Ayers Unrepentant for Radical Group’s Violence in 1960s, 1970s

[2 articles]

Ayers Unrepentant for Radical Group's Violence in 1960s, 1970s

http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/08/26/obama-associate-bill-ayers-unrepentant-for-acts-of-terror/

by FOXNews.com
Tuesday, August 26, 2008

William Ayers, who was a founder of the 1960s and 1970s radical group
the Weather Underground, told FOX News correspondent James Rosen in a
candid 2004 interview that he still believed he was "on the side of
justice" years after the group's wave of attacks.

In the interview, conducted three years after the September 11
attacks, Ayers argued the U.S. government had carried out "many other
acts of terror … even recently, that are comparable," and claimed he
and his bomb-planting comrades were "restrained" in their actions.

Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, served
with Barack Obama on the board of the charitable Woods Fund of
Chicago for three years and helped launch Obama's political career in
Illinois by hosting in his Hyde Park home an informal campaign event
for the future state senator in 1995.

Ayers claimed the Weathermen were driven by "hope and love," not
despair, and said he did not think the group's violent acts,
targeting federal officials and local law enforcement officers, were
"a big deal."

Interviewed in May 2004 in connection with Rosen's book "The Strong
Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate," published recently
by Doubleday, Ayers affirmed that 9/11 was "an act of pure terror,"
one that had caused him to weep, and that terrorism is "always wrong,
always evil." But Ayers also condemned the Bush administration for
using the attacks "to advance a right-wing agenda on every front:
every uterus must be examined, every tree chopped down, every oil
well dug. I mean, it's absolute madness."

"I mean, the only group of people that I know who weren't weeping for
the next several weeks [after 9/11] were the people who were busy
typing legislation into their computers," Ayers continued.

When asked about some Palestinians who had been captured on videotape
dancing in the streets after the attacks, Ayers said coverage of
those individuals had been "overwrought" in the U.S. media, and
added: "[E]verybody in the world knows that Americans are
geographically challenged and historically challenged. We don't have
a sense of who we are or where we are. So I think every American that
I know was weeping over the next several weeks, and devastated and
shocked. Was that an act of pure terror? It absolutely was.

"And there are many other acts of terror carried out by our
government, even recently, that, that are comparable. And there are
other acts of terror that have gone on in places like Bosnia that we
forgot to notice."

Explaining how he became a leader of the radical 1960s antiwar group,
the Weathermen (and its subsequent fugitive incarnation, the Weather
Underground), Ayers was unrepentant about the group's planting of
bombs in the Capitol, the Pentagon, and other sites. "I think I was
on the side of justice and ultimately it will be seen that way,"
Ayers said. "I don't think our move was so much towards violence.

"I think that what we did was to look at this situation of 2,000
people a day being murdered [in Vietnam] and try to figure out a
couple of things. One is, how can we effectively resist the war, when
we thought our charge was to convince the majority of the American
people to oppose it. We did. And still the war went on, and still the
murder went on. So what do you do?

"And in that moment, SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and
every other organization came unglued, and people went different
ways. Some people joined the Democratic Party, tried to build a peace
wing within it; some people went to factories; some people went to
Europe; some people ran away to the hills of California. What we did
was try to build the capacity to survive what we saw was an impending
American fascism.

"We didn't want to ­ we looked at the conspiracy trial [of the
Chicago Seven], which we were very close to, and we didn't want to
spend two years defending ourselves. That seemed like a complete
waste of energy and time. And so we said to ourselves, 'What are we
going to do?'… We saw the movement either being targeted like [Black
Panther leader] Fred Hampton and shot in the head, or targeted like
the Chicago Seven, dragged into federal court, where they had to
spend zillions of resources and energy and people-hours defending
themselves against this completely corrupt government and this
completely corrupt Justice Department on this completely corrupt charge.

"So, yeah, we, we found that an appalling alternative. And so we set
about building a clandestine organization. And the whole point was to
survive them and then possibly to take the fight to them against the
war and against, against empire, generally … I think we were moving
in a direction that said demonstrations ­ you know, we've tried to
demonstrate. We've tried to petition our government. We've gone door
to door and knocked on doors. We've talked to our neighbors. We've
talked to, you know, our parents, our Republican parents. And
everybody agrees with us; but we can't stop the war. So what do we do?"

