SubscribeObama Pal Ayers Is Still A Dangerous Radical
From the editorial pages of the Chicago’s City Journal:
Bill Ayers in Chicago, 2007. (Enlarge)
Obama’s Real Bill Ayers Problem
The ex-Weatherman is now a radical educator with influence.
23 April 2008
Barack Obama complains that he’s been unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. Obama has a point. In the ultraliberal Hyde Park community where the presidential candidate first earned his political spurs, Ayers is widely regarded as a member in good standing of the city’s civic establishment, not an unrepentant domestic terrorist. But Obama and his critics are arguing about the wrong moral question. The more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation’s schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today.
A Chicago native son, Ayers first went into combat with his Weatherman comrades during the “Days of Rage” in 1969, smashing storefront windows along the city’s Magnificent Mile and assaulting police officers and city officials. Chicago’s mayor at the time was the Democratic boss of bosses, Richard J. Daley. The city’s current mayor, Richard M. Daley, has employed Ayers as a teacher trainer for the public schools and consulted him on the city’s education-reform plans. Obama’s supporters can reasonably ask: If Daley fils can forgive Ayers for his past violence, why should Obama’s less consequential contacts with Ayers be a political disqualification? It’s hard to disagree. Chicago’s liberals have chosen to define deviancy down in Ayers’s case, and Obama can’t be blamed for that.
What he can be blamed for is not acknowledging that his neighbor has a political agenda that, if successful, would make it impossible to lift academic achievement for disadvantaged children. As I have shown elsewhere in City Journal, Ayers’s politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.
Indeed, the education department at the University of Illinois is a hotbed for the radical education professoriate. As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K–12 teachers need to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.” Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes. One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change.
Unfortunately, neither Obama nor his critics in the media seem to have a clue about Ayers’s current work and his widespread influence in the education schools. In his last debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama referred to Ayers as a “professor of English,” an error that the media then repeated. Would that Ayers were just another radical English professor. In that case, his poisonous anti-American teaching would be limited to a few hundred college students in the liberal arts. But through his indoctrination of future K–12 teachers, Ayers has been able to influence what happens in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of classrooms.
Ayers’s influence on what is taught in the nation’s public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for. In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.
AERA already does a great deal to advance the social-justice teaching agenda in the nation’s schools and has established a Social Justice Division with its own executive director. With Bill Ayers now part of the organization’s national leadership, you can be sure that it will encourage even more funding and support for research on how teachers can promote left-wing ideology in the nation’s classrooms—and correspondingly less support for research on such mundane subjects as the best methods for teaching underprivileged children to read.
The next time Obama—the candidate who purports to be our next “education president”—discusses education on the campaign trail, it would be nice to hear what he thinks of his Hyde Park neighbor’s vision for turning the nation’s schools into left-wing indoctrination centers. Indeed, it’s an appropriate question for all the presidential candidates.
Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.
The door to Bill Ayers’ office at the University of Illinois is covered with pictures, cartoons, graphics and various political paraphernalia. (Enlarge)
These details about Mr. Ayers will be showing up in out watchdog media any minute now.
No, wait. We have instead these “ho-hum” reactions from the hard-hitting, fact-digging Chicago media, via Editor & Publisher:
Ayers/Obama Connection Brings ‘So What?’ Reaction In Chicago Media
By Mark Fitzgerald
Published: April 24, 2008
CHICAGO His political opponents think Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s acquaintance with former Weatherman William Ayers is a weak spot worthy of attack, as certain Republican presidential nominee John McCain did again Sunday on a TV talk show.
But here in Chicago, home to both men, the charge that Obama has been friendly with the former political radical has gone nowhere.
Ayers’ extremist past has “has never bothered anyone in Chicago,” Chicago Sun-Times political columnist Lynn Sweet wrote after Obama was questioned about his relationship with Ayers in last week’s debate with Hillary Clinton.
“That’s why back in the day when Obama was starting his political career — making a visit to the Ayers home while running for a state Senate seat, and then agreeing to being on panels with him and serve on a foundation board together — it was no big deal, or any deal, to any local political reporters or to the editorial boards of the Sun-Times or Tribune,” Sweet added.
And it’s no big deal still to the Tribune editorial board, which has not endorsed a Democrat for president since 1872.
“Ah, we know Ayers too,” a Tribune editorial said last week. “And his wife, Bernardine Dohrn. If you know people in Chicago academic circles, chances are you know Ayers and Dohrn. They have not been repentant about their days in the radical, anti-war movement in the 1960s and their time fleeing federal authorities. They should be. There is still time for them to be. But they have done good work in Chicago–Ayers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Dohrn at Northwestern University Law School’s Children and Family Justice Center.”
Ayers also was given the seal of approval by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, nobody’s idea of a radical and someone who doesn’t need a weatherman to know which way the political winds are blowing.
The Ayers episode is one reason “that Americans are angry about Washington politics,” Daley said.
“One more example is the way Sen. Obama’s opponents are playing guilt by association, tarring him because he happens to know Bill Ayers,” Daley said in a statement issued last week.
Daley called Ayers “a valued member of the Chicago community” who is “worked with me in shaping our now nationally renowned school reform program.”
Chicago’s pundit class is not exactly unanimous on shrugging off the Obama/Ayers connection. Steve Chapman, a Chicago Tribune columnist of libertarian bent who also serves on the paper’s editorial board, argued Sunday that the relationship, which he said Obama was disingenuously trying to downplay, does matter.
