http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=129361
Teaches tactics of direct action, confrontation and intimidation
Posted: March 18, 2010
By Aaron Klein
A Chicago nonprofit on which President Obama served as paid director
provided startup capital and later funding to Midwest Academy, an
activist organization described as teaching tactics of direct action,
confrontation and intimidation, WND has learned.
Also, in 1998, Obama participated on a panel discussion alongside
Midwest Academy founder Heather Booth, an extremist organizer and
dedicated disciple of radical community organizer Saul Alinsky.
The Woods Fund, a nonprofit on which Obama served as paid director
from 1999 to December 2002, provided startup funding and later
capital to the Midwest Academy. WND first reported Obama sat on the
Woods Fund board alongside William Ayers, founder of the Weather
Underground domestic terrorist organization.
Midwest was co-founded by Booth's husband, Paul Booth, a founder and
the former national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society,
the radical 1960s anti-war movement from which Ayers' Weathermen splintered.
In 1999, Booth's Midwest Academy received $75,000 from the Woods
Fund. In 2002, with Obama still serving on the Woods Fund, Midwest
received another $23,500 for its Young Organizers Development Program.
Midwest describes itself as "one of the nation's oldest and
best-known schools for community organizations, citizen organizations
and individuals committed to progressive social change."
It later morphed into a national organizing institute for an emerging
network of organizations known as Citizen Action. Midwest teaches
Alinsky tactics of community organizing.
Discover the Networks describes Midwest as "teach[ing] tactics of
direct action, confrontation, and intimidation."
In August 1998, Obama participated in a panel discussion following
the opening performance in Chicago of the play "The Love Song of Saul
Alinsky," a work described by the Chicago Sun-Times as "bringing to
life one of America's greatest community organizers."
Obama participated in the discussion alongside other Alinskyites,
including Booth, political analyst Aaron Freeman, Don Turner of the
Chicago Federation of Labor and Northwestern University history
professor Charles Paine.
"Alinsky had so much fire burning within," stated local actor Gary
Houston, who portrayed Alinsky in the play. "There was a lot of
complexity to him. Yet he was a really cool character."
Booth herself is a notorious radical community activist and
self-described dedicated disciple of Alinsky, of whom she says:
"Alinsky is to community-organizing as Freud is to psychoanalysis."
Booth's vision of uniting various left-leaning organizations and
factions has also been the subject of her two books: "Toward a
Radical Movement and Citizen Action" and "The New American Populism."
Former 1960s radical and FrontPageMagazine Editor David Horowitz
describes Alinsky as the "communist/Marxist fellow-traveler who
helped establish the dual political tactics of confrontation and
infiltration that characterized the 1960s and have remained central
to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States."
Horowitz writes in his 2009 pamphlet "Barack Obama's Rules for
Revolution. The Alinsky Model":
"The strategy of working within the system until you can accumulate
enough power to destroy it was what sixties radicals called 'boring
from within.' .... Like termites, they set about to eat away at the
foundations of the building in expectation that one day they could
cause it to collapse."
As WND reported, Obama approached Northwestern University professor
John L. McKnight a loyal student of Alinsky's radical tactics to
pen a letter of recommendation for him when he applied to Harvard Law
School. Under the tutelage of McKnight and other hardcore students of
Alinsky, Obama said he got the "best education I ever had, better
than anything I got at Harvard Law School."
In a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe, Alinsky's son praised
Obama for stirring up the masses at the 2008 Democratic National
Convention "Saul Alinsky style," saying, "Obama learned his lesson well."
The letter, signed L. David Alinsky, closed with, "I am proud to see
that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully."
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