Terrorist Bill Ayers' Non-Denial Denial

"[Barack Obama] is a talented and well-educated and erudite and articulate guy and he wrote two really brilliant and well-written memoirs. But somebody [Jack Cashill] did a textual analysis that proved that the nautical images in Fugitive Days were similar to his work and I was the ghostwriter...It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you."---Weather Underground Terrorist Billy Ayers (Salon 11-17-08, page 2)

Ayers is calling Cashill "paranoid"? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

Bill Ayers, a leader of the murdering Maoist Weather Underground terrorist organization was interviewed by Walter Shapiro of Salon (11-17-08). Young Billy probably picked Mao for his revolutionary hero because he was born on Mao's birthday, December 26.

Shapiro and Ayers tried to discredit research by Dr. Jack Cashill that demonstrates that Bill Ayers had a hand in writing Barack Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father (2001). Shapiro and Ayers were so afraid of Dr. Cashill that they didn't even disclose Dr. Cashill's name or provide a link so readers could see the allegedly "paranoid" evidence in his long series of articles. Instead, they dishonestly dismissed Dr. Cashill, a published author, as "a right-wing blogger"; and I notice that they didn't say that Dr. Cashill was wrong. This is called a "non-denial denial."

Dr. Cashill also noticed Ayers' non-denial denial and responded with a rebuttal (11-20-08).

I have also been reading Fugitive Days (2001) and Dreams from My Father and agree with Dr. Cashill that Bill Ayers, the author of Fugitive Days, had a hand in Dreams From My Father (1995).

It is clear that the communist Ayers and his friend from the old days Walter Shapiro are really dishonest people because they denigrate Dr. Cashill's achievements, call him paranoid, and mischaracterize his evidence. It's a classic communist smear-job.

On page two, Shapiro asks Ayers:

Did you follow the right-wing blogger [Cashill], I believe it was, who was totally convinced that you wrote Barack Obama's books?

Ayers responded:

I saw that because my oldest son, who is a writer, sent it to me. It was something that struck us as very, very funny. Barack Obama is a brilliant man, obviously. He is a talented and well-educated and erudite and articulate guy and he wrote two really brilliant and well-written memoirs. But somebody did a textual analysis that proved that the nautical images [here] in "Fugitive Days" were similar to his work and I was the ghostwriter.

Ayers' dismissive ridicule hardly qualifies as a denial.

Billy Ayers is nothing but a psychopathic maniac who was turned on by firecrackers and bombs. In Fugitive Days, Ayers describes US bombs dropped on Vietnam as "eggs" being "delivered" after doors "ease open." The plane is described as a bird laying an egg; it is an image of death juxtaposed on an image of birth:

[T]he doors ease open and millennial eggs are delivered on the green canopy below…

In Fugitive Days, Ayers' mother “explodes” when Billy is born. She is both Billy's egg and a bomb, "swollen to explosive proportions and absolutely ablaze."

The air crackles expectantly in the Ayers' home on Christmas Day before Billy is born and is aromatic with the smell of cooking. Even the sweet potatoes baking in the hot oven are "splitting."

Billy Ayers may try to perfume his terrorism with the scent of his mom's Christmas kitchen, but since I know that the Weather Underground organization cooked-up bombs and murdered people, Billy Ayers' olfactory reminiscences evoke in me not the smells of Christmas, but the distinct and disagreeable whiff of that fictional culinary artist, the predatory Hannibal Lecter.

Fugitive Days recounts that Billy is the last "unopened present" who explodes on the scene moments after Christmas--December 26, Mao's birthday--and takes his place in the "hatchery":

Inside everything was hot and glowing—the flickering red and green lights on the little Christmas tree, the butter cookies fresh from the oven cooling on a rack, the chestnuts, the steaming cider. And, of course, Mom herself, two weeks past her due date, swollen to explosive proportions and absolutely ablaze. The aroma of roasting turkey and sweet potatoes splitting their skins mixed with the close and pungent scent from the nursery, and the air crackled expectantly. The presents had all been opened, wrapping paper and ribbon littering the living room, when Mom felt me stir and stretch. Here it is, she said, the last unopened present…and then—boom!—

...there I was, scrambling, I imagine now, for space and food in the hatchery…

Elsewhere Billy Ayers describes his rebirth into the revolution, “a world in flames,” using the image of the egg:

I woke up one day—hatched out of the hard, white protective shell of my privileged prep school upbringing—to a world in flames.

Ayers' memoir Fugitive Days opens with a phone call from the terrorist Bernardine Dohrn. She tells Billy that his girlfriend Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Ted Gold have been blown to bits while assembling a bomb. In the opening of Barack Obama's book, Dreams From My Father, young Obama also gets a phone call from Africa announcing that his father has died violently in a car accident.

As he sits on the couch absorbing the news of his father's death, Obama smells the eggs he had been cooking burn in the skillet and notes the cracks in the plaster of his apartment.

The kitchen scene in Dreams From My Father may be the rough draft of Billy Ayers' subsequent pungent olfactory descriptions and the egg imagery in Fugitive Days: In Obama's memoir, eggs--a symbol of birth--are transformed into a pungent symbol of a burning death. Why does young Obama note the cracks in the plaster? Perhaps because the father's death is a symbolic bombing:

I was in the middle of making myself breakfast, with coffee on the stove and two eggs in the skillet, when my roommate handed me the phone….your father is dead….I sat down on the couch, smelling eggs burn in the kitchen, staring at cracks in the plaster, trying to measure my loss.

Well, all I smell is a rat. And mainly what I remember from my Lake Forest idyll is Billy's demonic wife Bernardine Dohrn holding up three fingers and celebrating Charles Manson's grisly crimes:

Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!

