Outpouring of academic support for Bill Ayers — 3,200-sign petition for terrorist linked to Obama

Thousands of academics have signed an online petition in support of Bill Ayers, the 1960s-radical-turned-college professor whose ties to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama were a matter of hot dispute in Wednesday night's debate.

The petition, which has circulated through university faculties across the nation, says critics of Ayers, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, are trying to "intimidate free thinking and stifle critical dialogue."

The petition represents a rare attempt to defend Ayers, whose name has become a political epithet. Republicans have called him a "domestic terrorist," and presidential candidate John McCain said Wednesday night that Obama's dealings with him raise questions of character.

Obama, for his part, has downplayed his connections with Ayers and disavowed Ayers' violent acts. But Ayers, his supporters say, has dimensions that are being ignored amid the election-year tumult.

Ayers "built an extraordinary life," said Lawrence Grossberg, a University of North Carolina Chapel Hill communications studies professor who signed the petition. "He has become one of the leading scholars in the field of education. (People are) excoriating him for things he did 40 years ago and misrepresenting what he has done since, in order to make someone else suffer. That doesn't seem very American to me."

But George Leef, director of research for the John William Pope Foundation for Education Policy, a conservative Raleigh, N.C., think tank, said the petition's signers are conveniently ignoring key facts. Ayers was never charged with killing anyone, but people were killed by bombs linked to his organization.

A 1970 pipe bomb in San Francisco attributed to the group killed a police officer and hurt another, and an accidental 1970 explosion in a Greenwich Village basement killed three radicals. In 1981, two police officers and a security guard were killed in the robbery of an armored truck in New York that involved two Weather Underground members.

"There is a lot of selective indignation in America, and the academic world is as prone to that as anyone else," Leef said. "If Ayers at one point had expressed a favorable opinion of the Ku Klux Klan, I don't think he would have ever lived that down."

In the late 1960s, Ayers helped form the Weather Underground, a group that launched a series of bombings targeting U.S. landmarks. Ayers was charged in 1970 with inciting to riot and conspiracy to bomb public buildings, but the charges were dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct. He has since redefined himself -- in some circles -- as an education scholar, the author or editor of about 15 books. He advocates for school reform and helped win nearly $50 million in grants for Chicago schools.

Ayers and Obama live near each other in Chicago and worked with a charity and foundation board together. In addition, Ayers once hosted a political meeting for Obama in the mid-1990s as Obama prepared to run for the state Senate in Illinois.

At Wednesday night's debate, McCain said the scope of Ayers' ties to Obama have not been fully explored. "We need to know the full extent of that relationship," he said.

Obama said that Ayers "engaged in despicable acts. ... I have roundly denounced those acts." He said Ayers has had no involvement in his campaign and would have no role in an Obama administration.

Duke law professor Michael Tigar has known the couple for many years and respects their academic work. Tigar, who also signed the petition, criticized attempts to link Obama with Ayers' past indiscretions.

The petition's origin isn't clear. It is signed only "Friends and supporters of Bill Ayers," and it doesn't address the most destructive acts committed by Ayers and his group, such as bombs set off at the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon.

It reads in part, "The current characterizations of Professor Ayers -- 'unrepentant terrorist,' 'lunatic leftist' -- are unrecognizable to those who know or work with him. It's true that Professor Ayers participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans.

"His participation in political activity 40 years ago is history; what is most relevant now is his continued engagement in progressive causes, and his exemplary contribution -- including publishing 16 books -- to the field of education. The current attacks appear as part of a pattern of 'exposes' and assaults designed to intimidate free thinking and stifle critical dialogue."

“Dreams from My Father” was NOT written by Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., the charismatic, messianic Magic, um, Mulatto.

In style and content, it looks almost exactly like some screed from one William Charles Ayers, known terrorist and indicted co-conspirator who escaped conviction and sentencing on a technical error in the case presented against him by the United States in 1980 (Jimmy Carter administration, when procedure became much more important than assigning guilt). Keep in mind, that young Bill Ayers, campus radical and doper, was the son of a very prominent family in Chicago, highly placed in the Cook County Democrat Machine, Thomas Ayers.

There are a couple of important connecting steps here. One is through Bill Ayers’ spouse, one Bernadine Dohrn. A little more digging into the background of the Magic, um, Mulatto and the known terrorist, would suggest that their relationship is even older still. Obama’s wife Michelle worked at the prestigious Sidley Austin law firm in Chicago from 1988 through 1991, at about the same time as Bernardine Dohrn, the wife, and fellow terrorist, of Bill Ayers.

