Chicago, where he befriended none other than U.S. presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama. In 2000 Khalidi held a successful fundraiser for Barack. I am not saying or inferring or suggesting that Obama did anything wrong in letting Khalidi hold a fund raiser. But I am willing to bet that it will become an issue in the general election. Barack also played a role in getting funding for Khalidi's Arab American Action Network during his tenure on the board of the Woods Fund.

Tagged as: terrorism, obama, fox news, weather underground, ayers, dorhn, khalidi

Jon Ponder is regular blogger for the Pensito Review