If Billy Ayers cooked-up the passage in Dreams about the death of Obama's father, what does it say about Obama? Was he unable to authentically recount his feelings about his long-absent father's death? Obama must be an empty shell if he let this predator concoct his own father's death.

Did Bill Ayers Ghostwrite Senator Obama's Memoir?

The Republican Party (10-6-08) is pointing out that Senator Obama has a relationship with the Weatherman terrorist turned teacher Bill Ayers.

UDATE: See an article about Bill Ayers' revolutionary terrorist manifesto, Prairie Fire (1974).

Some websites are also speculating that Bill Ayers helped Senator Obama write his memoir Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995).

A writer named Jack Cashill, who published a 2005 book on intellectual fraud titled Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture (reviewed here), is posting a series of articles questioning the authorship of Senator Obama's Dreams From My Father.

This is a pretty ominous development for Senator Obama because Jack Cashill exposed some of the discredited ex-professor Ward Churchill's frauds in Hoodwinked and subsequently published an article based on excerpts from Hoodwinked called "Little Eichmanns" (6-22-05).

Cashill thinks that Senator Obama's Dreams of My Father bears a striking resemblance to books authored by Bill Ayers' such as To Teach (1993), A Kind and Just Parent (1997), and Fugitive Days (2001).

Below are the articles Jack Cashill has published so far. I am updating this page as more articles are published:

"Who wrote Dreams From My Father?" (7-31-08)

"Did Bill Ayers Write Obama’s Dreams?" (Part 1 of 3) (9-18-08)

"Did Bill Ayers Write Obama’s Dreams?" (Part II: Deconstructing the Text) (9-19-08)

"Did Bill Ayers Write Obama’s Dreams?" (Part III: Why it Matters ) (9-20-08)

"More Proof Ayers Ghosted Obama's Dreams" (9-25-08)

"Obama’s Poems Show Real Talent Level" (10-2-08)

"Roots’ Fraud Set Standard For Obama’s" (10-9-08)

"Who Wrote Dreams From My Father?" (10-9-08)

"Obama did not write Dreams From My Father" (10-13-08)

"Nautical Metaphors Could Sink Obama" (10-14-08)

"Evidence Mounts: Ayers Co-Wrote Obama's Dreams" (10-17-08)

Test shows Ayers penned Obama's 'Dreams' (10-19-08)

"More Evidence That Ayers Ghosted Obama’s Dreams" (10-20-08)

"Ayers’ Role in Obama’s Dreams Poised To Break Out" (10-23-08)

"Barack Obama: Bill Ayers’ Alter Ego" (October 2008)

"Fiction Fixer Evaluation of Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama and Fugitive Days by William Ayers" (10-27-08)

"Science points to Ayers' authorship of Obama's Dreams" (10-29-08) [See also WND article (10-29-08)and summary (10-29-08) of Dr. Cashill's findings]

"London Times Inquires About Dreams Fraud" (11-1-08)

"Yavelow Study Confirms Ayers Hand In Obama's Dreams" (11-2-08)

Finish Your "Oxford" Study, Mr. Millican (11-3-08)

Oxford Don Trips Badly On “Dreams” Analysis (11-3-08)

Cashill is interviewed on The Rusty Humphries Show (10-15-08).

Cashill's recent articles about Senator Obama are here.

Two recent articles on this issue are also linked here.

Here is Jack Cashill's World net Daily Archive.

Senator Obama wrote an article in 1988 for Illinois Issues called "Why Organize? Problems and promise in the inner city." (See Cashill's 10-13-08 article referencing Obama's 1988 article.)

Dr. Bruce Heiden Questions President Obama's Authorship of "Dreams from My Father"

"[President Obama] doesn't say how these memories turned into the book Dreams from My Father. In particular, he doesn't say he wrote the book. He says that Dreams 'found its way onto these pages' [xvi]...Obama's whole Introduction to Dreams has the odd rhetorical project of persuading the reader that Barack Obama, the author of Dreams from My Father, actually had nothing to do with writing his book and couldn't have written it."---Dr. Bruce Heiden describing the Introduction of President Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, 2004 paperback edition.

Dr. Heiden, a professor of Greek and Latin at Ohio State University, does not believe that President Obama is the author of his highly-acclaimed 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father.

I have posted a number of articles about Dr. Jack Cashill, a Ph.D. author who has written a series of articles that also raise questions about the authorship of President Obama's 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father. Last October, Jack Cashill reviewed Dr. Heiden's thesis here.

Dr. Cashill's articles make the case that that the Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers had a hand in writing the President's autobiography. It would not be the first time that a communist bomber retired, was rehabilitated, and took up ghostwriting. [See the entry on Pavel Sudoplatov in Vadim J. Birstein's The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science, pages 423-4; See also footnote 118, page 353]
Billy Ayers was already asked if he had a hand in the President's autobiography, and he didn't flatly deny this possibility. He just called Dr. Cashill "paranoid":

[Barack Obama] is a talented and well-educated and erudite and articulate guy and he wrote two really brilliant and well-written memoirs. But somebody [Jack Cashill] did a textual analysis that proved that the nautical images in Fugitive Days were similar to [Obama's Dreams from My Father] and I was the ghostwriter...It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.---Weather Underground Terrorist Billy Ayers (Salon 11-17-08, page 2)

Professor Bruce Heiden has studied the language of the new Introduction in the 2004 paperback edition of Dreams and has compared the new Forward with the original Preface that follows.

Dr. Heiden writes (10-18-08):

Jack Cashill has assembled evidence suggesting that Barack Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father may be the work of a ghostwriter: Obama's Chicago neighbor William Ayers. Obama agrees with Cashill on one important point: in his own Introduction to Dreams, which describes his book's genesis, Obama himself strongly implies that he didn't write it.

