Bill Ayers [defended by Barbara Ransby, Graduate of Columbia same year as Obama]

http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/february-29-2008/ ^ | February 29, 2008 | Barbara Ransby, et al.

[syriacus]

February 29, 2008

Chicago Tribune Editors:

We write to voice our support for our colleague, Bill Ayers, who was the target yesterday of Jonah Goldberg’s mean-spirited muckraking journalism.

Goldberg asks why Bill Ayers is allowed to have a job as a college professor, despite his leftist views and political activities from some forty years ago? The answer is simple.

Professor Ayers has degrees from University of Michigan and Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Over the past twenty plus years he has earned the reputation of a cutting edge scholar of education, and made major contributions to our understanding of schools and the institutions impacting children.

Ayers has authored, co-authored or edited 14 books and dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters, some of them award-winning. His books have received praise from the likes of Jonathan Kozol, Studs Turkel and Scott Turow.

He has been invited to lecture around the country and internationally on pedagogy, curriculum, the politics of education, and the small schools strategy for educational excellence. He has served on numerous university and community-based committees.

During the McCarthy era of the 1950s one could be fired simply for the hint of left of center views or association with people who held those views. Perhaps Mr. Goldberg is nostalgic for an earlier time. We are not.

Sincerely,

Barbara Ransby, Associate Professor of African American Studies and History, UIC

Beth E. Richie, Professor of Criminology. Law and Justice and African American Studies, UIC

Lisa Yun Lee, Director, Jane Addams Hull House Museum at UIC

[syriacus]

1984--Barbara Ransby graduated from Columbia the same year as Obama.

Ransby got her advanced degrees at U of Michigan

2002 -- She moderated a panel which included Obama and Ayers

Ransby is Associate Professor, Gender and Women's Studies, African American Studies, and History Director, Gender and Women's Studies Program at Univ. Ill /Chicago

What other connections might she have with Obama and Ayers?

[I still care]

The fact that he tried to blow up and murder men, women and children is incidental.

[Poincare]

Ayers has done far more damage to American society as a professor of education than as a bomber. (And the damage the Weathermen did was considerable.)

[devere]

Defending Ayers is a bit like defending OJ. They are both guilty of murder.

[Brown Deer]

Mr. Goldberg is nostalgic for an earlier time. We are not.

Right. Why should those people he murdered way back then, matter to her?

[screaminsunshine]

McCarthy was right.

[danamco]

I e-mailed her about her “NO” history knowledge of the terror group!!!

[DaveTesla]

Ayers and his wife are COP KILLERS.

Perhaps Barbara could write a letter to this mans family and tell them his life did not matter:

Anti-personnel bomb set on window-ledge in San Francisco

Brian V. McDonnell, a sergeant with the San Franscisco Police Department who received fatal shrapnel wounds from a Weatherman pipe bomb set off on February 16, 1970.In a bombing that took place on February 16, 1970, and that was credited to the Weathermen at the time, a pipe bomb filled with heavy metal staples and lead bullet projectiles was set off on the ledge of a window at the Park Station of the San Francisco Police Department. In the blast, Brian V. McDonnell, a police sergeant, was fatally wounded while Robert Fogarty, another police officer, received severe wounds to his face and legs and was partially blinded.

Weatherman leader Bernardine Dohrn has been suspected of involvement in the February 16, 1970, bombing of the Park Police Station in San Francisco. At the time, Dohrn was said to be living with a Weatherman cell in a houseboat in Sausalito, California, unnamed law enforcement sources later told KRON-TV.[28] An investigation into the case was reopened in 1999,[29] and a San Francisco grand jury looked into the incident, but no indictments followed, and no one was ever arrested for the bombing. An FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl, who successfully penetrated the organization from the late summer of 1969 until April 1970, later testified to a U.S. Senate subcommittee that Bill Ayers, then a high-ranking member of the organization and a member of its Central Committee (but not then Dohrn’s husband), had said Dohrn constructed and planted the bomb. Grathwohl testified that Ayers had told him specifically where the bomb was placed (on a window ledge) and what kind of shrapnel was put in it. Grathwohl said Ayers was emphatic, leading Grathwohl to believe Ayers either was present at some point during the operation or had heard about it from someone who was there. In a book about his experiences published in 1976, Grathwohl wrote that Ayers, who had recently attended a meeting of the group's Central Committee, said Dohrn had planned the operation, made the bomb and placed it herself. In 2008, author David Freddoso commented that “Ayers and Dohrn escaped prosecution only because of government misconduct in collecting evidence against them”.


