This moral relativism eerily echoes Barack Obama’s blasé reaction to questions about his relationship with Ayers and Dohrn. The former is just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” we are told. With a rationale like this Obama insults our intelligence. It is inconceivable that someone with his education – including at Columbia University, where the SDS’s occupation of the campus in 1968 is the stuff of legend – and his exposure to politics in Chicago, the sight of the 1968 Democratic Convention and the Days of Rage in 1969, knew nothing of the history of the Weather Underground when he first met Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. “I was just 8 years old” in 1969, Obama says. How old was he when Ayers and Dohrn emerged from hiding in 1980 to headlines across the country? How old was he when the Weathermen murdered two policemen and a Brinks security guard in Nyack, New York in 1981? He was twenty, well past the age of reason. What is more, he was in his junior year at Columbia University in New York City, less than forty miles from where the crime occurred. “Despicable acts” is his strongest description of what Ayers and Dohrn did. Wrong again. These were not simply “despicable,” they were evil, terrorist atrocities – and capital murders in the case of the Brinks robbery. Why can’t Obama, lauded for his oratory, speak plainly and truthfully about such actions, about a campaign that aimed to rip our country apart?

In recent days Deroy Murdock and radio talk show host Laura Ingraham have asked the right rhetorical question: what did Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn see in Barack Obama when they met him in Chicago? After reading Berger’s book the answer is clear: they saw in him a kindred spirit, a fellow traveler, an acceptable face of the radical agenda they were pushing. What is more, Obama saw kindred souls in Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. This cuts to the heart of the matter. A person with a sound moral compass would have never developed a relationship with the two former terrorists in the first place, but would have immediately distanced himself from them. A person with a strong moral foundation, never mind a candidate for president of the United States, would have never sought to ingratiate himself with the likes of Ayers and Dohrn, a man and woman who have committed evil acts, who have admitted as such, and who have never repented for their transgressions This entire episode represents a profound failure of judgment on Obama’s part. It also has the most serious of implications regarding his presidency if he is elected. Remember, on Inauguration Day Obama will take an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. He will be the highest law enforcement official in the nation. He will recommend judges to sit on the Supreme Court, appoint the Attorney General of the United States, and name the Director of the FBI. Bernardine Dohrn refused to cooperate with the latter agency and refused to testify before a grand jury. What does Obama think about this? What does his association with someone who has nothing but utter contempt for our legal system portend? Will he go soft on domestic terrorism? Can we expect him to take a page out of Bill Clinton’s book and pardon Judy Clark and Dave Gilbert? Will he sound off about moral equivalence, which we have already heard in some his statements? Can we trust him to enforce the rule of law? We do not ask these questions about John McCain because we know his track record. We ask them of Barack Obama because, for whatever reason, he is covering his tracks.

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM

There is an international dimension to this issue that is directly relevant to the Constitutional obligations of the Commander-in-Chief. In 1974 the Weather Underground made a fraudulent intellectual case for its terrorist campaign in a subversive book, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutions. It outlined three justifications for its bombings: those taken “to retaliate for the most savage criminal attacks against Black and Third World people, especially by the police apparatus … to disrupt and agitate against U.S. aggression and terror against Vietnam and the Third World … [and] to expose and focus attention against the power and institutions which most cruelly oppress, exploit and delude the people.” The introduction, signed by Bill Ayers, said the book was written for “communist-minded people, independent organizers and anti-imperialists … to all sister and brothers who are engaged in armed struggle against the enemy.”

The bombing rationale found in Prairie Fire as well as other aspects of the book — it was released on the fifteenth anniversary of the communist revolution in Cuba and its title comes from a quote by Chairman Mao: “A single spark can start a prairie fire” — remind us that the Weather Underground was a domestic component of an international terrorist network that spanned several decades, from the 1960s to the 1990s. This network included the Vietcong, Cuban terrorists, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Red Brigades, the Baider-Meinhof Gang, the Irish Republican Army, ETA in Spain and, closer to home, the Puerto Rican FALN. Dan Berger delineates the link between all of these organizations. The Weather Underground, he writes, emulated “Third World revolutionaries — Cuba and Vietnam were especially the models — by going underground and taking armed actions … Weather viewed the underground as a way to express solidarity with the Third World, within and outside the United States.”

As such, the Weather Underground was part of an international movement that provided a template for radical Islamic terrorism. Assassinating American diplomats in Africa, targeting buildings in New York, bombing the Pentagon, targeting the U.S. Capitol, attacking world financial centers – the calling cards of Al Qaeda – were all first carried out by the Weather Underground Organization and other international terrorist groups, including the PLO. They overlap with Al Qaeda, in fact, which is a chilling connection in a post-9/11 world. Does Barack Obama, possibly our next Commander-in-Chief whose solemn duty is to protect the citizens of the United States, understand this connection, or has his friendship with members of the Weather Underground clouded his thinking on national security?

MORALLY UNQUALIFIED

Barack Obama is being untruthful. The questions we must ask are: what did he know and when did he know it about Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and the Weather Underground? Until he levels with the American people, the doubts about him will linger. They will be magnified by the fact that there are simply too many things we do not know about this candidate.

There is one thing, however, that is certain: Barack Obama’s partnership with William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn calls into question not only his political judgment, but his ethical reasoning. Their sustained relationship raises the question of his soundness to serve in high office. The mounting evidence indicates that Barack Obama is morally unqualified to be the president of the United States of America.

— Joseph Morrison Skelly, a college history professor in New York City, writes frequently on international terrorism and international affairs