According to Obama, he did some writing on another book, not a memoir but "an essay on the limits of civil rights litigation in bringing about racial equality" (xiii; all citations refer to the 2004 paperback edition). This book was never finished, and it doesn't exist. Obama says that his work on the "civil rights litigation" project was aborted by personal memories that forced themselves upon him: "I found my mind pulled..." (xiv). But he doesn't say how these memories turned into the book Dreams from My Father. In particular, he doesn't say he wrote the book. He says that Dreams "found its way onto these pages" (xvi).

Most readers of Dreams have probably assumed that Obama's curiously impersonal description is merely figurative, a display of humility, a modest way of saying that he did write the book the reader has in hand. I have no doubt that Obama hoped the words would be understood that way. Nevertheless, it should be noted that Obama's display of humility is so extreme that although he devotes his Introduction to just a single topic--where Dreams came from--he omits the writing altogether. Instead he replaces the writing of Dreams by a quasi-automatic process whereby memories somehow took form in words and found a way onto the page by themselves. This picture is so fantastic that it can't be taken literally, and therefore can't be suspected of falsehood. In describing a genesis of Dreams that is blatantly impossible, Obama is counting on readers to think, "he can't really mean it," and he leaves it to us to come up with our own idea of what he did mean. That's very convenient for Obama, since in saying, as in essence he does, "this book came into existence without anybody writing it," Obama also implies, "and I, the credited author, didn't write it." Unlike "nobody wrote this book," "I didn't write this book" is not a fantastic statement that cannot mean what it literally says. Lots of people didn't write Dreams from My Father. Maybe Barack Obama is one of them.

Obama's whole Introduction to Dreams has the odd rhetorical project of persuading the reader that Barack Obama, the author of Dreams from My Father, actually had nothing to do with writing his book and couldn't have written it.

..Obama's Introduction to Dreams from My Father is a pretty strange document. But the Preface he affixed to the 2004 reissue is even stranger. Bear in mind that the Preface is printed immediately before the Introduction in the 2004 edition, so that it would not be difficult for anyone to read both of them and compare. Like the Introduction, the Preface also narrates the genesis of Dreams. But Obama seems to have forgotten parts of his own story.

As I mention in the original introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went to work with the belief that the story of my family...might speak in some way to the fissures of race, etc. (vii, emphasis added)

The "burst of publicity" that testified to Obama's "modest accomplishments" in the Introduction has here been reduced to "some modest publicity." The "few publishers" who initiated Obama's project when they "called" him have given way to "an advance" (i.e., a cash incentive) that Obama received from "a publisher." But most importantly, Obama's original project (the essay on the limits of civil rights litigation), his project agenda, his work-in-progress, the memories that arose unbidden to overwhelm his theories, his struggle to resist the direction in which those memories were leading him, the final triumph in which his inner journey "found its way onto these pages"--all this has disappeared. According to the 2004 Preface, when Obama received his advance, he already had a "belief" about the story he could tell, and he immediately "went to work."

Obama says he "went to work" on Dreams from My Father, but he still does not say that he wrote it. In the Introduction Obama also said he went to work on his essay about civil rights litigation, and even that he "sat down and began to write." But he never wrote that book, and it doesn't exist. When Obama says in the Preface that he "went to work" on Dreams, it's impossible to know whether this means he started writing the book, started thinking about writing it, or started imagining how to deliver a book to his publisher without writing one. "Went to work" claims only that Obama made some early contribution to the Dreams project as a content-provider, whatever a content-provider might be.

Obama's narrative then skips straight from "went to work" to the completed book's publication. [See the full text]

A Question for Senator Obama: Did Bill Ayers Ghostwrite Your Memoir "Dreams from My Father"?

"The evidence overwhelms the dispassionate observer that semi-retired terrorist Bill Ayers played a major role in the writing of Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father."--Jack Cashill

Senator Obama told us that the terrorist Bill Ayers is just some English professor who lives in his neighborhood.

Actually, Bill Ayers is a Professor of Education. Senator Obama knows that because he wrote a glowing review of Bill Ayers' book, A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court, in the Chicago Tribune (12-21-97). The terrorist professor Bill Ayers even mentioned Senator Obama on page 82 of this book as a "writer" who lives in his neighborhood.

A writer named Dr. Jack Cashill believes that Senator Obama may not be much of a writer after all, and that the Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers ghostwrote Senator Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995).

Here are Dr. Cashill's most recent articles. I have also written about and catalogued Dr. Cashill's articles about Dreams from My Father in a previous article.

UPDATE: See Dr. Cashill's article "Science Points to Ayers Authorship of Obama's Dreams" (10-29-08), a summary of his evidence called "Who wrote Dreams From My Father?" (10-29-08), and a World Net Daily article about Dr. Cashill's research titled "Experts Affirm: Ayers Wrote Obama's Memoir" (10-29-08).

See also an article titled "Fiction Fixer Evaluation of Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama and Fugitive Days by William Ayers" (10-27-08). Fiction Fixer is a computer program that can be used to compare literary works to settle questions of authorship. I am still trying to understand this article, but it seems that in the category called "attributions" Senator Obama's book Dreams from My Father resembles Bill Ayers' Fugitive Days more than it resembles Senator Obama's own later book The Audacity of Hope.

In an article titled "Barack Obama: Bill Ayers’ Alter Ego," Cashill writes:

The evidence overwhelms the dispassionate observer that semi-retired terrorist Bill Ayers played a major role in the writing of Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father.

