White House Faith Advisor ‘Lived With’ Communist Bill Ayers

We begin with the discovery by Danette Clark, an RBO contributor, that Eboo Patel (on right), a former White House religious advisor to Barack Obama, stayed as a guest in residence during the 2004-2005 school year in the same hall as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Clark continues:

If that’s not enough to convince you that this faith-based appointee and Bill Ayers knew each other personally, consider this — Eboo Patel also co-authored a book in 2005 with Bill Ayers’ adopted son, Chesa Boudin.

The book, Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out, was authored by several young radicals including Ismail Khalidi, the son of Rashid Khalidi, the Columbia University professor with ties to the Palestinian Liberation Organization who has described Israel as a “racist” state with an “apartheid” system.

Read more about Rashid Khalidi and his relationship to Obama here.

The Preface was written by Dohrn, who describes Letters as “a clarion call of hope, defiance, critical analysis, humor, irony, and self-conscious insistence that the queer, the Palestinian, the immigrant, the privileged, the children of prisoners and hip-hopsters have arrived.”

The back cover of the book boasts an endorsement from Mumia Abu-Jamal, a convicted cop-killer and former member of the Black Panther Party. On the Acknowledgments page you’ll find a great big thank you to Bill Ayers himself for “guidance” and “encouragement.”

Patel and Boudin appeared together at Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore in December of 2005 to promote the release of their book.

Aaron Klein first reported that Eboo Patel is also closely linked to the imam seeking to build a mosque at Gound Zero.

But, as always, there’s much more. Digging deeper, I find that in his book, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, in the Struggle for the Soul, Patel thanks Ayers for “suggesting there may be a story worth telling floating around in my head.”

He writes that he “searched for models of people who had tried to block the machinery of American imperialism,” at which point, he says, a “campus radical” suggested Patel talk with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

During a 2007 NPR interview promoting his book, Patel was asked about his affinity for “the American terrorist, Bill Ayers, who is a member of the Weather Underground.” Patel responded: “Well, you know, actually my story is much closer to Bill Ayers as -in the early days than it is to any of these Muslim terrorists, even though I’m Muslim, because I actually grew up in the same hometown that Bill Ayers did and I was kind of taught the same myths about America, a land of freedom and equality and justice, et cetera, et cetera.”

In 2008, Ayers paid homage to Patel in his book, Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom: “…Langston Hughes knew that America was both reality and idea, and he challenged himself as he challenges us to unite the two. He imagined himself beyond confinement. The young spiritual activist Eboo Patel has called America a ‘trauma of contradictions,’ a story still not fully written.”

Typical of the self-absorbed Ayers, he continues: “When I was nineteen I joined a student organization whose founding document began, ‘We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort…looking uneasily at the world we inherit.’ The challenge for today, then, is not unfamiliar, but it is unique in time and place – the American story must be rewritten again, right now, by this generation.”

The student organization, for those who do not know, is the campus-based radical group Students for a Democratic Society.

Clark writes: Patel isn’t the first White House appointee revealed to have close ties to Bill Ayers and I’m positive he won’t be the last. As Donald Trump and others continue to speculate as to whether Ayers actually wrote Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, dare I speculate as to who has really been helping to make White House appointments?