The Woods Fund

The Woods Fund is supposedly an anti-poverty group in the Chicago area that has made notoriety due to Obama serving on it’s Board of Directors. Obama joined the board of the Woods Fund in 1993 and remained until 2002. Bill Ayers, the notable domestic terrorist who was involved in the bombing of government facilities during the Woodstock generation, served on the Woods board for three years of Obama’s tenure and remained on the board after Obama departed. These facts are not in dispute.

Perhaps the most notorious of the Woods Fund recipients of grant money was the Arab American Action Network (AAAN). AAAN was established in 1995 as non-profit group supposedly dedicated to improving the conditions of Arab immigrants in the Chicago area.

But its activities were hardly benign. For example, AAAN sponsored a Palestinian art exhibit on the “Nakba” — that is, the “catastrophe” of Israel’s establishment in 1948. AAAN’s officials routinely have made statements vilifying Israel. AAAN Board member Ali Abunimah in 2002 said: “‘By deliberately denying food, water and medical aid, and wantonly destroying public and private property, and deliberately destroying the economy in the occupied territories, Israel is in flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention. … Unfortunately, we are seeing the world turn a blind eye to atrocities being committed under its nose.” (Abunimah co-founded and operates the Electronic Intifada, a website replete with anti-Israel slurs and which declares Israel to be an apartheid state.)

On the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004, Hatem Abudayyeh, executive director of AAAN, announced: “Arafat was a great man. Yes, Arafat was an icon. … We’re saddened by his death, but we don’t ignore the fact that this is not an issue of individuals, it’s an issue of a people who have been oppressed and occupied for 55 years.”

Also serving on the Woods Fund at the time was Palestinian activist and now professor at Columbia University Rashid Khalidi, whose wife headed AAAN. The Woods Fund granted AAAN $40,000 in 2001 and $70,000 in 2002. As Salon magazine wrote, this was “nepotism, Chicago style.”

Khalidi, a former spokesman for Yasser Arafat, held a fundraiser for Obama in 2000 during his unsuccessful bid for Congress. In 2003, during a dinner honoring Khalidi for becoming the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia, Obama warmly praised him.

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