For those unpersuaded by authorship studies, timelines, parallel themes, matching metaphors, Ayers’ role as neighborhood editor, or Obama’s overnight transformation from struggling hack to literary superstar, allow me to introduce another variable: Obama’s conspicuous channeling of the thoughts and experiences of Bill Ayers into his own presumed autobiography....[full text]

Dr. Jack Cashill Writes that the London Times Is Inquiring into the Authorship of Senator Obama's Memoir "Dreams From My Father"

“The bizarre accusation Jack Cashill made . . . that Obama didn't write Dreams From My Father (and that Bill Ayers did) has caught fire in the blogosphere and on talk radio.”---Kirsten Powers, New York Post (10-29-08)

UPDATE: London Times dismissive of Dr. Cashill's theory (11-2-08)

I have a question for Senator Obama: Did Bill Ayers help you write your memoir Dreams From My Father? Just answer the question "yes" or "no."

According to Time Magazine (Joe Klein, 10-15-06), Senator Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father (1995) is “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician” [see page 3], but Dr. Jack Cashill argues in a series of articles that the Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers really ghostwrote Senator Obama's memoir.

Dr. Jack Cashill, the author of Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture, reports today that the London Times listened to his theory that the Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers ghostwrote Senator Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father (1995).

The London Times has not written about this story, but they did listen. Maybe they will write about it later when they have a chance to evaluate the evidence.

Perhaps a reporter could ask Senator Obama if anyone helped him write Dreams, and if so, who?

Today Dr. Cashill has posted an article titled "London Times Inquires About Dreams Fraud" (11-1-08):

...What might just keep the London Times in this story is the transparency of Obama’s fraud. One does not have to be a forensic linguist to spot it. Indeed, my single best source to date has been a 39 year-old father of three who runs a small construction business in the Midwest.

Joe the Builder—given Joe the Plumber’s fate he prefers to remain anonymous--spotted at least two of the stories that bleed from the 1993 Ayers’ book “To Teach” into the 1995 Obama book “Dreams From My Father.”

Yesterday, I received an email from a Boston-area writer and composer, Jay Spencer, who suggested some other parallels between Obama’s “Dreams” and Ayers’ books that had evaded me. They smack even the casual reader in the face.

Remember that the young Ayers served as a merchant seaman, and although he has tried to put his ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go.

“I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience,” Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama’s earth-bound memoir.

Although there are no literal sea experiences in "Dreams," the following words, incredibly enough, appear in both Dreams and in Ayers’ work: fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, barges, horizons, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky.

This is well beyond coincidence. By contrast, only the words “current” and “tide” appear in my own semi-memoir on race, “Sucker Punch.”

Not surprisingly, two of the more conspicuous parallel structures that Spencer discovered involve elements that intrigue Ayers—water and language.

Writes Ayers in his [2001] memoir “Fugitive Days”: “The debates swam above and around and through us . . . . The confrontation in the [Student Union] flowed like a swollen river in to the teach-in, carrying me along the cascading waters from room to room, hall to hall, bouncing off boulders.”

Writes Obama in “Dreams”: “I heard all our voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream, my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents, but always the voices returning to that single course, a single story.”

...

Now, note the rhythm, cadence, and layered structure of the following two excerpts, both dealing with waves.
Writes Ayers in “A Kind And Just Parent”: “The hard ground is frozen through, the wintry waves upswept - all white and frosty - transposed in midcrash from furious motion to arctic glass. A fading, fragile sun offers no heat and precious little light to our dark smudge of a city nestled between Lake Michigan and the vast, flat plains stretching westward.”

Writes Obama in “Dreams”: “The trembling blue plane of the Pacific. The moss-covered cliffs and the cool rush of Manoa Falls, with its ginger blossoms and high canopies filled with the sounds of invisible birds. The North Shore's thunderous waves, crumbling as if in a slow-motion reel. The shadows off Pali's peaks; the sultry scented air.”

No one who has seen Obama’s earlier writing or paid heed to his casual speech could make a serious case that Obama wrote either of these passages. [See full text; See the series of Cashill's articles about the authorship of Dreams.]

Jack Cashill Writes That Yavelow Study Confirms Ayers' Hand in Obama's Memoir

"Obama’s memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama get appointed chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, launched Obama’s political career with a fundraiser in his Chicago home. In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place, and the ability to burnish Obama’s literary star."---Jack Cashill

Jack Cashill has been writing a series of articles elaborating on his theory that the Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers authored Senator Barack Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father (1995).

As I noted in a previous post, The London Times (11-2-08) just published a dismissive article that ridiculed Cashill's research without looking at the evidence.

The London Times article is titled "Republicans try to use Oxford don to smear Barack Obama" (11-2-08).

Great Britain's most famous newspaper failed to ask Senator Obama if Bill Ayers had a hand in writing Dreams from My Father. Why didn't they get Senator Obama on the record? We know that Senator Obama didn't tell us the truth when he claimed that Bill Ayers was just his neighbor.

Jack Cashill followed up the London Times' ridicule by posting another article explaining his theory and reporting what Chris Yavelow, the creator of a software product called FictionFixer, and other scientists say about Dreams From My Father. The article is titled "Yavelow Study Confirms Ayers' Hand In Obama's Dreams" (11-2-08):

Yavelow, an award-winning composer and author, had worked for years developing what he believes is the most comprehensive linguistics tool for authorship detection, a software product trademarked as FictionFixer.

Yavelow contacted me and I sent him some relevant materials. When he ran the two books nominally by Barack Obama, the 1995 Dreams From My Father and the 2006 Audacity of Hope, through FictionFixer, he concluded, “They were written by different people.”

As Yavelow explains, authors don’t go from a 3.8 percent use of the passive voice in 1995 to an 8.3 percent use in 2006. For developing writers, the use of the passive almost always diminishes with experience.

Yavelow cites a score of other characteristics that change too conspicuously from one Obama book to the next, among them the Flesch Reading Ease score, the use of gender words, sentence starters, adverbs, discouraged words, sensory triggers, and more.

