Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers, and Barack Obama -- Connecting the Dots

Powerline ^ | October 14, 2008 10:36 PM | Paul

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

At one level, the connection between Jeremiah Wright (Barack Obama's spiritual mentor) and William Ayers (Obama's political ally) is apparent. After all, Ayers set out to bring "America's chickens home to roost" decades before Wright applied that phrase to 9/11.

But now Stanley Kurtz has demonstrated a more concrete connection, and one that implicates Obama directly, not just through "association." Kurtz's review of documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) -- the education foundation Obama and Ayers jointly led for a time during the 1990s -- has established that "Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright."

There are two elements here: (1) the funding by the CAC of projects that shared Wright's anti-American philosophy and (2) Obama's knowledge that this was the nature of the projects his outfit was funding.

As to the first element, Kurtz found, among other things, that CAC funded teacher training programs based on the curriculum of the South Shore African Village Collaborative (SSAVC). Kurtz explains that the mission of SSAVC is to provide "a social and cultural 'inoculation' process that facilitates healthy, African-centered development among African American youth and protects them against the ravages of a racist, sexist, capitalist, and oppressive society." In this view, American values "have confused African American people and oriented them toward American definitions of achievement and success and away from traditional African values." This process has "proven to be dysfuntional and genocidal to the African American community." The answer, in part, is an adolescent rites of passage movement, designed "to provide African American youth with the cultural information and values they would need to counter the potentially detrimental effects of a Eurocentrically oriented society."

The connection between this philosophy and that of Rev. Wright is apparent. As Kurtz puts it:

We hear echoes of [the educational philosophy underpinning the SVVAC] in Wright's distinction between "right brained" Africans and "left brained" Europeans, in Wright's fears of U.S. government-sponsored genocide against American blacks, and in Wright's embittered attacks on America's indelibly white-supremacist history.

It is not surprising, therefore that prominent members of the "Afrocentric," rites of passage movement spoke at Wright's church during the late 1980s and 1990s. Obama missed church on these occasions, no doubt.

But Obama was right in the middle of the process through which tens of thousands of dollars were funneled by CAC into SVACC teacher training programs. In 1995, the year Obama assumed control of CAC, he publicly rejected "the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation," thereby embracing the Afrocentirc educational philosophy of the SVACC, Wright, and Ayers. And according to Kurtz, it is clear from the documents that Obama reviewed and commented on proposals to fund the training programs of SVACC, including the African rites of passage based programs. As one would hope, Obama encountered resistance from his own board to attempting to improve the education of African-Americans by orienting them away from "American definitions of achievement and success." But he managed to keep the money flowing.

We've noted in the past that CAC's own evaluators found that Annenberg-aided schools showed no improvement in achievement scores. The miracle is that scores did not decline.

In what I believe was his only stint running anything (other than the Harvard Law Review), Barack Obama wasted more than $100 million that could have been used to improve the education of disadvantaged students. And he did so in order to advance an extremist, anti-American agenda. The people of Chicago can only wish that Bill Ayers had just been somebody who lived in Obama's neighborhood and that Jeremiah Wright was just an eccentric uncle.

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[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

More on Obama!

[Ann Archy]

NO ONE but a few will EVER hear of this.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

From NRO:

Wright 101
Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Rev. Wright’s anti-Americanism

********************************EXCERPT***************************

By Stanley Kurtz

It looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg. Not only did Barack Obama savor Wright’s sermons, Obama gave legitimacy — and a whole lot of money — to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Reverend Wright. And guess what? Bill Ayers is still palling around with the same bitterly anti-American Afrocentric ideologues that he and Obama were promoting a decade ago. All this is revealed by a bit of digging, combined with a careful study of documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the education foundation Obama and Ayers jointly led in the late 1990s.

John McCain, take note. Obama’s tie to Wright is no longer a purely personal question (if it ever was one) about one man’s choice of his pastor. The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright’s anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign.

African Village
In the winter of 1996, the Coalition for Improved Education in [Chicago’s] South Shore (CIESS) announced that it had received a $200,000 grant from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. That made CIESS an “external partner,” i.e. a community organization linked to a network of schools within the Chicago public system. This network, named the “South Shore African Village Collaborative” was thoroughly “Afrocentric” in orientation. CIESS’s job was to use a combination of teacher-training, curriculum advice, and community involvement to improve academic performance in the schools it worked with. CIESS would continue to receive large Annenberg grants throughout the 1990s.

The South Shore African Village Collaborative (SSAVC) was very much a part of the Afrocentric “rites of passage movement,” a fringe education crusade of the 1990s. SSAVC schools featured “African-Centered” curricula built around “rites of passage” ceremonies inspired by the puberty rites found in many African societies. In and of themselves, these ceremonies were harmless. Yet the philosophy that accompanied them was not. On the contrary, it was a carbon-copy of Jeremiah Wright’s worldview.

