see post #373 for related info:
Unlikely Events Recall Story of This President
By Mike Seccombe
We are all the products of a series of accidents, really. Every human is a personification of chaos theory. As a butterfly flaps its wings and sets in train a hurricane, an act of generosity 50 years ago in Kenya gives America a President.
To explain. There were two American teachers, Helen Roberts and Elizabeth Mooney living in Nairobi in the late 1960s, and they had taken a shine to a bright young student. They wanted to foster his brilliance and they paid for him to fly to America to continue his education. That Kenyan man was Barack Obama Sr.
He went to Hawaii to study, and met a young woman. They had a son, who now is the President. But for the goodness of Ms. Roberts and Ms. Mooney, you could argue, the President’s parents would never have met.
But chaos theory involves infinitely complex causation. You could also argue that without the vision of a Kenyan man named Tom Mboya, the President would not exist either. For he arranged for the University of Hawaii to offer the scholarship taken by the senior Mr. Obama. And Mr. Mboya’s activities, in turn, depended on the dedication of a group of activists in America.
Cora Weiss
Cora Weiss, a 53-year summer resident of the Vineyard, was one of those activists. One of the main ones, in fact. And now a book has been written, Airlift to America, chronicling their efforts in bringing hundreds of African students to America to study, between 1959 and 1963.
The book was written by Tom Shachtman, much of it from records which had been stored in Mrs. Weiss’s garage for nearly 50 years. She also did many of the interviews.
“I was the executive director [1959-1963] of something called the African-American Students’ Foundation, set up in 1959 to facilitate the travel and care and feeding of what became nearly 800 students from East Africa,” she recalled on Wednesday, sitting in the kitchen of her Aquinnah home.
The organization began because Mr. Mboya, a Kenyan labor activist, became concerned about how his country would function, once it gained independence from British colonial rule. To the considerable displeasure of the British, he determined the country should look to America to help educate its future leaders.
“Tom was a young man, ambitious, brilliant. It was the height of colonialism there and of the civil rights movement here,” Mrs. Weiss said. “And Tom did a tour of American colleges, setting up scholarships everywhere, including the University of Hawaii.
“Then he [Mboya] said, ‘But we need an organization to run this.’
“So a few of us gathered in New York and I became the executive director, and on the board of directors,” Mrs. Weiss said. With the initial support of two other families in Riverdale, in the Bronx, where Mrs. Weiss and her husband Peter lived, they started it.
“I worked with a man named Frank Montero and a woman raised in a Japanese concentration camp in California named Mary Hamanaka,” she recalled.
“We were very fortunate in that guy named Milton Gordon, who owned Lassie the dog — Lassie was quite a property in those days — and Milton had an office in the Seagram Building in New York and he let us have a room in his office. That’s where we worked from.”
The Weisses were no strangers to activism of this sort. Peter Weiss was on the board of the American Committee on Africa, “a very strong anti-colonial organization.”
“And I had spent my years at the University of Wisconsin at the international club setting up speaking dates for the few foreign students there, so they could have some pin money. I helped the few African students there organize a student union,” said Mrs. Weiss.
She also helped raise funds for Martin Luther King’s civil rights campaign. The Weisses were connected, as evidenced by the fact that Dr. King himself persuaded the Georgia university to take six students.
The cause of helping these African achievers to further their education was always closely connected to the civil rights movement. “This country in those days had hundreds of small white Christian colleges in the South, who would not take a ‘negro.’ But would take a foreign student. So I think these black African students helped open the door a bit.
“The first plane was paid for because Harry Belafonte, Jackie Robinson and Sidney Poitier, together signed a fundraising letter,” Mrs. Weiss said. “In that first group of 1959, 81 students came.”
“Barack Obama missed out on a seat on that first plane. Luckily the two teachers stepped in and raised money for him to come over on a parallel flight,” she said.
“He picked up the scholarship from the University of Hawaii. And while he was there, he needed money for books and tuition and clothes, some of which we sent him.
“So he wasn’t on the airlift, but he was a member of the airlift family.”
VineYard Gazette Online
To explain. There were two American teachers, Helen Roberts and Elizabeth Mooney living in Nairobi in the late 1960s... I think she meant to say 1950's?
