Arizona Shooter Tied To Larger Radical Nexus
Jared Lee Loughner, the suspected gunman in Saturday’s Arizona fatal shooting that left six dead and gravely injured a U.S. congresswoman, attended a high school that is part of a network in which teachers are trained and provided resources by a liberal group founded by Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers and once funded by President Obama, WorldNetDaily has learned.
The group, Small Schools Workshop, has been led by a former top communist activist who is an associate of Ayers. Obama provided the group with funds in the 1990s when he worked at an education reform group alongside Ayers.
Loughner attended Mountain View High School, which is part of Arizona’s Morana Unified School District.
Since 2003, Mountain View has been part of what is known as the Smaller Learning Community, a network of schools that have been restructured to create a more personalized learning environment where students often have the same teachers and fellow students from grade to grade.
Ayers himself is considered one of the fathers of the Smaller Learning Communities, often providing lectures to schools on the subject. Smaller Learning Communities had its conceptual genesis in 1991, when Ayers founded a group, Small Schools Workshop, which provides training and resources to teach schools how to implement the Smaller Learning Communities.
Ayers reportedly recruited a radical communist activist, Mike Klonsky, to head the Workshop. Klonsky still serves as director.
In 1995, with Obama as its chairman, the newly formed Chicago Annenberg Challenge, or CAC, a school reform organization, gave the Workshop a grant of $175,000. The CAC provided another $482,662 to the Workshop over the next few years.
Ayers was on a working group of five that originally founded the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Correspondence shows Ayers was instrumental in recruiting Obama to serve as the CAC’s first chairman.
Klonsky served with Ayers and Ayers’ wife, former Weatherman terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, in the Students for a Democratic Society group, a major leftist student organization in the 1960s that later splintered. In the 1970s, Klonsky became a top communist activist and leader of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party.
He reportedly identified as a Maoist, and traveled in 1977 to Beijing, where he held friendly meetings with the Chinese leadership, with his organization effectively recognized as the all-but-official U.S. Maoist party.
Another Liberal Cover-Up?
Are the news media deliberately disguising the reported liberal politics of Jared Lee Loughner, the suspected gunman in Saturday’s deadly shooting?
This journalist was first to report, at WND, that Caitie Parker, who went to high school, college and was in a band with the gunman, labeled Loughner as “quite liberal” and “more left” on her Twitter account.
It was that Twitter posting that first prompted ABC News’s Jack Tapper to send out a Twitter message of his own, asking publicly how he can get in touch with Parker.
ABC News online quoted a “high school classmate” of Loughner’s, apparently Parker, as saying “he was extremely political in high school, but not radical.” The ABC News online article does not state which kind of politics Loughner ascribes to.
In her Twitter postings, Parker wrote of Loughner, “As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal and oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy.” She also described him as “more left.”
Parker was also interviewed today on ABC’s “This Week,” yet the network did not even ask Parker about Loughner’s political leanings.
A Newsweek article that quotes Parker only in the context of her telling the news agency Loughner had apparently met Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords once in 2007 and described her as “stupid and unintelligent.” The article does not cite Parker’s Twitter postings.
Egypt Asks Coptic Christian Leader
Not To Go Into Seclusion
The Egyptian government this week directly interfered in the religious practices of the country’s Coptic Christian leaders, according to high-placed Egyptian Coptic sources.
The move follows a deadly suicide bombing in the main Coptic church of Alexandria, Egypt, that killed up to 23 and is being widely blamed on Islamists seeking to target Christians.
The high-placed sources told this column that Pope Shenouda III, the leader of the Coptic Christian community, had planned to go into seclusion this week with other senior priests in protest of Islamists targeting Christians in the country.
Shenouda is head of The Holy Synod of the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria.
Shenouda previously has gone into seclusion as protest, including for several weeks in 2004 when he refused to attend to his church duties in protest of the alleged failure of the Egyptian government to fight against Muslim attacks against Christians.
However, this week the Egyptian government interfered and asked Shenouda not to go into seclusion for fear the act would be seen as a protest against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, according to the sources.
The sources said it was the first time the Egyptian government had acted to officially prevent Shenouda from carrying out his religious practices or going into seclusion.
Aaron Klein is Jerusalem bureau chief and senior reporter for Internet giant WorldNetDaily.com. He is also host of an investigative radio program on New York’s 770-WABC Radio, the largest talk radio station in the U.S., every Sunday between 2-4 p.m.
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