Obama's problematic directorship: the Woods Fund

 
Barack Obama was a director of the Woods Fund board from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the Fund's website.

While the Chicago Sun-Times provides a laundry list of Obama's problematic relationships (Rezko, Farrakhan, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Austan Goolsbee), none may prove more ultimately damaging than fellow Woods fund directors William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

As others have mentioned, William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were once notorious members of the Weather Underground, terrorist bombers who attempted to overthrow the United State Government.

William Ayers, quoted on Sept. 11, 2001: "‘Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.”

[Ayers and Dohrn] 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...

“I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough,” Ayers told the New York Times in 2001...

“Ayers was a terrorist. Bernardine Dohrn was a terrorist. Ayers has never offered one word of apology - he glories in it, thinks it’s terrific. And that to me is not what I would call acceptable or mainstream behavior,” said Dan Polsby, a former law professor at Northwestern who is now dean of George Mason University Law School. “If Obama takes a different view on that - well, OK, that’s data about Obama.”

Setting aside Obama's relationship with Ayers, the board on which they served together deserves additional scrutiny. And, in fact, the Woods Fund's investments appear to be quite problematic for Obama:

Arab American Action Network (AAAN): "supports expanded rights for illegal aliens... [and was] founded by anti-Israel professor Rashid Khalidi, former director of the PLO press agency and onetime moderator of PLO advisory committee."

AAAN views the United States as a nation wherein Arab citizens are routinely maltreated. To remedy this perceived societal injustice, the organization aims “to challenge government policies that violate the civil, political and human rights of the Arab American and Arab immigrant community.” Among these policies are “detentions, deportations and other attacks on immigrants that result from Homeland Security [measures]"

...AAAN’s hostile view of the Jewish state is further manifest in the organization’s reference to Israel’s creation in 1948 as Al Nakba (“The Catastrophe”).

Among the current luminaries of AAAN's staff are: (a) Vice President Ali Abunimah, who maintains the website ElectroicIntifada.com and is a Board member of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center; and (b) Executive Director Hatem Abudayyeh, who has condemned “the Israeli government and its military killing machine.”

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American Friends Service Committee (AFSC): a "Radical Quaker organization that supports America's unilateral disarmament [and that backed] the Vietnamese Communists, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, and the PLO."

In fact, AFSC recently formed a partnership with MEChA. MEChA is one of several groups that intend to "reclaim Aztlán" (the southwestern portion of the United States):

...we are a Chicana and Chicano student movement directly linked to Aztlán. As Chicanas and Chicanos of Aztlán, we are a nationalist movement of Indigenous Gente that lay claim to the land that is ours by birthright. As a nationalist movement we seek to free our people from the exploitation of an oppressive society that occupies our land...

Put simply, MEChA's mission is straightforward: overthrow the United States Government and establish a new form of government.

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Midwest Academy: "[A] training organization that teaches radical activists tactics of direct action, targeting, confrontation, and intimidation."

In January 2004 [founder] Heather Booth was featured at the National Conference on Organized Resistance at American University in Washington, D.C. This radical conference featured speakers on such topics as "An Analysis of Politically Motivated Property Destruction as a Legitimate Tactic." Booth participated in a panel discussion with former Black Panther Party leader Elaine Brown and Cathy Wilkerson, who had been Editor of the SDS magazine New Left Notes and a member of the domestic terrorist radical group the Weathermen.

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ACORN: a liberal activist group, notorious for voter registration fraud and even paying for votes using crack cocaine.

Operating in at least 38 states (as well as Canada and Mexico), Acorn pushes a highly partisan agenda, and its organizers are best understood as shock troops for the AFL-CIO and even the Democratic Party...

Acorn and its affiliates have pulled some real stunts in recent years. In Ohio in 2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations that included underage voters, dead voters and pillars of the community named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey. During a Congressional hearing in Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004 election, officials from several counties in the state explained Acorn's practice of dumping thousands of registration forms in their lap on the submission deadline, even though the forms had been collected months earlier.

...Given this history, it's not surprising that Acorn is so hostile to voter identification laws and other efforts to ensure fairness and accuracy at the polls.

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Put simply, Obama must explain not only his relationship to Ayers and Dohrn, but also his support of radical groups that support the overthrow of the United States Government.