When, however, Yavelow compared Obama’s Dreams with Bill Ayers’ memoir, Fugitive Days, he found the similarity of the two books “striking.” He then quickly corrects himself: “’Striking’ is an understatement for the relationship FictionFixer uncovered between Fugitive Days and Dreams From My Father.”

For instance, Dreams averages 17.61 words and 26.48 syllables for non-dialogue sentences. Fugitive Days averages 17.62 words and 26.27 syllables.

Another example is what Yavelow calls “attributions”—e.g., he “asked,” she “said,” they “wondered.” Some authors use as few as three. Many use fewer than twenty. Dreams, however, uses 36; Fugitive Days 34, and with only four exceptions—three of these used only once—the two books use the very same attributions.

Yavelow compares the two books on any number of other characteristics and concludes, “There is a strong likelihood that the author of Fugitive Days ghost-wrote Dreams From My Father using recordings of dialog (either tape recorded or notes). Alternatively, another scenario could be possible: Ayers might have served as a ‘book doctor’.”

American Thinker has made the Yavelow study available below [see here]. By the standards of this profession, it is remarkably easy for the layman to follow.

Unbeknownst to Yavelow, three other individuals or teams had volunteered to run analyses of the books using off-the-shelf software, which allows for easier testability...

[See the full text of this very lengthy article which includes information from other experts; See my previous articles about the authorship of Dreams by searching Cashill. See American Thinker's "Fiction Fixer Evaluation of Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama and Fugitive Days by William Ayers."]

Bill Ayers Has Normal Hearing!

"Have you drunk the Kool-Aid or do you actually have a mind of your own?"--Dr. Billy Ayers [See also here]

When he is interviewed, the Weather Underground terrorist Dr. Billy Ayers sometimes acts as if setting off all those bombs has affected his hearing. During a recent interview at a Baltimore book-signing, Dr. Billy repeated a Washington Times online editor's questions as if he were not sure he had heard them correctly. The foggy old fogie repeatedly asked the editor if she had a mind of her own and chuckled at his own joke. I thought Ayers' question was funny, because the young Billy never had a mind of his own. I think he chose the psychopathic mass-murderer Mao as his spiritual father because they share the same December 26 birthday.

But when Washington Times online editor Kerry Picket suggested that Dr. Billy might have collaborated with President Obama on Dreams from My Father, the old goat heard well enough and didn't repeat the question. His whole demeanor changed. The condescending smirk vanished from his face. He looked scared and answered immediately. According to Dr. Billy, the theory that he had a hand in the President's book Dreams from My Father is a "myth." Ayers said, "I never had a collaboration...no. That's a myth."

Watch the Washington Times video on FOX (5-19-09) or Youtube.

The writer Dr. Jack Cashill has written a series of articles that make the case that William Ayers had a hand in writing President Obama's book Dreams from My Father. Dr. Cashill writes about Dr. Ayers' run-in with the intrepid Ms. Picket at World Net Daily (5-28-09). [See the article and video on Cashill's own site, too.] At first I thought Dr. Cashill's theory was nonsense, but then I read Dreams and Bill Ayers' memoir Fugitive Days.

Ohio State University Professor Bruce Heiden has also questioned Obama's authorship of Dreams:

[President Obama] doesn't say how these memories turned into the book Dreams from My Father. In particular, he doesn't say he wrote the book. He says that Dreams 'found its way onto these pages'[xvi]...Obama's whole Introduction to Dreams has the odd rhetorical project of persuading the reader that Barack Obama, the author of Dreams from My Father, actually had nothing to do with writing his book and couldn't have written it.---Dr. Bruce Heiden describing the Introduction of President Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, 2004 paperback edition.

Maybe next time, Ms. Picket of the Washington Times should ask Dr. Ayers if he knows who killed Brian V. McDonnell.

Readers can scroll through my posts about the authorship of President Obama's autobiography by searching Cashill on this blog.

Did Oxford Don Peter Millican Trivialize and Misrepresent Jack Cashill's Research?

Dr. Jack Cashill is making the case in a series of articles that the Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers had a hand in writing President-elect Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father (1995).

Dr. Cashill writes in an article titled "Oxford Don Trips Badly On Dreams Analysis" (11-3-08) that Dr. Peter Millican, an Oxford Philosophy professor, is mocking his theory:

Oxford philosophy don Peter Millican has posted a report on Bill Ayers’ likely involvement in the writing of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father so shabby and slapdash that it had me checking Britain’s famous libel laws before I was halfway through.

Millican seems to be a man on a mission. He tells readers that they “will be pleased to discover that the probable next leader of the free world did not get his impressive first book written by Bill Ayers.”

His gratuitous leaks to the London Times about his work have netted him glowing headlines as a bloke bold enough to blow the whistle on Republican chicanery.

“How they tried to tarnish Barack Obama,” reads one laughable headline. “Peter Millican reveals how he was drawn into a plot to link the Democrat to a former radical.”

Dr. Cashill criticizes Dr. Millican's article for trivializing and misrepresenting the facts that support his argument:

Millican begins by trivializing the undeniable evidence that three nearly identical stories appear in Obama’s Dreams that also appear in Ayers’ works. (Please see cashill.com for more details).

“Even if parallel passages were to be found between Obama's [1995] book and Ayers's Fugitive Days of 2001, the charge of plagiarism could only be directed at Ayers . . . “ writes Millican [my link].

Let me repeat: I have found not just parallel passages but detailed and distinctive parallel stories, at least three of them, all of them embarrassingly obvious.
Millican tries to explain them away by suggesting Ayers possibly plagiarized Dreams, given that Fugitive Days was written six years later.

If Millican had bothered to read what I had written, however, he would have known that two of the parallel stories appear in Ayers’ 1993 book, To Teach. [not Fugitive Days!]

