The Real Bill Ayers by Bill Ayers

[djm99]

The Real Bill Ayers By WILLIAM AYERS
Published: December 5, 2008

IN the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”

Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.

I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.

With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.

Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.

Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.

I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.

I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.

The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.

We — the broad “we” — wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war.

The dishonesty of the narrative about Mr. Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other’s behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we’ve been unable to rise above it.

President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others, I wish I knew him better.

Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let’s hope they never will again. And let’s hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.

William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of “Fugitive Days” and a co-author of the forthcoming “Race Course.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/opinion/06ayers.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

 

[SteveInBrooklyn]

The Real Bill Ayers By WILLIAM AYERS
Published: December 5, 2008

IN the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”

Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.

I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.

With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.

Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.

Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.

I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.

I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.

The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.

We — the broad “we” — wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war.

The dishonesty of the narrative about Mr. Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other’s behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we’ve been unable to rise above it.

President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others, I wish I knew him better.

Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let’s hope they never will again. And let’s hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.

William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of “Fugitive Days” and a co-author of the forthcoming “Race Course.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/opinion/06ayers.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Right on Bill Ayers!!! Keep the books and media appearances coming!!! The youth of America need wise people to guide them!!!

 

[Seewhatimesdone]

Thanks for posting!

 

[loco4dis]

"Extreme vandalism." Attempted murder. I guess it's all the same in the sad, sick, twisted, murderous, violent, unrepentent world of terrorist William Ayers. Here's another view of the "extreme vandalism" of the Weather Underground.

By JOHN M. MURTAGH
Fire in the Night
The Weathermen tried to kill my family.
30 April 2008

During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.

In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course, we’d call that a car bomb.) A neighbor heard the first two blasts and, with the remains of a snowman I had built a few days earlier, managed to douse the flames beneath the car. That was an act whose courage I fully appreciated only as an adult, an act that doubtless saved multiple lives that night.

I still recall, as though it were a dream, thinking that someone was lifting and dropping my bed as the explosions jolted me awake, and I remember my mother’s pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn’t leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: FREE THE PANTHER 21; THE VIET CONG HAVE WON; KILL THE PIGS.

For the next 18 months, I went to school in an unmarked police car. My mother, a schoolteacher, had plainclothes detectives waiting in the faculty lounge all day. My brother saved a few bucks because he didn’t have to rent a limo for the senior prom: the NYPD did the driving. We all made the best of the odd new life that had been thrust upon us, but for years, the sound of a fire truck’s siren made my stomach knot and my heart race. In many ways, the enormity of the attempt to kill my entire family didn’t fully hit me until years later, when, a father myself, I was tucking my own nine-year-old John Murtagh into bed.

Though no one was ever caught or tried for the attempt on my family’s life, there was never any doubt who was behind it. Only a few weeks after the attack, the New York contingent of the Weathermen blew themselves up making more bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse. The same cell had bombed my house, writes Ron Jacobs in The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. And in late November that year, a letter to the Associated Press signed by Bernardine Dohrn, Ayers’s wife, promised more bombings.

As the association between Obama and Ayers came to light, it would have helped the senator a little if his friend had at least shown some remorse. But listen to Ayers interviewed in the New York Times on September 11, 2001, of all days: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Translation: “We meant to kill that judge and his family, not just damage the porch.” When asked by the Times if he would do it all again, Ayers responded: “I don’t want to discount the possibility.”

Though never a supporter of Obama, I admired him for a time for his ability to engage our imaginations, and especially for his ability to inspire the young once again to embrace the political system. Yet his myopia in the last few months has cast a new light on his “politics of change.” Nobody should hold the junior senator from Illinois responsible for his friends’ and supporters’ violent terrorist acts. But it is fair to hold him responsible for a startling lack of judgment in his choice of mentors, associates, and friends, and for showing a callous disregard for the lives they damaged and the hatred they have demonstrated for this country. It is fair, too, to ask what those choices say about Obama’s own beliefs, his philosophy, and the direction he would take our nation.

At the conclusion of his 2001 Times interview, Ayers said of his upbringing and subsequent radicalization: “I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.”

Funny thing, Bill: one night, so did I.

John M. Murtagh is a practicing attorney, an adjunct professor of public policy at the Fordham University College of Liberal Studies, and a member of the city council in Yonkers, New York, where he resides with his wife and two sons.

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0430jm.html

 

[LoraJ]

For those who have Netflix, you can see a documentary about the Weather Underground via "Watch it Now". I didn't get through the whole thing, but it was interesting since I am studying that time in history right now.

 

[SteveInBrooklyn]

Murtaugh is full of it. There is absolutely no evidence that Ayers had anything whatsoever to do with the events he describes.