Rites of Passage
To learn what the rites of passage movement was all about, we can turn to a sympathetic 1992 study published in the Journal of Negro Education by Nsenga Warfield-Coppock. In that article, Warfield-Coppock bemoans the fact that public education in the United States is shaped by “capitalism, competitiveness, racism, sexism and oppression.” According to Warfield-Coppock, these American values “have confused African American people and oriented them toward American definitions of achievement and success and away from traditional African values.” American socialization has “proven to be dysfuntional and genocidal to the African American community,” Warfield-Coppock tells us. The answer is the adolescent rites of passage movement, designed “to provide African American youth with the cultural information and values they would need to counter the potentially detrimental effects of a Eurocentrically oriented society.”

The adolescent rites of passage movement that flowered in the 1990s grew out of the “cultural nationalist” or “Pan-African” thinking popular in radical black circles of the 1960s and 1970s. The attempt to create a virtually separate and intensely anti-American black social world began to take hold in the mid-1980s in small private schools, which carefully guarded the contents of their controversial curricula.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Yes,...but we have to use the Bull Horn we have.

[cookcounty]

THIS is the direction the Ayers issue needs to take: Ayers is out to destroy black young people and Obama is complicit....................

[Terry Mross]

The only way the world would hear this is if McCain brought it up during the debate. Anything talked about during the debate cannot be ignored by the media. But will he do it?

[Blue Turtle]

Stanely Kurtz is a true PATRIOT. Thank you for your tireless research.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The Book:

INTELLECTUAL WARFARE by JACOB CARRUTHERS

***************************EXCERPT*************************

Intellectual Warfare By: Jacob H. Carruthers $19.95** This book is more than just a critical examination of the war to revitalize the African Worldview for the survival of people of African descent. Intellectual Warfare offers insight and instructional methods to assist those individuals ready to make African-centeredness a part of their lives: thereby choosing their own position in the battle to defend the African Worldview. ***1999 / 316 pages / paper back

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The conclusion of the Kurtz article....link at post #3:

*******************************EXCERPT**************************

Ayers’s Pals
An important exception to the rule is Bill Ayers himself, who not only worked with Obama to fund groups like this at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, but who is still “palling around” with the same folks. Discretely waiting until after the election, Bill Ayers and his wife, and fellow former terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn plan to release a book in 2009 entitled Race Course Against White Supremacy. The book will be published by Third World Press, a press set up by Carruthers and other members of the ASCAC. Representatives of that press were prominently present for Wright’s eulogy at Asa Hilliard’s memorial service. Less than a decade ago, therefore, when it came to education issues, Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright were pretty much on the same page.

Obama’s Knowledge
Given the precedent of his earlier responses on Ayers and Wright, Obama might be inclined to deny personal knowledge of the educational philosophy he was so generously funding. Such a denial would not be convincing. For one thing, we have evidence that in 1995, the same year Obama assumed control of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he publicly rejected “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation,” a stance that clearly resonates with both Wright and Carruthers. (See “No Liberation.”)

And as noted, Wright had invited Carruthers, Hilliard, and like-minded thinkers to address his Trinity congregants. Wright likes to tick off his connections to these prominent Afrocentrists in sermons, and Obama would surely have heard of them. Reading over SSAVC’s Annenberg proposals, Obama could hardly be ignorant of what they were about. And if by some chance Obama overlooked Hilliard’s or Carruthers’s names, SSAVC’s proposals are filled with references to “rites of passage” and “Ptahhotep,” dead giveaways for the anti-American and separatist ideological concoction favored by SSAVC.

We know that Obama did read the proposals. Annenberg documents show him commenting on proposal quality. And especially after 1995, when concerns over self-dealing and conflicts of interest forced the Ayers-headed “Collaborative” to distance itself from monetary issues, all funding decisions fell to Obama and the board. Significantly, there was dissent within the board. One business leader and experienced grant-smith characterized the quality of most Annenberg proposals as “awful.” (See “The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: The First Three Years,” p. 19.) Yet Obama and his very small and divided board kept the money flowing to ideologically extremist groups like the South Shore African Village Collaborative, instead of organizations focused on traditional educational achievement.

As if the content of SSAVC documents wasn’t warning enough, their proposals consistently misspelled “rites of passage” as “rights of passage,” hardly an encouraging sign from a group meant to improve children’s reading skills. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge’s own evaluators acknowledged that Annenberg-aided schools showed no improvement in achievement scores. Evaluators attributed that failure, in part, to the fact that many of Annenberg’s “external partners” had little educational expertise. A group that puts its efforts into Kwanzaa celebrations and half-baked history certainly fits that bill, and goes a long way toward explaining how Ayers and Obama managed to waste upwards of $150 million without improving student achievement.

However he may seek to deny it, all evidence points to the fact that, from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright. The Wright affair was no fluke. It’s time for McCain to say so.

 — Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

FR Thread on the soon to be released book by Ayers:

"Race Course Against White Supremacy" --- Bill Ayers & Bernadine Dohrn new book

[bd476]

Very interesting, Ernest! BTTT!

[Marine_Uncle]

We continue to read all the things that point to a guy that should be dragging his chain and ball in a prison, not running for POTUS. But as long as the L/MSM keep things under wrap tens of millions are going to vote for this fraud.

[XHogPilot]

Re-forming Chicago schools into communist re-education facilities.

Ayers Is No Education 'Reformer'