A CNN review of the Annenberg Challenge Project board minutes and records showed that Barack Obama and unrepentant radical and antiwar terrorist bomber William Ayers met repeatedly at the board meetings. According to a CNN report supported by interviews and board document reviews, the relationship between Obama and Ayers went deeper, ran longer and was more political than Obama — and his surrogates — have revealed.
The $100 million Annenberg Foundation gave the project a $50 million grant to match local private funds to improve Chicago schools, and Ayers fought to bring the grant to Chicago.
Ayers and Obama (who served as board chairman starting in 1995) worked together with others for seven years on funding for education projects — some advocated by Ayers.
Also in 1995, a political coming-out party marked the launch of Barack Obama from lawyer to political player. The gathering, which has also been referred to as “a coffee” was held at the home of William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn and campaign money for Barack Obama was raised.
Stanley Kurtz, a conservative researcher for the Ethics and Public Policy Center and frequent Obama critic, has said that the specific job of the Annenberg Challenge Project board of directors was to give out the money.
The board gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bill Ayers’ small schools project.
The project promoted alternative education, including projects like the Peace School — where the curriculum centered on a United Nations theme.
While working on the Annenberg project, Obama worked on a second charitable foundation, the Woods Fund, that included the following recipients: Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church and the Children and Family Justice Center where Ayer’s wife Bernadine Dohrn (also a radical antiwar terrorist) was the director.
The Annenberg project was shut down in 2003 after a final report stated it had “little impact on school improvement and student outcomes.”
In the 1960s, Ayers was a founding member of the radical Weather Underground group that carried out a string of bombings of federal buildings, including the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, and police stations in antiwar protests against the Vietnam War. The now-defunct group was labeled a “domestic terrorist group” by the FBI, and Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn — also a member of the Weather Underground — spent 10 years as fugitives in the 1970s. Both Ayers and Dohrn ultimately became university professors in Chicago, with Ayers, 63, now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago after Federal charges against the couple were dropped because of misconduct gathering evidence. Ayers grew up in Glen Ellyn, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois — son of Thomas G. Ayers, former Chariman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison (1973 to1980).
An editorial in Investor’s Business Daily (Obama’s Real Problem with Ayers) warns that the real issue of the Obama-Ayers controversy is the socialist revolutionary agenda that he and Barack Obama want to impose on nation’s schools. Ayers expressed his agenda two years ago in November 2006 at the World Education Forum in Caracas hosted by dictator Hugo Chavez.
Ayers told the great humanitarian Chavez: “Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions large and small. La educacion es revolucion.” It is that form of socialist revolution that Ayers, and Obama, have worked to bring to America.
Ayers, now a tenured Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, works to educate teachers in socialist revolutionary ideology, urging that it be passed on to impressionable students.
As Stern points out, “Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children in the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive.”
CNN recently labeled charges by Governor Sarah Palin that Obama pals around with terrorist William Ayers as false.
CNN article …
Ayers and Obama crossed paths on boards, records show (updated 10:50 p.m. EDT, Tue October 7, 2008)
City Journal article …
The Bomber as School Reformer by Sol Stern (October 6, 2008)
City Journal (official website)
The Ethics and Public Policy Center — eppc.org
See also on Wikipedia …
Annenberg Foundation
Weather Underground (Weathermen)
William Ayers
Bernadine Dohrn
City Journal (New York)
Howard Kurtz
Obama–Ayers controversy