Michelle Obama organized event with Ayers, husband

Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama in 1997 organized a university event in which she invited her husband, Sen. Barack Obama, and former Weathermen radical Bill Ayers to serve on a panel discussion about whether child murderers should be tried as adults.

Both Barack Obama and Ayers served on the side that opposed treating offending minors as adults.

Michelle Obama at the time was the University of Chicago's associate dean of Student Services and director of the college's Community Service Center, which sponsored the juvenile detention discussion Nov. 20, 1997.

She told the university's student newspaper she hoped the panel discussion would open a dialogue between members of the college and the broader Chicago community.

"We know that issues like juvenile justice impact the city of Chicago, this nation and – directly or indirectly – this campus. This panel gives students a chance to hear about the juvenile justice system not only on a theoretical level, but from the people who have experienced it," she said.

Panel leaders invited by Michelle Obama included her husband, who taught law at the university; Ayers, who was a university education professor; and four other speakers who had experience with Chicago's juvenile detention system.

Barack Obama was billed as a leader "who is working to combat legislation that would put more juvenile offenders into the adult system."

Ayers, promoting the panel event, told the student newspaper, "We should call a child a child. A 13-year-old who picks up a gun isn't suddenly an adult. We have to ask other questions: How did he get the gun? Where did it come from?"

Ayers reportedly spent a year observing the juvenile detention system and in 1997 released a book, "A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court."

During his Weathermen days, Ayers once famously commented, "Kill all the rich people. ... Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents."

Several blogs noting the panel discussion commented the collusion seemed to evidence a closer relationship with Ayers than Obama has admitted.

In an ABC News interview, Obama described Ayers as "guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis."

The Sweetness and Light blog, which first reported on Michelle Obama's panel event, commented "we all must be mistaken, since we have been repeatedly reassured that Mr. Ayers 'was just a guy who lived in the Obamas' neighborhood.'"

Other blogs focused in part on Michelle Obama's invitation to Ayers as evidence of a family-wide relationship with the terrorist.

In 1995, Barack Obama served as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, or CAC, which was founded by Ayers and billed itself as a school reform organization. Ayers also served as co-chairman of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one of the two operational arms of the CAC, from its formation in 1995 until 2000.

WND reported that in an interview during his failed congressional bid in 2000, Obama cited his CAC job as evidence of his qualification for public office.

Also in 1995, the first organizing meeting for Obama's state senatorial campaign reportedly was held in Ayers' apartment.
In a widely circulated article, WND first reported Obama served on the board of the Wood's Fund, a liberal Chicago nonprofit, alongside Ayers from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the Fund's website. Tax filings showed Obama received compensation of $6,000 per year for his service in 1999 and 2000.

The "Friends of Barack Obama" campaign fund lists a $200 campaign contribution from Ayers April 2, 2001.

The two appeared together as speakers at several public events.

Ayers' wife, Bernardine Dohrn, also has served on panels with Obama. Dohrn, once on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted List, was described by J. Edgar Hoover as the "most dangerous woman in America." Ayers and Dohrn raised the son of Weathermen terrorist Kathy Boudin, who was serving a sentence for participating in a 1981 murder and robbery that left four people dead.

As WND reports today, an FBI report claims Dohrn built and planted the bomb that killed a San Francisco police officer in 1970.

Ayers, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has admitted to involvement in the bombings of U.S. governmental buildings in the 1970s. The charges against him were dropped in 1974, however, because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.

But Ayers told the New York Times in an interview released Sept. 11, 2001, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

He posed for a photograph accompanying the piece that showed him stepping on an American flag.

In August, Ayers wrote on his blog he still feels not enough was done to oppose the Vietnam War, although he clarified, "I don't think violent resistance is necessarily the answer, but I do think opposition and refusal is imperative."

To interview Aaron Klein, contact M. Sliwa Public Relations by e-mail, or call 973-272-2861 or
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