As the presidential campaign heats up, the two Democratic contenders—Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are shoring up their base on college campuses, areas mostly off-limits for Republicans.

With typical perception, activist and author Star Parker zeroes in on an aspect of the controversy involving the Illinois senator and his pastor that many media folk miss. “In my speaking tours at universities around the country, students tell me that they hear from many professors a worldview not much different from what we’re hearing on the footage of Wright’s sermons,” Parker states in her weekly column. “Can we forget prestigious Columbia University’s inviting, and providing a gracious forum for, Iran’s maniac president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to speak there (in Clinton’s state of New York)?”
The founder of the Coalition for Urban Education and Renewal, Parker argues that the fringe positions of the would-be party standard-bearers are not all that dissimilar, from their academic cheerleaders or from each other. “Take, for instance, Wright’s outrageous accusation that AIDS in the black community is the result of some racial conspiracy,” Parker observes. “Last summer, the Democratic presidential candidates debated at Howard University. A black journalist asked for comments about why AIDS is ravaging young black women,” Parker reminds us. “Clinton observed, ‘You know … if HIV/AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country.’”

And the similarities don’t end at the water’s edge, Parker notes. “Or how about Wright’s trip with the Rev. Louis Farrakhan to visit Moammar Gadhafi in Libya?” she asks. “So let’s recall Clinton’s famous embrace of and kissing Soha Arafat, wife of terrorist Yasser.” “Clinton wants to credit her years as first lady as relevant experience to be president. In those years, her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, transformed Arafat from terrorist to statesman, inviting him to the White House and to Camp David to negotiate peace.

“The fruits of this folly are pretty clear today. In a recent poll done by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, as reported in The New York Times, 84 percent of Palestinians surveyed approved of the recent terror attack in which eight teen-age Israeli rabbinic students were murdered in a Jerusalem seminary.”

Incidentally, Sen. Clinton just made another campaign stop at George Washington University. Additionally, the NAACP’s Julian Bond, a long-time Democratic Party activist, is scheduled to deliver the commencement address at GWU.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.