Brian V. McDonnell

[Darkwolf377]

” mean-spirited” = not fake, but accurate

[RubyR]

Found this site today. Online petition to support Bill Ayers. I just looked at the list quickly but a few names jump out for me already.

http://www.supportbillayers.org/

[syriacus]

RIP, Brian V. McDonnell.

[rockinqsranch]

“Ayers and Dohrn escaped prosecution only because of government misconduct in collecting evidence against them”.

Article after article I keep seeing that statement about “Government misconduct”.

Not wanting to miss a second of the activity at FR, I am part time researching what that misconduct was. Thus far I find it had something to do with the results of the “Church Commission”, inappropriate acquisition of evidence.

I need to do more research to get the whole picture on this apparent travesty of justice.

Have you any more information on this matter?

[DaveTesla]

Ayers and his wife were never officially tried for the death of Sgt. McDonnell.

some good information in ETL’s post
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2098457/posts?page=10#10

[pbmaltzman]

I think I threw up in my mouth, just a little, right now.

This should have had a BARF ALERT posted at the top.

[DaveTesla]

The case was Reopened in 1999 and 2003.

[syriacus]

Very interesting petition. It's nice to know that Ayers' son, Malik Dohrn is supporting him.[#115]

AT HOME WITH: Bernadine Dohrn; Same Passion, New Tactics

Malik Cochise, takes his names from Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) and the 19th-century Apache chief who fought settlers encroaching on his land.

[Wil H]

1984--Barbara Ransby graduated from Columbia the same year as Obama.

WRONG!

Obama graduated from Columbia in 1983, not 1984.

However, William Ayers graduated from Bank Street College in 1984, then went to Columbia and Graduated from there in 1987.

Bank Street College is 371 down the road from Columbia.

If Ransby knew Ayers when she was at Columbia, doesn't it seem obvious that OBAMA KNEW AYERS IN EXACTLY THE SAME SITUATION?

[syriacus]

In 2004, Bernardin Dohrn wrote a glowing review (She Challenged the Rules ) of Barbara Ransby's book Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision

Barbara Ransby, professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and herself a widely regarded and unifying radical activist, has written a profoundly brilliant and critical book that must be carried in backpacks, read and digested.

It will lead to the deepest reconsiderations of the methods and purposes of social justice. Ransby, through Baker, articulates a politics that places activists among the dispossessed with humility and deference.

She illuminates the dynamic between organizers and the community, revealing just how much organizers stand to learn if only they can observe the “democratic silences.” She synthesizes content and process. She challenges hierarchies. She redefines intellectual, ideology, leadership, and internationalist—with a gendered and grassroots cast.

This is no puff portrait, however. Ransby must deal with Baker’s participation in the NAACP’s shameful embrace of anticommunism in 1957 as a member of their Internal Security Committee.

[Carley]

Cutting edge as in cutting off the heads of those who disagree, as in Daniel Pearl murder?

We see no evidence at all that Ayers has changed his views of violence being the only way forward towards his world views.

[syriacus]

Thanks for pointing out that Obama graduated from Columbia in 1983.

Someone better tell Jesse Jackson, too.

From: http://nymag.com/tags/jesse%20jackson/barack%20obama

“According to Jackson, Obama once told him that he was a Columbia undergrad in 1984, when Jackson, Hart, and Mondale had a Democratic primary debate there.”