A Community Organizer and Terrorist Worked Together to Push Radicalism in Chicago Schools

Move to the front of the class if you know that Barack Obama is an unrepentant Community Organizer and his very close friend, Bill Ayers is an unrepentant Terrorist.

Here is the story:

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.

The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago...

[SNIP]

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.

In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

Source: Wall Street Journal (go read the whole thing and pass it along to everyone you know)

Hat Tip: Gateway Pundit

Commentary

Never doubt for one moment that Barack Obama is not every bit a "small c" communist that Bill Ayers is, and will work to get as much of it implemented in America as he can from the Oval Office of the White House should he manage to steal the election this year.

One thing that we will definitely be able to do is expose the evil nature of community organizers...and use their own words and works to prove it. Barack Obama has done an invaluable service for the conservative movement, he has violated the following axiom: “The most effective community organizer is he who is invisible,” says Saul Alinsky in Reveille for Radicals. He has not only become very visible...but he has, in turn, shown a very bright light on his fellow community organizers across this nation. They are now visible, identifyable, and we can go after them and neutralize their effectiveness. Barack Obama may be the just the tool we have needed to undo the whole generation-long march through our institutions.

Barack...your center cannot hold together any longer!

We have you!