 Mugshot of William Ayers after his 1968 arrest |
With the media focus this week on Sen. Barack Obama’s relationship with the notorious Weatherman Underground figure William Ayers, voters should be reminded of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s ties to terrorists, says political analyst and former Clinton adviser Dick Morris.
Clinton has argued Obama would make a more vulnerable general election candidate because opposition researchers are just beginning to vet his past political associations, but Morris told WND he believes Hillary is wrong when she maintains all her “baggage” has been “rummaged through for years.”
Morris insists Clinton has plenty of radical political skeletons in her closet that have not been fully investigated.
“In the 1980s, Hillary served on the board of the New World Foundation, which gave a grant to the PLO, then designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group,” Morris noted.
In 1996, he added, Clinton organized a White House conference for the American Muslim Alliance.
Clinton took a $50,000 donation from the Alliance when she ran for the Senate and tried to hide it on her forms by calling it the ‘American Museum Alliance, Morris said.
“Then, when it was discovered, she hesitated until a week before the election and then returned the money,” he explained. “By the time Hillary gave it back, she had forsworn use of soft money in the campaign, so the donation had lost its usefulness in any event.”
Writing in the Wall Street Journal Nov. 3, 2000, terrorism expert Steven Emerson identified the American Muslim Alliance as “an anti-Israeli group whose leaders have sanctioned terrorism, published anti-Semitic statements and repeatedly hosted conferences that were forums for denunciations of Jews and exhortations to wage jihad.”
Emerson objected to Clinton’s attempt to distance herself from wrongdoing, instead of admitting she had courted radical Islamic groups such as the American Muslim Alliance. Clinton, he said, used the White House to hold conferences so she could solicit campaign contributions for her up-coming New York Senate race.
Emerson quoted Clinton saying, “I have been part of some of those events. I have hosted some of them.”
Yet, Emerson said, she tried to position her actions “as part of the administration’s efforts to open lines of communication and build bridges with Muslim Americans and Muslim leaders from all over the world.”
Emerson asked, “What have these groups done since Mrs. Clinton began reaching out to them?”
He answered by documenting a long list of instances in which Islamic groups invited to the White House by Clinton had held radical anti-Israel rallies, speeches and public meetings.
Among the examples cited by Emerson was a Sept. 16, 2000, Washington rally sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the American Muslim Council and the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
At the rally, the head of CAIR, Nihad Awad, declared: “[The Jews] have been saying ‘next year to Jerusalem,’ we say to them ‘next year to all of Palestine!'”
In an article entitled “Hillary’s Terrorist Ties,” written to appear on his website, Morris credits the work of WND author Aaron Klein, who in his book “Schmoozing with Terrorists” documents “how most of the Hamas leaders are fulsome in their praise of Hillary and outspoken in their hopes for their victory.”
“Clearly, Barack Obama should not have stayed in Reverend Wright’s church and his campaign should not maintain a ‘friendly’ relationship with William Ayers,” Morris asserted. “But what about Hillary hosting a terror-supporting group in the White House? And her acceptance of a $50,000 campaign contribution from that group? These are far more serious connections than have been established for Obama and either Wright or Ayers.”
Ayers is the 1960s Weather Underground radical who participated in bombing New York City’s police headquarters in 1970, the U.S. Capitol building in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972.
Ayers served with Obama on the board of the Chicago-based Woods Foundation when the group provided a $40,000 grant to the Arab American Action Network. The group’s founder, Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, is a harsh critic of Israel who was associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization when it was labeled a terrorist organization by the State Department.
In Wednesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos confronted Obama about his association with Ayers.
Obama replied, “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.”
Obama argued, “And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make sense, George.”
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