Saul Alinsky
In a revelation tying Barack Obama even closer to radical community organizing, WND has learned that a renowned disciple of the late socialist agitator Saul "The Red" Alinksy wrote a letter of recommendation for Obama when he applied to Harvard Law School.
Obama approached Northwestern University professor John L. McKnight – a loyal student of Alinsky's radical tactics – to pen the Harvard letter in the late 1980s. McKnight serves on the boards of radically anti-American groups in Chicago, including one accused of thuggery.
Obama in his 2006 memoir alludes to McKnight – whom he describes as an "older man who had been active in the civil rights efforts in Chicago in the sixties" – but stops short of identifying him by name. He referred to him only as "my friend."
But McKnight, who enforced affirmative action for Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was far more than that to young Obama. He helped train him in the agitation tactics of Alinsky, who wrote the organizing manual, "Rules for Radicals," which he dedicated to mankind's "very first radical, Lucifer."
The Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation lists McKnight as a board director. From1985 to 1988, Obama worked for a subsidiary of Gamaliel, where he cut his teeth as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. McKnight and Gamaliel, which was founded on Alinsky's principles, provided training for the budding radical.
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Before leaving for Harvard, Obama wrote an article published in a journal titled, "After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois," in which he praised McKnight and his organizing strategies. He also decried "institutional racism" and called for more "power" to put in place "a systematic approach to community organization."
Barack Obama teaching Alinsky organizing tactics
While at Harvard, he found time to take advanced training courses at the Industrial Areas Foundation, a group founded by Alinsky and affiliated with Gamaliel. He also would return to Chicago to work as a consultant and trainer for Gamaliel.
Under the tutelage of McKnight and other hardcore students of Alinsky, Obama says he got the "best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School." He made the remark last year while campaigning in Iowa.
His mentor McKnight also sits on the board of a militant leftist group called the National People's Action, the professor's curriculum vita reveals. NPA employs the hardball street tactics of Alinskyite organizing.
NPA claims to be simply a coalition of neighborhood advocacy groups based in Chicago, but conservative analyst Michelle Malkin describes it as a "left-wing goon squad." She says NPA has been known to bus hundreds of angry protestors to the homes of business and government leaders to demand "justice" for inner-city blacks.
While preparing to intimidate the families of officials and trample over their private property, she says NPA picketers belt out the following battle cry:
Who's on your hit list, NPA?
Who's on your hit list for today?
Take no prisoner, take no names.
Kick 'em in the a-- when they play their games.
"NPA's militant tactics cross the bounds of decent political debate," Malkin wrote in 2004.
Obama, in his 1995 memoir, said he wanted to go to Harvard Law School to "learn power's currency in all its intricacy," with the goal of "making large-scale change" as a national politician.
John L. McKnight
Before writing his recommendation, McKnight, a former ACLU director, advised Obama not to "compromise" his principles.
While Obama says he's perhaps more tolerant of compromise than McKnight, he says his views haven't really changed from his days organizing on behalf of radical Alinsky groups like Gamaliel and ACORN in Chicago.
"My views are not so much more refined than they were when I labored in obscurity as a community organizer," he averred in his 2006 autobiography.
Socialist dream
Alinsky, the father of community organizing, dreamed of socialism one day replacing the "jungle" of American capitalism. He wrote that he hoped "for a future where the means of production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful."
Alinsky dedicated the first edition of his book, "Rules for Radicals," to Satan: "Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer."
McKnight has advocated for another war on poverty, something Obama is proposing with his "Urban Prosperity" plan.
