Election '08: Bill Ayers isn't out bombing anymore, but he has never stopped being a radical. His ties to hostile Marxist regimes remain, raising more questions about Barack Obama's refusal to fully repudiate him.
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The Audacity Of SocialismDistancing himself, as Obama did, from the "detestable acts" of the founder of the Weather Underground terror organization, is one thing. Ayers' terror attacks — in armed robbery, police murder, attempted killings of U.S. troops, and bombings of U.S. democratic institutions to advance a Marxist revolution — were quite easy to disavow.
But Ayers' supporters say his violence was all a long time ago.
Obama emphasized that his friend's terror acts happened "when I was eight years old." Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley told the New York Times last week "he's done a lot of good in this city and nationally." He added: "This is 2008. People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life."
But a look at Ayers' whole life suggests he hasn't changed much more than his tactics. He's still the same radical he always was.
Ayers' terrorist acts in the 1970s didn't just blow in out of nowhere. Ayers moved to urban guerrilla violence after finding Tom Hayden's riot-prone Students for a Democratic Society too tame. He was inspired by the Cuban revolution of Fidel Castro, who toppled a democracy a decade earlier.
Ayers' Weathermen were part of a broad upsurge of Marxist guerrilla movements across the hemisphere, using similar tactics to establish Cuba-style regimes. These children of the rich infiltrated universities and spread violence against the "establishment," just as Ayers did.
At the time Ayers was targeting the Pentagon, Argentina's communist ERP began terror attacks in 1969, triggering a Dirty War by 1976. Brazil's MR-8 shot police and kidnapped a U.S. ambassador in 1969. In Colombia, the FARC unleashed terror in 1966, and the M-19 was born in 1970. Uruguay's Tupamaros began bombing and kidnapping in 1970. Peru's Shining Path started university agitation in 1973 and full-blown war by 1980. The Weather Underground, founded in 1969, was the same leftist revolution, U.S.-style.
Operating underground, Ayers' Weathermen aligned closely with Castro's Cuba, which aided Marxist terror groups. Some Weathermen on the run found asylum in Havana; others, like Mark Rudd, were trained by the KGB there. Cuba helped Weathermen on the lam by letting them secretly pass messages through Cuba's embassy in Canada, says FBI informant Larry Grathwohl.
Like many at the time, Ayers was a child of privilege from a wealthy family who got away with his crimes at a time when the West had lost its will. "Guilty as sin, free as a bird — America is a great country," Ayers taunted after walking free on a technicality.
Ayers is too smart to continue bombing, but remains a "revolutionary" through other means. He remains proud of his violent past and alignment with America's enemies.
"I don't regret setting bombs," he famously told the New York Times. "I feel we didn't do enough." His terrorist past reviled here, he's found a welcome embrace in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.
Obama says he barely knows him, but in the years when he was meeting and serving together on the Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund, as well as launching his career with a fundraiser in Ayers' Che Guevara-festooned house, Ayers made at least four Marxist pilgrimages to Caracas to praise Chavez's dictatorial regime.
He sits on the board of a Venezuelan government think tank called Miranda International Center, focused on bringing Cuba-style education to Venezuelan school children.
Recent polls show this turning of schools toward Marxist indoctrination terrifies average Venezuelans. Venezuelan dissidents also accuse Miranda of rewriting constitutions in South America to grant leftist leaders absolute power, with some saying Ayers had a role in 2007's effort to give Chavez total power inside Venezuela.
It's not surprising. Ayers' violent methods may have influenced Chavez's rise to power in 1998. Like Ayers' terrorists, Chavez's campaign began with Weather Underground-style hijackings of bank trucks. At the same time, captured computer documents show that Chavez took $150,000 from FARC while in prison.
Ayers' Miranda biography calls him "leader of the revolutionary and anti-imperialist group The Weather Underground which initiated armed struggle against the government of the USA for more than 10 years from the heart of the empire."
It continues: "Now, he's a professor of education and executive researcher of the University of Illinois in Chicago. He's developed courses around urban reform of schools, problems of capitalist education, and research. He is the author or editor of more than 11 books, including a memoir titled Fugitive Days on the struggle against the government of the United States."
In other words, education isn't the best credential for this supposedly distinguished professor — his terrorist past is.
It's a good guess that his biography on the Miranda site was written by Ayers himself. Ayers' Miranda peers are a soup of the international far left: a FARC apologist from Colombia, a Che-crazy UCLA professor named Peter McLaren, and activist Eva Golinger, who was closely tied to Philip Agee, the fugitive CIA traitor who died earlier this year in Havana.
Meanwhile, Ayers' stepson Chesa Boudin has close Venezuelan ties, too. He identified himself as a foreign-policy adviser intern to Venezuela's government in 2005. He had an office next to Chavez's own in the presidential palace. Not surprising, since Boudin's grandfather is Fidel Castro's personal attorney, and his mother is jailed Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin. His family ties give him street cred to communists.
This, then, is Bill Ayers.
Obama claims he had no idea about his terrorist past when he met him, and hasn't talked to him since 2005.
But with the association going back to the 1980s and Ayers making no secret of his radical views, this is hard to believe.
Given glowing profiles of Ayers and his past in the Chicago Tribune, as writer Jonah Goldberg found, and Ayers' radical agenda in education and philanthropy while Obama and Ayers served on charitable projects, it's hard to imagine anything but a deep bond.
The reality is, either Obama is naive or he doesn't care that Ayers remains an anti-American radical who would hurt his country.
His ties to the rising radicalism in Latin America continue. Could anything be more useful to Chavez than to have someone like Ayers as a go-between with a U.S. president? Obama still has repudiated only Ayers' past terrorist actions. What about his present?
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=308444682748596Just a guy in my neighborhood,a harmless weatherman.
“Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bringthe revolution home. Kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.”–Bill Ayers, Weather Underground, 1970
“America is not a just and fair and decent place,” Ayers said in 2001. “It makes me want to puke.”
Meet the Real Sarah Palin
"Just a guy in my neighborhood, a harmless weatherman. Maybe I'll invite him for dinner at the White House." B.H.O.
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