Posted on 01/07/2010 4:43:53 AM PST by SJackson
“What a country. It makes me want to puke.”
Bill Ayers, the former terrorist who’s now a professor of education at the University of Illinois, said that in 2001 about the United States.
It’s a safe bet that people with his degree of America-hatred don’t like Israel either. Indeed, Ayers has now joined 431 academics in signing an anti-Israeli petition.
Not surprisingly it accuses Israel of apartheid—the ritual accusation of the Israel-hating crowd that dreams of Israel’s Jewish-majority government being forced to dissolve the way South Africa’s white-minority government was forced to. The petition also “urge[s] our colleagues, nationally, regionally, and internationally, to stand up against Israel’s ongoing scholasticide and to support the non-violent call for academic boycott, disinvestment, and sanctions.”
Soon after signing the petition Ayers, along with his wife and fellow former terrorist Bernadine Dohrn, was in Egypt, agitating to be allowed into Gaza to express “solidarity” with the Gazans and their leadership, Hamas.
It’s a testament to the irresistible pull, for people like Ayers and Dohrn, of terrorism directed at a democratic society—in their own case, the U.S., in Hamas’s, Israel. In a 1974 manifesto, Ayers, Dohrn, and two other coauthors wrote that “We are communist women and men…deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism.” Somehow that morphs into sympathy for fanatically religious, socioculturally troglodyte Hamas—with the spilt blood of democratic citizens as the connecting glue.
Ayers’s antics are still of interest because of his close past connections with the current U.S. president. Ayers helped get Obama’s political career going in the mid-1990s by featuring him in meetings at his home. Ayers also appointed Obama as the first chairman of his school-reform group, Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and the two of them apparently worked closely together. There is even considerable evidence that Ayers ghost-wrote Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father.
It was particularly Obama’s association with Ayers and with Obama’s longtime pastor, Reverend James Wright, that sparked fears America was on the way to electing a radical president. Wright and Ayers were intensely worrisome from Israel’s standpoint, too. Ayers, for his part, accused Israel in a 2006 blog post of “invading” the New York public schools with its “elaborate, self-aggrandizing, and thoroughly dishonest story of itself….” Last month he said that “small little Israel…tends to make U.S. foreign policy” and called this a “disaster” and “something we could end.”
Were Israel’s fears that Obama would be influenced by such attitudes justified? It seemed that way for a while. As when, in his speech last June in Cairo, he found ways to relativize and mitigate all evils that occur in the Muslim world and referred only to Israeli settlements as an intolerable offense that “must stop,” and then continued (along with other members of his administration) to pound away on the settlements issue while referring only delicately and obliquely to the mounting domestic brutalities of the Iranian regime.
More recently, though, Obama and his administration have taken a softer line on Israel and allayed some of these fears. As Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren pointed out, the U.S. under Obama has in the past months backed Israel by opposing the Goldstone report and by pulling out of joint military maneuvers with Turkey after Turkey forced Israel out of them.
Reasons for the change could include Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deft deflection of the administration’s pressures; Obama’s preoccupation with a host of other issues from health care to domestic terror to Afghanistan to Yemen; and perhaps even the evident intransigence and refusal to negotiate of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.
Ideally, however, the change would reflect Obama’s progress from an Ayers-type view of the world, in which the United States and Israel are its main troublemakers, to realism about the actual threats that civilization faces. On that score, though, Obama’s continued ineptitude in dealing with Tehran means it’s much too soon to celebrate.
Israel, as the country most directly threatened by Iran’s nuclear drive, can only hope he can still shed the old myopia that led him to people like Ayers in the first place.
Soon after signing the petition Ayers, along with his wife and fellow former terrorist Bernadine Dohrn, was in Egypt, agitating to be allowed into Gaza to express “solidarity” with the Gazans and their leadership, Hamas.
Oooooh. More words of wisdom from the original Unabomber.
Wonder how many Palestinians Ayers has inspired to build their own bombs?
He also said:
"Guilty as hell, free as a bird — America is a great country."
[and]
"I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."
If I hated a place as much as Ayers hates America I would move somewhere that is more to my liking (such as Iran). Bill Ayers makes me want to puke...
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Bill Ayers belongs in jail. Bill Ayers makes me want to puke. He is a subhuman POS.
Heh heh. Dr of Education. The most worthless degree in human history.
Now, that should be the short list for monitoring research topics and data quality at the peer-review level of higher education. (just a hint)
Thanks.
Ayers was a little Marxist creep back in 1970, and he’s still a little Marxist creep. He doesn’t like the U.S. much, either, having attempted to overthrow the entire society. I would rather listen to a street corner ranter than listen to a whining, unprincipled bastard like Bill Ayers.
Bill Ayers? You mean Obama’s mentor, who wrote his first biography?
Yep, that’s the one!
Ayers is a vicious killer of the most cowardly degree. He must be condemned, shamed, shunned, and hounded from public life. It is a duty for concientious citizens to broadcast unrelenting outrage at Ayers and his vile wife Dohrn. There is not a harsh enough penalty for such as these.
Ayers is certainly a coward. He is the US’s equivalent to the Middle Eastern cowards who set roadside bombs and then run and hide.
He’s probably worse actually. His radicalism is that of a spoiled, rich-boy dilletante, that ran home to the sanctuary of his fat-cat daddy when life on the run became tedious. He is a worm-like parasite boring into the hull of our civil ship...a “Professor” of Education?...A toxic carrier of virulent ideology entrusted to train teachers...teachers who will have access to generations of our children? We all know what Bill Ayers deserves a fate not proper for discussion on Free Republic...”For ‘tis sport to have the eginer hoist with his own petar...”
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