President Barack Obama’s friends and supporters in the news media continue to downplay his friendship and business relationship with former terrorist and Marxist university professor William Ayers. One aspect of the Ayers terrorism saga that’s almost totally ignored is his reputation as a cop-killer.

For instance, in Nyack, New York, Ayers’ terrorist group the Weather Underground launched an armored-car robbery that left two Nyack, NY police officers — Officer Waverly Brown and Sergeant Ed O’Grady — mortally wounded. In addition, the Brinks armored-car driver, Peter Paige, was also shot to death by the Weathermen.

Quite simply, Ayers’ group of killers left five children without fathers as a result of the brutal and vicious armored car robbery.

Progressives for Obama signatories include Weathermen Howard Machtinger, Jeff Jones, Steve Tappis and Mark Rudd. Machtinger helped author the mission statement of the Weathermen that called for revolutionaries within the United States to wage a ‘people’s war’ and attack from within. The government would fall and ‘world communism’ eventually would be instituted.

In addition to the New York police officers killed, a 1970 pipe bomb in San Francisco set by the group killed another police officer and critically wounded yet another cop. When given the opportunity to serve on boards and appear at press conferences with Ayers, an up-and-coming politician named Barack Obama jumped at the chance.

Recently released records from the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois, Chicago show that Obama and Ayers attended board meetings, retreats and press conferences from 1995 to 2001 as directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Ayers also sat on the board of the Woods Fund with Obama and is a professor at the University of Chicago.

Bill Ayers — along with his wife Bernadine Dohrn — was an active member of the Weather Underground, a radical left-wing group that advocated violence against the United States. Both Ayers and Dohrn went “underground” in 1970 after others in the group accidentally detonated a bomb in a Greenwich Village (New York City) townhouse. The blast killed three of the group’s members, including Ayers’ girlfriend at the time.

While Ayers and Dohrn were hiding from law enforcement, the Weather Underground participated in the bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and a State Department building. In 1981 Ayers and Dohrn turned themselves in to federal authorities, but all charges were dropped as a result of alleged “government legal misconduct.” In his 2001 memoir, Ayers wrote, “I don’t regret setting the bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Ayers and Dohrn are known to have held at least one fundraiser for Barack Obama in their Chicago home.

During Obama’s last year on the board of The Woods Fund (2002), he participated in awarding grants, including a $70,000 grant to the Arab American Action Network, a Chicago-based group founded by Rashid and Mona Khalidi. In another suspected quid pro quo arrangement similar to those with Ayers and Rezko, Rashid Khalidi also held a fundraising event in his home for Barack Obama.

In the Middle East, Rashid Khalidi was known as a man to be reckoned with. From 1972 through 1983, Khalidi was the director in Beirut of the official Palestinian press agency, FAFA. His wife worked there as well.

According to sources who served in the U.S. Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, when the Khalidis left Chicago for Columbia University in New York, Rashid was honored with the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at that Ivy League university. Their goodbye party in Chicago included testimonials from Bill Ayers and Barack Obama. 

Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.

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About the author

Jim Kouri CPP
FSM Contributing Editor Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and he's a staff writer for the New Media Alliance (thenma.org). Kouri's website is located at http://jimkouri.us