The third parallel story is cited in Ayers’ 1997 book, A Kind And Just Parent [not Fugitive Days!], but has its origins in a 1992 book by black author Reginald McKnight. Ayers obviously knew enough about this story by 1995 to adapt it to Obama’s life. [See full text]

Weather Underground Terrorist Bill Ayers Reportedly Claims He Wrote President Obama's Memoir "Dreams from My Father"

I wrote Dreams From My Father...Michelle [Obama] asked me to...and if you can prove it, we can split the royalties...I really wrote it.---Weather Underground Terrorist Bill Ayers on Monday, October 5, 2009

Dr. Jack Cashill has written a series of articles that make the case that the terrorist Bill Ayers helped write President Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father.

In support of his thesis, Dr. Cashill can now cite (10-1-09) the words of biographer Christopher Anderson, who wrote in his best-seller Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage:

These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers...Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Book.

Dr. Cashill subsequently reported (10-8-09):

Christopher Andersen, author of the new best-seller Barack and Michelle: Portrait of An American Marriage, told Sean Hannity that Bill Ayers did indeed lend a major assist to the writing of Barack Obama's acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. [See more about Anderson's book here.]

Cashill also reports that a blogger named Anne Leary confronted Bill Ayers at Washington's Reagan Airport and that he claimed he had written the President's book.

Ayers reportedly told Leary, the blogger at Back Yard Conservative (10-6-09):

I wrote Dreams From My Father...Michelle [Obama] asked me to...and if you can prove it, we can split the royalties...I really wrote it.

Leary writes that she told Ayers:

[W]hy would I believe you, you're a liar.

He had no answer to that. Just looked at me. Then he turned and walked off, and said again his bit about my proving it and splitting the proceeds.

Canada Refuses Weather Underground Bomber William Ayers Entry! [UPDATE: Says Billy Ayers!]

"[Barack Obama] is a talented and well-educated and erudite and articulate guy and he wrote two really brilliant and well-written memoirs. But somebody [Jack Cashill] did a textual analysis that proved that the nautical images in Fugitive Days were similar to [Obama's Dreams from My Father] and I was the ghostwriter...It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you."---Weather Underground Terrorist Billy Ayers (Salon 11-17-08, page 2)

UPDATE: Bill Ayers damns himself out of his own mouth. He just told the Canadian MSM that he didn't know why he had been refused entry into Canada, but he has written on the Internet that he often has problems at the Canadian border! He claims that he knows the reason: the Canadians have false information that he was convicted of a 1969 felony. Really, you can't believe anything Bill Ayers says. I think it is even possible that the terrorist drama queen Billy Ayers just claims he has problems at the Canadian border. We only have Billy's word that he was refused entry at the Canadian border.

Ayers (7-16-05) wrote:

On July 2, 2005 I took a flight from Chicago to western Canada where I was scheduled to give a lecture to a group of teachers at the University of Calgary. Clearing customs, I was directed to Immigration where a growing line of anxious or impatient arrivals -- mostly dark-skinned, mostly young, I the glaring exception -- awaited further examination.

This has become a common-place for me whenever I travel to Canada -- I'm always diverted and delayed, always questioned about my anticipated length of stay and the nature of my business, always double-checked. Whenever I've asked why I'm being subjected to this special treatment, the reply has always been the same: "Just a routine check."

Original post:

The Weather Underground terrorist-bomber and University of Illinios at Chicago Professor of Education Bill Ayers [scroll down to read all posts, especially about the bombing murder of Brian McDonnell] was refused entry into Toronto, Canada on Saturday night (1-17-09) because Canadian border security reportedly considered him a security risk. I wonder why Canada is refusing Ayers entry just before the inauguation of Mr. Barack Obama? Maybe they know something we don't know.

Ayers, who has a sense of humor, reportedly complained to Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper that he "has travelled to Canada more than a dozen times in the past," but he's not doing that anymore! Finally, change I can believe in!

It's interesting that this is happening right before the inauguration, because the writer Dr. Jack Cashill believes that Bill Ayers ghostwrote parts of President-Elect Obama's biography Dreams From My Father.

Even though I don't like to believe this accusation is true, I think Dr. Cashill has a point because---like Bill Ayers---I have read Obama's "brilliant" book Dreams from My Father. The tone, style, imagery, diction, descriptions, and incidents in this book do echo Ayers' dishonest but well-written book Fugitive Days.

Bill Ayers mocked Dr. Cashill's theory as "paranoid" but did not flatly deny that he had a hand in the book's creation. I wonder if our incoming President will flatly either admit or deny that he had help with his autobiography from the infamous communist bomber Bill Ayers. If its true, he should come clean right away and explain what's going on. I certainly understand how the charming sociopath Bill Ayers manipulates people.

Fox News (1-19-09) writes:

William Ayers, the 1960s radical whose ties to President-elect Barack Obama caused trouble for his campaign, was turned away from Canada Sunday night as he tried to enter the country for a series of educational events.

Jeffrey Kugler, the executive director for the Center for Urban Schooling at the University of Toronto, said Ayers was deemed not admissible after being pulled aside by Canadian immigration officials while trying to clear customs at the Toronto airport.

Ayers had been invited to speak before the center. He was also scheduled to meet with the Toronto District School Board and do interviews with Canadian television and radio stations, Kugler said...

Ayers, a co-founder of the violent Weather Underground group and current education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told the Toronto Star that he didn't know why he had been turned away. [See full text]

More Evidence that President Obama Did Not Write "Dreams from My Father"

“These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers...Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Book.”--Christopher Anderson in Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage

Dr. Jack Cashill has written a series of articles that make the case that the real author of President Obama's 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father is the Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers. [Search Cashill on this blog.]

