Obama's Missing Years

Obama has been remarkably coy about the years he spent at Columbia University. Just One Minute postulates a reason for that-

What did Barack Obama do while at Columbia from 1981 to 1983 and in the year after his graduation?

These are just dots and it may be impossible to connect them, but we have Barack Obama at Columbia working on South African divestment (as were many peaceful protestors) while other radical elements with a Weather Underground flavor are setting bombs, killing cops, and working on South African divestment. As a bonus, Bill Ayers is studying at Bank Street College a quarter mile from Columbia towards his Masters in Education and Kathy Boudin, one of the Brinks getaway drivers, was working at a progressive Upper West Side School. Eventually Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn raised Kathy's child while she was in jail, so it seems a fair guess that they were close.

A small, small world in which Obama never met any of these people despite their shared passion for justice in South Africa. Never heard them speak at a rally, never heard anyone describe the Weather Underground to him, and felt comfortable assuming that Bill Ayers had been rehabilitated by 1995. In fact, a world so small that Obama won't talk about it now.

It's a remarkable coincidence that Ayers (who plucked Obama from obscurity to head up the Annenberg Challenge) and Obama were there at the same time and apparently involved in the same kinds of anti-apartheid protest.

Did Obama meet and befriend Ayers during this period? Did their paths cross?

As NRO tells us, while at Columbia Obama studied under Edward Said- a relationship that continued afterwards-

Obama plainly maintained some sort of tie with Said — a photo making the Internet rounds shows Obama conversing with the great man himself at a 1998 Arab American community dinner in Chicago, where the Obamas and Saids were seated together.

And Obama wasn't Said's only acquaintance in this tale-

Said had a wide circle of radical acquaintances. That circle clearly included Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. When they came out of hiding in the early 1980s (while Obama was attending Columbia), Ayers took education courses at Bank Street College, adjacent to Columbia in Morningside Heights — before earning his doctorate at Columbia’s Teachers College in 1987.

Said was so enamoured of Ayers that he commended the unrepentant terrorist’s 2001 memoir.

You know, if Palin had been linked- even tangentially- to a radical during her college years, you can be sure that the media would devote their considerable resources into investigating and reporting on it.

With Obama? Yet another free pass. But given the working relationship that developed between Ayers and Obama in the following years surely this is worth looking at. Bear in mind too that the two of them also worked on education issues in Chicago related to the 1988 Reform Act. So, we find not only a possible link between Ayers and Obama during the latter's study at Columbia but also just a few years later in Chicago. Steve Diamond also has a theory on how Obama landed his post at the law firm Sidley & Austin in 1989- William Ayers' father was an important client and had apparently pulled strings to get Dohrn hired there too.

And, here's yet another "coincidental" link between Ayers-Dohrn and the Obamas- Dohrn and Michelle Obama worked together at the law firm just before Barack was hired.

Quite the social circle, isn't it?

Worth mentioning too, surely, is the fact that when Barack Obama returned from Harvard he joined the law firm Davis Miner Barnhill- and the Miner involved was, surprise, a classmate of Bernardine Dohrn.

Just a couple of years after that, Obama was suddenly made head of the Annenberg Challenge-

In short, Bill Ayers and Barack Obama moved in the same circles, were driven by the same cause, and admired the same radicals all the way from Morningside Heights to Hyde Park. They ended up publicly admiring each other, promoting each other’s work, sitting on the same boards, and funding the same Leftist agitators.

You could conclude, as I do, that it all goes back to a formative time in his life that Obama refuses to discuss. Or you could buy the fairy tale that Bill Ayers first encountered an unknown, inexperienced, third-year associate from a small Chicago law-firm over coffee in 1995 and suddenly decided Barack Obama was the perfect fit to oversee the $150 million pot of gold Ayers hoped would underwrite his revolution.

Obama's whole life is one of associations with far-left radicals- from his "Uncle" Frank to Rev. Wright- and among those associations there seems to be a remarkably long period during which Obama was in close proximity, and perhaps even a good friend of, two of America's most notorious domestic terrorists.

It's not beyond the pale to suggest that the whole truth about the Obama-Ayers connection hasn't yet come out. Contrary to Obama's public statement that William Ayers was "just a guy in the neighbourhood" it seems that the pair could have a relationship going back as far as the beginning of the 1980s. Ayers- bear in mind- only came out of hiding in 1980, with his famed "guilty as sin, free as a bird" statement being delivered in 1981.

Contrary to popular misconception, the Weather Underground were not merely a '60s radical organisation, the bulk of their activities took place throughout the 1970s, culminating in the Brinks armoured car robbery in 1981, where two police officers and a guard were murdered. Ayers adopted the child of one of that group, Kathy Boudin. That child was raised by Ayers and Dohrn and recently stated that he was dedicated to fighting US imperialism.

Plainly the background and associations of Obama clearly do not tie into his post-partisan, moderate image.