Melanie Phillips, writing in the Spectator:As reported here, Camp Obama is resorting to ever more outrageous attempts to silence the questions that are mounting about the past associations of the saviour of the planet. Given the sheer volume of information that is now available and the deeply disturbing questions this all poses, the astounding reluctance of the mainstream US media to ask those questions is a scandal which has itself become a major political issue.
[...] information has been around for the past year suggesting that Barack Obama is an integral part of a web of radical activists, whose roots go back to a clandestine Communist Party network in Hawaii centering upon his erstwhile mentor the late black poet Frank Marshall Davis, an agent of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).
Unlike Communists elsewhere, the CPUSA fused the twin ideologies of class and race oppression. In a speech last year to mark the reception of the CPUSA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University Gerald Horne, a member of the editorial board of the CPUSA journal Political Affairs, described how the CPUSA placed its emphasis on working class solidarity in tandem with staunch opposition to ‘white supremacy’.
In a dossier posted on the America’s Survival blog [pdf link available on Spectator site] Herbert Romerstein, a former US government security investigator, records how Moscow micromanaged the CPUSA. In 1935, Moscow instructed it to establish a CP apparatus in Hawaii to develop a mass revolutionary movement there and promote the withdrawal from its territory of US forces – at that time essential for the defence of the US. This Hawaii CP network was perceived by government bodies to be a major threat to US national security.
A key figure was Harry Bridges, a CP agent and head of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union. In 1948, Frank Marshall Davis came to Hawaii at the suggestion of Bridges and another secret CPUSA member, Paul Robeson. [...] In an analysis [of Davis's work], [Dr Kathryn] Takara [a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Hawaii] notes that he brought ‘an acute sense of race relations and class struggle throughout America and the world’ and that he openly discussed subjects such as American imperialism, colonialism and exploitation.