Yet Ayers rejected the notion, advanced in a 2002 documentary about
the Weather Underground, that he and his fugitive comrades ­
including his wife, Bernardine Dohrn ­ were animated solely by rage
over their inability to stop the Vietnam War. "I don't buy that even
a little," Ayers said. "I think that we were driven by hope and love
and aspiration as much as we were driven by despair."

A Marxist offshoot of the progressive SDS, the Weathermen took their
name from Bob Dylan's 1965 alienated-youth anthem "Subterranean
Homesick Blues" (with the line "You don't need a weatherman to know
which way the wind blows"), and initially demonstrated their
resistance to "Amerikan" imperialism through armed street clashes with police.

Soon, however, the group's members assumed clandestine identities,
changed their collective name to the Weather Underground, and began
detonating bombs at courthouses, correctional facilities, police
stations, the Capitol and the Pentagon. Between October 1969 and
September 1973, the Weather Underground claimed credit for some
twenty bombings across the country, in which no one was harmed ­ save
the three cell members who perished in a Greenwich Village townhouse
in March 1970, when one of their creations detonated prematurely.

Ayers claimed the fact that no other individuals were killed as a
result of the Weathermen's actions was "by design."

In his autobiography, Fugitive Days: A Memoir, Ayers recalled, he
posed the question: "How far are you willing to take that step into
what I consider the abyss of violence? And we really never did,
except for that moment in the townhouse.… I actually think destroying
property in the face of that kind of catastrophe is so ­ restrained.
And I don't see it as a big deal. I mean, the Catholic Left, when the
Berrigan Brothers climb into nuclear silos and hammer on the
warheads, is that terrible terrorism and violence? I don't, I don't
get it. I don't see what the equivalency is. Yes, they're crossing a
line; yes, they're breaking the law; yes, they're using weapons. But
they're also not hurting anybody; they're not killing anybody.
Meanwhile, in the background, 2,000 people are being lined up at a
pit and shot. And [laughs] where those things become equivalent just
boggles my mind."

While Ayers denounced Stalinism as a "poisonous, dogmatic
mind-breaking kind of logic," he lamented that "we examine less in
this country … the way the ideology of anti-communism wreaks the same
results." Speaking from his home in Hyde Park, in Chicago, Ayers
accused President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and then-Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld of "murdering innocents … humiliating people
… [and] devastating a country" in the invasion of Iraq.

"[Y]ou know, it's easy, sitting in America, with all of our wealth
and privilege, and layers and layers of denial, it's easy to say, to
point to all the evil out there in the world and say, 'But we're good
people, we're good people,'" Ayers said. "[T]he problem there is that
we fail to actually look at our history and our impact on the world.
So if you say something ­ if you point out what's happened in the
last two weeks [a reference to the Abu Ghraib scandal], 'Oh, that's
an aberration.' That's the face ­ that's ­ 'and un-American.' I love
that! Donald Rumsfeld says it's un-American! When this began, George
Bush said we're going to shock and awe. What the hell is shock and
awe? It's murdering innocents; it's humiliating people; it's
devastating a country. So we're doing it now up close and personal."
Asked about President Bush's ability to connect with voters, Ayers
said: "Well, he's very charming, and charm does get you pretty far in
American politics. It's kind of frightening."

Other subjects on which Ayers commented included the Abu Ghraib
Scandal, FOX News, John Kerry's flawed response to Republican attacks
on his war record, and the American use of military technology in the
Middle East.

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Bill Ayers: Unrepentant LYING Terrorist

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODk2ZTRmZDIwNWEzOWE2MDNhMTQ0ZWYwYmRiNWZmNDM=

by Andy McCarthy
August 27, 2008

In that Fox interview that Rich linked to, Ayers preposterously
claimed that he and his fellow Weather Underground terrorists did not
really intend to harm any people ­ the fact that no one was killed in
their 20 or so bombings was, he said, "by design"; they only wanted
to cause property damage:

Between October 1969 and September 1973, the Weather Underground
claimed credit for some twenty bombings across the country, in which
no one was harmed ­ save the three cell members who perished in a
Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970, when one of their
creations detonated prematurely. Ayers claimed the fact that no other
individuals were killed as a result of the Weathermen's actions was
"by design."

