Terrorists Declare Support for Obama

In a report posted by WorldNetDaily October 2, Aaron Klein says the names of four past leaders of the Weatherman terrorist group are listed on an online petition soliciting help for Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Klein writes that the petition was started by an independent group called Progressives for Obama. Members of the group include, Klein says, former Students for a Democratic Society participants and current and former Communist Party USA and Black Radical Congress members.

According to the report, the online petition says the following: "We agree that Barack Obama is our best option for president in 2008, and that an independent grassroots effort can help strengthen his campaign. It can also strengthen the mandate for his programs for stopping war, promoting global justice and securing our rights, liberties, and economic well-being." Stopping war? I wonder if they realize Obama wants to up the ante in Afghanistan.

The former Weathermen named by Klein as being on the petition are Howard Machtinger, Jeff Jones, Steve Tappis and Mark Rudd. Klein says "Machtinger was a Weathermen founder and was co-author of the terror group's original mission statement, which called for 'revolutionaries within the United States to wage a people's war and attack from within. The government would fall and world communism eventually would be instituted."

Copying text from Jeff Jones' own website, the Klein report says that Jones was "elected, along with Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd, to the SDS national office. Then, in the spring of 1970, he disappeared. As a leader of the Weather Underground, Jeff evaded an intense FBI manhunt for more than a decade. In 1981, they finally got him. Twenty special agents battered down the door of the Bronx apartment where he was living with his wife and four-year-old son." Jones told WorldNetDaily that he was "...not involved in any Obama advocacy" Klein writes.

Steve Tappis, Klein says, "...was one of 11 people who signed the original Weathermen statement...." Mark Rudd, the final name cited by Klein as being on the petition, is "...a petition supporter as well as a main signatory to the Progressives for Obama group..." and was one of the individuals primarily responsible for the founding of the Weathermen.

The report says Rudd would not comment on the record for WorldNetDaily, saying, as Klein writes, that "...an interview may spark more Weathermen controversy for Obama." The four former domestic terrorists whose names appear on the petition "...worked closely for years with Weathermen terrorist William Ayers." Obama has distanced himself from Ayers saying the actions he was accused of happened when Obama was a child.

None of this is meant to imply that Obama has done anything wrong, or that he has some sort of ties with these individuals or groups. Surely Obama would disavow the support of former terrorists. But it does give one reason to pause and wonder what these nuts see for themselves in an Obama presidency.