“Barack Obama missed out on a seat on that first plane. Luckily the two teachers stepped in and raised money for him to come over on a parallel flight,” she said.
There it is again...that NEED to show Obama Senior's arrival coincided with the first airlift, when in fact, he had already been in Hawaii months before it landed:
THE OBAMA FILE
"When Senior arrived in Hawaii in June 1959, Kenya's future president, Jomo Kenyatta was in jail in Kenya," as reported by a story done in Hawaiian paper after he arrived:
"The Washington Post reported that when Barack Obama, Sr. first arrived in Hawaii he was interviewed by the Hawaiian Press, the reporter Hirozawa relays Obama’s comments, "he would study business administration and wanted to return to Kenya to help with its transition from tribal customs to a modern economy."
He was concerned, he said, about his generation’s disorientation as Kenyans rejected old ways yet struggled with "westernization," the date of the story was June, 1959.
THE FIRST AFRICAN AIRLIFT ARRIVALS IN SEPTEMBER 1959
The baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who backed efforts to bring African students to the United States, greets the first “African Airlift” arrivals in New York in September 1959. Robinson later urged presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon to support the 1960 airlifts, appealing to Nixon’s interest in courting black voters in the upcoming election. Courtesy Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Jackie Robinson Papers.
CORA WEISS - HARRY BELFONTE - MARXIST REVOLUTIONS AFRICA
* Institute for Policy Studies :
Phyllis Benning of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) appeared on a TV talk show a few months ago during which she claimed that no link between Al-Qaeda and Iraq was established. Yet, a couple of days earlier I watched an edition of CBS’ 60 Minutes in which an Israeli intelligence official was interviewed who claimed that the Israelis have captured documents that do establish such a relationship. ... What do all of these organizations [IPS, IPB, PAN, & HAP] have in common? Cora Weiss.
Cora Weiss is the daughter of Faberge millionaire and Soviet-phile Samuel Rubin. She is the president of the Samuel Rubin Foundation, which finances a host of communist causes. As well as president of her father’s foundation, Cora is president of the IPB, president of the HAP, an international representative of the PAN, and the principal financier of the IPS, which was founded by a grant from the Rubin Foundation. ...
In 1983, [Cora] Weiss was a delegate to an IPS sponsored US-USSR confab for disarmament. Delegates included members of the Riverside Church, which is allied with the National Council of Churches (NCC) and World Council of Churches (WCC). ...
The anti-Americanism of Riverside, the NCC and the WCC is well known. All three organizations were advocates for the North Vietnamese. All three organizations were advocates for Marxists revolutions in Africa. (Indeed, the WCC contributed to Robert Mugabe’s Marxist army.) All three organizations were advocates for the Marxist revolutions in Central America in the 1980’s. All three protested the deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe. All three condemned the Gulf War. All three condemned US military action against the Taliban.
Weiss is definitely plugged in to the good old comrade’s network. For example, the IPS Board of Directors contains such liberal luminaries as Harry Belafonte, Time magazine journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, and editor of The Nation magazine Katrina vanden Heuvel (who was formerly the director of the IPS’s Transnational Institute).
Each of these people are well known for their unrepentant leftwing commitments. Ehrenreich is the Vice–Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. [Katrina] vanden Heuvel, is a staunch apologist for socialism. Belafonte was a founding member of the Hollywood chapter of SANE, a precursor of PAN. In December 2000, he received an honorary degree from Cuba’s Higher Arts Institute. Radio Havana reported that Belafonte said Cuba has always been an artistic haven for people who struggle for the liberation of humanity.
Cora’s old comrade network is incestuous as well. Peter Weiss, Cora’s husband, was the first chairman of the IPS, and is a member of the HAP board. He is a member of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and the Center for Constitutional Rights. The NLG is a communist proxy group. Both it and the Center for Constitutional Rights litigate government counter-intelligence activities.
‘Red Queen of “Peace”,’ By Michael Tremoglie, FrontPageMagazine.com, December 11, 2002
20 posted on Monday, May 01, 2006 2:04:15 PM by piasa