According to reports from Chicago, it is widely believed that Dohrn acquired her position at Sidley Austin, at least in part, because of her father-in-law, Thomas Ayers, CEO of Commonwealth Edison, the firm’s largest, and most important client. This, coupled with the “coincidental” employment of Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, was contrived to have a place for the young man recently arrived from Columbia University in New York, Barry Soetero, a young man who held an Indonesian citizenship.

Well, a couple of things had to be “fixed” here. First, shuck the Indonesian ties, and paint young Barry as being an American citizen by birth. After all, when he was born, his mother was an American teenager living in Hawaii, wasn’t she? By all accounts, Stanley Ann Dunham was a headstrong young hellion, doing all this “in your face” to spite her parents, by consorting with this bigamist from Kenya, a lapsed Muslim of mixed Black and Arabic heritage.

After a couple years of this, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., decided to scoot off to Harvard. Young Stanley Ann and her son were at loose ends, so she found another Muslim, an Indonesian student named Lolo Soetoro. and moved the family to Indonesia, where she gave birth to a daughter, Maya, and persuaded Lolo to adopt young Barry, giving him Indonesian citizenship. While there, Dunham would wake a young Barry up as early as 4 a.m. to give him extra lessons, scared he wasn’t being challenged enough at school, and made him read books about the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., and listen to recordings by Mahalia Jackson to keep him connected to his black roots.

When Barry was 10, Dunham allowed him to move back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents and attend Punahou, an elite prep school. She joined him a year later, in 1972. She and Soetoro did not live together again, but did not divorce until 1980.

Dunham pursued a Ph.D. and did her fieldwork back in Indonesia, leaving Barry and his sister with her parents. She died in 1995 from ovarian cancer, but is largely credited with helping build the microfinance program in Indonesia through her anthropological research on how people worked. Obama has often spoken about what a tremendous influence she was on his life. Is it possible Barry acquired a dislike for America from his mother, and has worked his way up the American elite ladder of education and career while sharing the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion? Has he used the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist like those of his mother by living with his subjects, speaking their language, and eliciting their hopes and fears but remaining at emotional distance and is the political equivalent of a sociopath?

Young Barry was introduced to Michelle, and it was a match made in - wait, what is the Muslim equivalent of Heaven? “Farados” I believe, is the Farsi term, and it is often translated as “Paradise”, but it is fundamentally different. In the Muslim version, Farados was reserved for the perished warriors who had waged Jihad upon the infidels and the apostates within Islam. In this Farados, the rewards included 72 virgins for each of these warriors, a concept that is impossible to construct logically.

So a backdrop and a veneer of respectability had to be established. Well, right at hand was the Trinity Church of Christ, a congregation sufficiently liberal to be accepting of Black Liberation, and of the Black Nation of Islam, a further variation on the “old-tyme” Muslim orthodoxy. Into this mix, there stood middle-aged Bill Ayers, concocting a new philosophy of learning in the inner city schools, indoctrinating a whole new generation on the politics and messages of taking the Black Liberation movement out into the community, reinforcing what was being preached from the pulpit of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and augmented by the orations of Louis Farrakhan.

By all these associations, Barack Obama HAD to been well acquainted with both Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn LONG before 1995, probably before he attended Harvard Law School. Since we know little of Barack Obama’s scholastic achievements, this placement at Harvard HAD to be an “affirmative action” slot, as was his position of “President” (not “Editor”) of the Harvard Law Review. We DO know, however, that he is regarded as “smart”.

We also know he is the ultimate sock puppet, sharing the opinions and beliefs of the person with whom he as most recently spoken. Which is why Michelle has to stay in such close contact, as his “handler”, much like Herself, the Cold and Joyless, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had to stay close to the “Former Occupant of the Oval Office, 1993-2001”, whom we otherwise know as William Jefferson Blythe IV, but has gone by the commonly accepted name of “Bill Clinton”.

Why do Democrats only nominate dysfunctionals for the Presidency and high elective or appointive posts?

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Allies in War, by David Horowitz

ON THE MORNING OF THE ATTACKS on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon ... "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."

People are excoriating him for things he did forty years ago and misrepresenting what he has done since, in order to make someone else suffer -- yeah, right.

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