 

[happygirl]

Is he trying to hurt or help himself with that nonsense?

 

[SwedishMeatball]

Awwww poor misunderstood Billy. I'm shocked that such a commie loving SOB would try to paint himself in such a way.

 

[LakeAriel]

Thanks for posting this. As someone who grew up in the 60's in the Bronx NY, I saw far too much death from the war in Vietnam.
Though I never would have engaged in radical protest, I certainly did protest that war..
There was a prominent poster back then that said..

Suppose they gave a War and nobody Came?

How true, today as well.

 

[chrisw127]

I'm so happy he spoke out. What an intelligent, thoughful man.

 

[freckles and boo]

I don't know much about Ayers but I do think his "relationship" with Obama was exaggerated. I also know that Vietnam was immediate and important to that generation. My mother graduated from high school in 1965. In her senior yearbook she kept track of the boys from her class who were killed in Vietnam over the course of the war. It is so strange to see, in writing, "Killed in Vietnam" (and the year written) under the senior pictures of at least a dozen boys. My father joined the Army Reserves and avoided the draft but he lost friends, too.

 

[John Smith1]

LOL, "palling around with terrorists" comes to mind. Too bad none of that crap worked!

Maybe they learned that most people didn't sit around shivering at every little thing?

 

[allison443]

I read both articles. I think there is an inconsistency.

Ayers says he founded the Weather Underground after the Greenwich Village explosion.

Murtagh says the attack on his family occurred a few weeks before that Greenwich Village explosion, but specifically states that the attack was committed by the Weather Underground. But according to Ayers the W.U. wasn't founded yet.

Does anyone know which one is true??

 

[Goofyluver]

Thank you for posting this.

I'm sure there are still some that refuse to believe the truth about the relationship between Ayers and Obama.

And to them I would say...

The lies and smears didn't work. We're 45 days away from a new administration. Believe what you want. But, clearly, people don't buy what you're selling.

 

[LoraJ]

I read both articles. I think there is an inconsistency.

Ayers says he founded the Weather Underground after the Greenwich Village explosion.

Murtagh says the attack on his family occurred a few weeks before that Greenwich Village explosion, but specifically states that the attack was committed by the Weather Underground. But according to Ayers the W.U. wasn't founded yet.

Does anyone know which one is true??

The members were part of the SDS, but they had a more radical philosophy. They were gruped together in 1969 but didn't call themselves the Weather Underground untl after the bombing in the village That's according to Wikipedia.

 

[rayelias]

I simply cannot believe that people are actually standing up for and applauding this man! I am dumbfounded.

Just because he is a huge OS, I guess that means all the other OS have to march in lock-step in support of him.

I guess if Osama Bin Laden had feverishly supported Obama, like Bill Ayers did, they'd be sticking up for him, too.

The sad part is that many of the OS don't realize how badly they've been brainwashed.

 

[crazyforgoofy]

I simply cannot believe that people are actually standing up for and applauding this man! I am dumbfounded.

Just because he is a huge OS, I guess that means all the other OS have to march in lock-step in support of him.

I guess if Osama Bin Laden had feverishly supported Obama, like Bill Ayers did, they'd be sticking up for him, too.

The sad part is that many of the OS don't realize how badly they've been brainwashed.

I stand and applaud Dr. Ayers because of who he is and what he has done. Like it or not the Weather Underground and many others helped bring the war in Vietnam to an end thereby saving the lives of both Americans and Vietnamese.

Bill Ayers may or may not be a supporter of President-elect Obama. That has nothing to do with why I respect him. I respect him because he cared enough to do something. The destruction of buildings was illegal and it was wrong but he did what he felt he had to do to bring that awful war to an end. For that I am grateful. Since that time he has lived his life in the service of education. For that I admire him.

As for the Osama bin Laden nonsense - PLEASE BE SERIOUS. I could post blanket statements about the Obama haters...

 

[IDoDis]

I believe the main point here is that the McCain campaign (namely Palin) tried to paint a picture that Obama was in kahoots with this man and that turned out to be complete utter nonsense. Just a boatload of lies and smears.

 

[crazyforgoofy]

I believe the main point here is that the McCain campaign (namely Palin) tried to paint a picture that Obama was in kahoots with this man and that turned out to be complete utter nonsense. Just a boatload of lies and smears.

But it didn't work!

 

[SwedishMeatball]

I believe the main point here is that the McCain campaign (namely Palin) tried to paint a picture that Obama was in kahoots with this man and that turned out to be complete utter nonsense. Just a boatload of lies and smears.

I'm surprised that Obama wouldn't want to be associated with Mr. Ayres. I mean obviously he is a splinter off the true cross.