In his autobiography, Fugitive Days: A Memoir, Ayers recalled, he
posed the question: "How far are you willing to take that step into
what I consider the abyss of violence? And we really never did,
except for that moment in the townhouse.… I actually think destroying
property in the face of that kind of catastrophe is so ­ restrained.
And I don't see it as a big deal.

Right.

First of all, "that moment in the townhouse" he's talking about
happened in 1970. Three of his confederates, including his then
girlfriend Diana Oughton, were accidentally killed when the explosive
they were building to Ayers specifications (Ayers was a bomb
designer) went off during construction. As noted in Ayers' Discover
the Networks profile, the explosive had been a nail bomb. Back when
Ayers was being more honest about his intentions, he admitted that
the purpose of that bomb had been to murder United States soldiers:

That bomb had been intended for detonation at a dance that was to be
attended by army soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Hundreds of lives
could have been lost had the plan been successfully executed. Ayers
attested that the bomb would have done serious damage, "tearing
through windows and walls and, yes, people too."

In fact, Ayers was a founder of the Weatherman terror group and he
defined its purpose as carrying out murder. Again, from Discover the
Networks:

Characterizing Weatherman as "an American Red Army," Ayers summed up
the organization's ideology as follows: "Kill all the rich people.
Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill
your parents."

Now he wants you to think they just wanted to break a few
dishes. But in his book Fugitive Days, in which he boasts that he
"participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in
1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972," he
says of the day that he bombed the Pentagon: "Everything was
absolutely ideal. ... The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And
the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them."

And he wasn't singular. As I noted back in April in this article
about Obama's motley collection of radical friends, at the Weatherman
"War Council" meeting in 1969, Ayers' fellow terrorist and now-wife,
Bernadine Dohrn, famously gushed over the barbaric Manson Family
murders of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail
Folger, and three others: "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!" And as Jonah recalled
yesterday, "In appreciation, her Weather Underground cell made a
threefingered 'fork' gesture its official salute." They weren't
talking about scratching up the wall-paper.

A Weatherman affiliate group which called itself "the Family"
colluded with the Black Liberation Army in the 1981 Brinks robbery in
which two police officers and an armed guard were murdered. (Obama
would like people to believe all this terrorist activity ended in
1969 when he was eight years old. In fact, it continued well into
the eighties.) Afterwards, like Ayers and Dohrn, their friend and
fellow terrorist Susan Rosenberg became a fugitive.

On November 29, 1984, Rosenberg and a co-conspirator, Timothy Blunk,
were finally apprehended in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. At the time,
they were actively planning an unspeakable bombing campaign that
would have put at risk the lives of countless innocent people. They
also possessed twelve assorted guns (including an Uzi 9 mm.
semi-automatic rifle and an Ithaca twelve-gauge shotgun with its
barrel sawed off), nearly 200 sticks of dynamite, more than 100
sticks of DuPont Trovex (a high explosive), a wide array of blasting
agents and caps, batteries, and switches for explosive
devices. Arrayed in disguises and offering multiple false identities
to arresting officers, the pair also maintained hundreds of false
identification documents, including FBI and DEA badges.

When she was sentenced to 58 years' imprisonment in 1985, the only
remorse Rosenberg expressed was over the fact that she and Blunk had
allowed themselves to be captured rather than fighting it out with
the police. Bernadine Dohrn was jailed for contempt when she refused
to testify against Rosenberg. Not to worry, though. On his last day
in office, the last Democrat president, Bill Clinton, pardoned
Rosenberg ­ commuting her 58-year sentence to time-served.

These savages wanted to kill massively. That they killed only a few
people owes to our luck and their incompetence, not design. They and
the Democrat politicians who now befriend and serve them can
rationalize that all they want. But those are the facts.

.