Allies in War By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, September 17, 2001
ON THE MORNING OF THE ATTACKS on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, along with a million other readers of the New York Times including many who would never be able to read the paper again, I opened its pages to be confronted by a color photo showing a middle-aged couple holding hands and affecting a defiant look at the camera. The article was headlined in an irony that could not have been more poignant, "No Regrets For A Love Of Explosives." The couple pictured were Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former leaders of the 1960s’ Weather Underground, America’s first terrorist cult. One of their bombing targets, as it happened, was the Pentagon.
"I don’t regret setting bombs," Ayers was quoted in the opening line of the Times profile; "I feel we didn’t do enough." In 1969, Ayers and his wife convened a "War Council" in Flint Michigan, whose purpose was to launch a military front inside the United States with the purpose of helping Third World revolutionaries conquer and destroy it. Taking charge of the podium, dressed in a high-heeled boots and a leather mini-skirt – her signature uniform – Dorhn incited the assembled radicals to join the war against "Amerikkka" and create chaos and destruction in the "belly of the beast."
Her voice rising to a fevered pitch, Dohrn raised three fingers in a "fork salute" to mass murderer Charles Manson whom she proposed as a symbol to her troops. Referring to the helpless victims of the Manson Family as the "Tate Eight" (the most famous was actress Sharon Tate) Dohrn shouted:
"Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!"
Embarrassed today by this memory, but unable to expunge it from the record and unwilling to repudiate her terrorist deeds, Dorhn resorts to the lie direct. "It was a joke," she told the sympathetic Times reporter, Dinitia Smith; she was actually protesting America’s crimes. "We were mocking violence in America. Even in my most inflamed moment I never supported a racist mass murderer." In 1980, I taped interviews with thirty members of the Weather Underground who were present at the Flint War Council, including most of its leadership. Not one of them thought Dohrn was anything but deadly serious. Outrageous nihilism was the Weatherman political style. As soon as her tribute to Manson was completed, Dohrn was followed to the Flint platform by another Weather leader who ranted, "We’re against everything that’s ‘good and decent’ in honky America. We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mothers’ nightmares."
It has long been a fashion among media sophisticates to ridicule the late J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI men who sought to protect Americans from the threats posed by people like Ayers and Dohrn in their "days of rage." But Hoover’s description of Bernardine Dohrn as "La Pasionara of the lunatic left" is far more accurate than anything that can be found in the Times profile.
Instead of a critique of this malignant couple and their destructive resume, the Times’ portrait provides a soft-focus promotion for Ayers’ newly published Fugitive Days, a memoir notable for its dishonesty and its celebration of his malevolent exploits. Ayers’ text wallows in familiar Marxist incitements and the homicidal delusions of Sixties radicalism, including a loving reprint of an editorial from the old socialist magazine Alarm! Written by Albert Parsons, one of the Haymarket anarchists, whom the Weathermen idolized:
"Dynamite! Of all the good stuff, that is the stuff! Stuff several pounds of this sublime stuff into an inch pip...plug up both ends, insert a cap with a fuse attached, place this in the immediate vicinity of a lot of rich loafers who live by the sweat of other people’s brows, and light the fuse. A most cheerful and gratifying result will follow. In giving dynamite to the downtrodden millions of the globe, science has done its best work."
In Fugitive Days, Ayers has written – and the Times promoted – a text that the bombers of the World Trade Center could have packed in their flight bags alongside the Koran, as they embarked on their sinister mission.
"Memory is a motherf*cker," Ayers warns his readers, in the illiterate style that made him an icon of the New Left. It is as close as he gets to acknowledging that his account leaves World Trade Center size holes in the story of his criminal past. Among them is its second half, how Weatherman imploded in the year other Americans were celebrating the bicentennial of their nation. It imploded because the devotion of the terrorists to the bibles of the cause – Lenin, Stalin, Mao – eventually led them into a series of brainwashing rituals and purges that decimated their ranks. None of this is remembered in Ayers’ book. Nor is the passage of their closest comrades into the ranks of the May 19th Communist Movement, which murdered three officers – including the first black policeman on the Nyack force, during an infamous robbery of a Brinks armored car in 1981. Caveat emptor. The point of the omissions is to hide from others (and from Ayers himself) the real-world consequences of the anti-American ideologies, which took root in the Sixties and now flourish on college campuses across the country.
Today William Ayers is not merely an author favored by the New York Times, but a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His Lady Macbeth is not merely a lawyer, but a member of the American Bar Association’s governing elite, as well as the director of Northwestern University’s Children and Family Justice Center. These facts reflect a reality about the culture of facile defamation of America and ready appeasement of her mortal enemies, that confronts us as we struggle to deal with the terrorist attack.
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FrontPageMag.com Allies in War By David Horowitz
Vastly Illuminating, 