An Ohio State University professor named Dr. Bruce Heiden has also questioned Obama's authorship.

In his just-released biography Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen has also written that the terrorist Ayers helped Barack Obama write his memoir. Cashill speculates that Anderson's two unnamed Hyde Park sources may be the infamous Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Dr. Cashill explains (10-1-09):

In a lengthy and detailed section on the Obama’s financial struggles in the early 1990s, Andersen relates how at the urging of Michelle, a “hopelessly blocked” Obama turned to “friend and neighbor” Bill Ayers to help him with his much acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.

Andersen’s details are specific. The Obamas were convinced of “Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer.” Barack particularly liked the novelistic style of To Teach, a 1993 book by Ayers.

Obama hoped to use a comparable style for his own family history. The problem was that although he had taped interviews with many of his relatives, he could not find it in himself to write the book.

Andersen details Obama’s blown advances, his futile escape to Bali, the growing financial and emotional pressure to finish a memoir he had started four years earlier.
The key sentence in Andersen’s account is the one that follows: “These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.”
Adds Andersen, “Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Book...”

Ayers has every right to be peeved. To protect Obama’s reputation, critics have had to attack him. Consider the following, and this from Republican bigwig Ken Blackwell:

"Bill Ayers' thoughts have all the leaden quality of most deadening Marxist screeds. Ayers' writing you can't pick up; Obama's you can't put down."

In fact, Ayers writes very well indeed. His 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, is a better book than Dreams. And he gets no credit for it. [Full text]

Weather Underground's 1974 Revolutionary Manifesto "Prairie Fire"

"Obama and his supporters at first claimed he barely knew who Ayers was, but when public awareness of the connections between Obama and Ayers became too numerous and too strong to deny, Obama's supporters have now begun resorting to a fallback position: that William Ayers wasn't such a bad guy after all, and that it is no shame to be associated with him."--Zombietime (10-22-08) [See also the Zomblog]

Zombietime (10-22-08) reviews Weather Underground's 1974 terrorist revolutionary manifesto Prairie Fire (Hat Tip, Mr. Paine, 10-22-08). The title Prairie Fire is an allusion to Mao's observation in a 1-5-30 letter that "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire." [See text here.]

Praire Fire was dedicated to, among others, Sirhan Sirhan, the man who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.

Be sure to check the links Zombietime includes that document some of Obama's many connections to William Ayers. Zombietime even links to recent speculation by Jack Cashill that Bill Ayers may have helped write Senator Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father.

Senator Obama told us on TV that Bill Ayers is just a professor who lives in his neighborhood. Obviously, the Senator has a lot of contempt for Americans. We can read in the Chicago Tribune (12-21-97) that Senator Obama wrote a laudatory review of Ayers' book on the juvenile justice system, A Kind and Just Parent (1997). We can read on pages 81-82 in Ayers' book that he knew the "writer" Barack Obama.

Jack Cashill observes (10-23-08):

There was a good deal of literary back-scratching going on in Chicago’s Hyde Park. Obama, for instance, wrote a short and glowing review of Ayers’ 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, for the Chicago Tribune [See Senator Obama's review on page 5 of the Chicago Review book section on December 21, 1997]. In that same book, perhaps with a self-congratulatory wink, Ayers cites the “writer” Barack Obama [see A Kind and Just Parent, pg. 81-82] as one among the celebrities in his neighborhood. [See a series of articles by Jack Cashill that makes the case that Bill Ayers ghosted Senator Obama's book Dreams from My Father here. Cashill believes that Senator Obama's memoir bears a strong resemblance to Bill Ayers terrorist memoir Fugitive Days. ]

Zombietime (10-22-08) explains:

This essay features many high-resolution scans of quotes and entire pages taken directly from Prairie Fire, which journalists, bloggers and other media members are free to copy and re-post...

This essay only exists to correct and unequivocably debunk claims routinely made by the mainstream media over the last few weeks about William Ayers, his beliefs, and the purpose behind his bombing campaign during the 1970s.

Specifically, when questions arose during the 2008 presidential race about Barack Obama's past associations with William Ayers, many media reports and articles blandly described Ayers as a "Vietnam-era radical" and the Weather Underground as a group that set bombs "to protest against the Vietnam War." Both of these characterizations are demonstrably inaccurate.

Furthermore: Obama and his supporters at first claimed he barely knew who Ayers was, but when public awareness of the connections between Obama and Ayers became too numerous and too strong to deny, Obama's supporters have now begun resorting to a fallback position: that William Ayers wasn't such a bad guy after all, and that it is no shame to be associated with him.

Here are some highlights of the Zombietime (10-22-08) review, but read the whole essay and the comments:

Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism...was written and published in 1974 by William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and other members of the Weather Underground. In this slim volume, which functioned as the Weather Underground's ideological manifesto, Ayers declares himself to be a communist, and announces that his group's bombing campaign was intended to start a violent revolution to overthrow the American government...

Ayers was not simply protesting "against" the Vietnam War. Firstly, he wasn't against war in principle, he was agitating for the victory of the communist forces in Vietnam. In other words: He wasn't against the war, he was against our side in the war. This is spelled out in great detail in Prairie Fire. Secondly, and more significantly, the Vietnam War was only one of many issues cited by the Weather Undergound as the justifications for their violent acts. As you will see below, in various quotes from Prairie Fire and in their own list of their violent actions (and in additional impartial documentary links), Ayers and the Weather Underground enumerated dozens of different grievances as the rationales for their bombings -- their overarching goal being to inspire a violent mass uprising against the United States government in order to establish a communist "dictatorship of the proletariat," in Ayers' own words.

Ayers and his co-authors freely brag about their bombings and other violent and illegal acts, and even provide a detailed list, most likely typed up by Ayers himself, of the crimes they had committed up to that point. Ayers' list, scanned directly from Prairie Fire, is shown below. He may have escaped conviction due to a legal technicality (the prosecutors failed to get a warrant during some of their surveillance of the Weather Underground), but this in no way means that Ayers was factually innocent of the crimes. As has been widely reported, after the case against him was dropped, Ayers decribed himself as "guilty as hell, free as a bird."

Just because Ayers tries to appear respectable now doesn't mean that he wasn't a violent revolutionary in the past. In fact, as the text of Prairie Fire shows, Ayers was one of the most extreme extremists in American political history. And as the links given as the end of this essay will prove, Ayers is just as politically radical now as he was back then. He has never renounced the political views he professed in the 1960s and 1970s. The only difference is that now he no longer commits violence to achieve his goals. After his stint as the leader of the Weather Underground, he shifted to a different tactic: to spread his ideology under the aegis of academia. But the goal remains the same: to turn America into a communist nation. Ayers' contemporary writings contain many of the same ideas (and even the same phrases) found in Prairie Fire, just toned down to make them more palatable in polite society...

On page 16 of Prairie Fire, Ayers and his fellow co-authors brag about their numerous acts of domestic terrorism, and provide a handy list detailing not only each crime but in most cases the justification for each crime as well. Note an important detail: Most of the stated rationales for the Weather Underground's violent acts have nothing whatsoever to do with Vietnam. This disproves the ubiquitous media assertion that Ayers and the Weather Underground were "Vietnam War protesters." Also note Wikipedia's list of Weather Underground actions that provides additional details regarding their putative justifications, including bombing a bank "in solidarity with striking Puerto Rican cement workers" and bombing a federal office building due to "the need for women to take control of daycare, healthcare, birth control and other aspects of women's daily lives," among many others which make no mention of Vietnam. Also note that the bombings and other violent acts continued after Prairie Fire was published, and that all the Weather Underground "actions" in 1974 and '75 happened after the United States had already pulled its ground troops out of Vietnam and was no longer an active combatant in the ground war, which would have rendered any Vietnam War protests pretty much meaningless.

London Times Dismissive of Jack Cashill's Theory but Doesn't Address the Evidence

Weather Underground Terrorist Bill Ayers

UPDATE: Yavelow Study Confirms Ayers Hand In Obama's "Dreams" (11-2-08) by Jack Cashill

In my previous post I noted that Dr. Jack Cashill had written that the London Times was giving consideration to his theory, which he has developed in a series of articles, that the terrorist Bill Ayers ghostwrote Senator Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father (1995).

The Times has just posted an article that dismisses this theory in an article titled "Republicans try to use Oxford don to smear Barack Obama" (11-2-08).

Still, a major newspaper has at least mentioned this controversy, if only to dismiss it as the work of Republican operatives. I notice that The Times failed to get a denial from Senator Obama. Will Barack Obama personally deny that Bill Ayers had anything to do with Dreams From My Father or will he say nothing and let the media do his talking? I want to hear Senator Obama deny that Bill Ayers had anything to do with his book.

I am distrustful of this article because the author dismisses the evidence that Senator Obama is "palling around" with Bill Ayers.

The Times article is dishonest not to note the fact that Bill Ayers mentioned his neighbor the "writer barack Obama" in his book A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court (1997) and that Senator Obama responded with a glowing review of Bill Ayers' book in the Chicago Tribune (12-21-97).

A young academic named David S. Tanenhaus, who admires Bill Ayers, admits in the title of an article he wrote-- "The Bill Ayers that Barack Obama and I worked with was no "domestic terrorist"--that Senator Obama "worked with" Bill Ayers.

The Times (11-2-08) writes:

The Republicans have made a last-minute attempt to prevent Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House by trying to recruit an Oxford academic to “prove” that his autobiography was ghostwritten by a former terrorist...

Dr Peter Millican, a philosophy don at Hertford College, Oxford, has devised a computer software program that can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favourite words and phrases.

He was contacted last weekend and offered $10,000 (£6,200) to assess alleged similarities between Obama’s bestseller, Dreams from My Father, and Fugitive Days, a memoir by William Ayers.

Ayers, now a university professor in Chicago, co-founded the Weathermen, a radical 1960s underground group that bombed government buildings in Washington and New York. The Republicans accuse Obama of “palling around” with him.

The offer to Millican to prove that Ayers wrote Obama’s book was made by Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah. He hoped to corroborate a theory advanced by Jack Cashill, an American writer.

Fox and Cannon each suggested to The Sunday Times that the other had taken the initiative.

Cannon said that he merely recommended computer testing of the books. He doubted whether Obama wrote his autobiography, adding: “If Ayers was the author, that would be interesting.”

Fox said he had hoped that Cannon would raise the $10,000 to run a computer test. “It was Congressman Cannon who initially pointed me in that direction and, from our conversation, I thought he might be able to find someone [to raise the $10,000].”

He believed that if “proof” of Ayers’s involvement was provided by an Oxford academic it would be political dynamite.

Fox contacted Millican, who said: “He was entirely upfront about this. He offered me $10,000 and sent me electronic versions of the text from both books.”
Millican took a preliminary look and found the charges “very implausible”. A deal was agreed for more detailed research but when Millican said the results had to be made public, even if no link to Ayers was proved, interest waned.

Millican said: “I thought it was extremely unlikely that we would get a positive result. It is the sort of thing where people make claims after seeing a few crude similarities and go overboard on them.” He said Fox gave him the impression that Cannon had got “cold feet about it being seen to be funded by the Republicans”.

Cannon insisted, however, that he was not interested in making an issue of Obama’s memoir “even if it were scientifically proven” to be someone else’s work. [See full text]