“It’s hard to imagine he would be so indulgent if we learned that John McCain had a long association with a former Klansman who used to terrorize African-Americans,” Chapman wrote. “Obama’s conduct exposes a moral blind spot about these onetime terrorists, who get a pass because they a) fall on the left end of the spectrum and b) haven’t planted any bombs lately.
“You can tell a lot about someone from his choice of friends. What this friendship reveals is that when it comes to practicing sound moral hygiene, Obama has work to do and no interest in doing it.”
But locally, Obama is far more likely to be rapped for being too palsy, or at least endorsing, the feckless president of the Cook County Board, Todd Stroger. Chicago media critic Steve Rhodes, in his blog The Beachwood Reporter, rarely lets slip an opportunity to contrast Obama’s national image as a daring leader who will bring “change you can believe in” with his get-along, go-along relationship with city and Cook County political hacks.
He once suggested this question to Michelle Obama for an interview the Sun-Times was promoting: “How do you square Barack’s campaigning as a change agent with all the profiles of him that describe him as a cautious, conservative, ultra-pragmatic legislator?”
The Chicagoist Web site, while also mostly shrugging off the Ayers “controversy,” said it pointed to disturbing pattern:
“While their relationship just might be a tempest in a teapot — or in Obamaspeak, a ‘distraction’ — is the fact that Obama is once again downplaying a friendship really the bigger deal? After all, this is the same guy that originally tried to claim he hardly knew Tony Rezko, and had only performed a few hours of legal work for him. Where’s that famous Obama transparency? This is a ‘new kind of politics’?”
Maybe one of the problems with our country is that “teachers” like Ayers no longer cause outrage. We have been gradually conditioned to accept them.
Or, as the first article notes, we have defined deviancy down.
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15 Responses to “Obama Pal Ayers Is Still A Dangerous Radical”
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April 24th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
…Ayers’ extremist past has “has never bothered anyone in Chicago,”….
Probably true, but so what? Chicago is already a known lost cause. How’s all this playing in Peoria?
April 24th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
"the best methods for teaching underprivileged children to read."
1. Teach them the alphabet.
2. Give them a book.
3. Work with them.
Just as we do with privileged children.
Git er dun.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Ah, Obama’s Secretary of Education.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
According to a bio on Ayers, he avoided prosecution on his terrorist days, based on a technicality (how comforting is that fact). . .
So Obama The Movement says Ayers is a neighbor but he doesn’t take his counsel regularly. . .I wonder how Barry is going to explain all this away:
http://tiny.cc/Uwix5
Read it carefully, the connection between Ayers and BO and (sadly) others in Barry’s Chicago Circle is mentioned -
Sounds to me that He Who Cannot Be Named is a Typical Political Person.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Unfortunately I have a lot of teachers like this anyway, and seriously we have parents at my high school who think there should be more guys like Ayers. Sick.
Please note the Cuba T-shirt! The irony! People in Cuba are being allowed only NOW to purchase microwaves.
To modify Churchill’s quotation, "Liberalism is a retrograde force in the world."
April 24th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
I thought that was a Cubs T-shirt, but on closer inspection it does seem to say Cuba. Unbelievable.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
“I thought that was a Cubs T-shirt, but on closer inspection it does seem to say Cuba. Unbelievable.”
Yes, that is why made the photo enlarge-able.
April 24th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Tell me again why this douchebag isn’t sitting in prison?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.....al_history
Prosecutorial misconduct….say what?
I don’t believe attempted murder or conspiracy to commit murder have a statue of limitations.
Try the worthless SOB again or prosecute him in a different jurisdiction. This effin’ POS is a walking mockery of our sad sack judicial system. I’m thoroughly disgusted…. :o(
April 24th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Yep, that’s three or four outrageous stories in a row. We’re on a roll! -sigh- Our country is doomed!
April 24th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
I’m glad to see this story get some attention, even if the old media is diluting it.
This isn’t just a case of guilt by association, as Daley puts it. It’s yet another instance of a radical marxist influence in Obama’s past.
There’s a very real pattern here and when the apologist deny it, they’re either lying to themselves or everyone else. Do they actually believe that Obama doesn’t know Ayer’s history or his agenda for the educational system? An agenda that not only churns them out dumb as rocks, but one that grows generations of outraged and violent marxist. And does Obama know that they won’t regret planting a few bombs when they don’t get their way?
If he doesn’t then he’s too naive to even be a Senator.
April 24th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
We need to find out if German “Gary” Talis aka “We Are Change 9-11 Truthers that beats on defenseless young girls in wheelchairs” and his buds took Ayers’ course.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Don’t forget Obama sat down to dinn din with this commies wife too, who said of the Manson massacres:
“Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”
Oh, but just because the people surrounding Obama turn out to have ‘questionable? characters, and spew vomit, this is no reflection of our Obammy, says the detractors.
what does the subversive list look like beginning with his own communist sympathizer mom? It’s a pretty long one.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
To all the liberal lurkers out there who still think Ayers’ crimes were a product of the “radical” 60’s and the WU didn’t really try to kill anyone, from a link at Hot Air;
Ayers’ crimes were victimless alright. Ayers should be rotting in prison, but alas, the libtard moonbats have him teaching our next generation at U of C.
I’m still disgusted at this world class POS!!
April 30th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
There is a lesson to everyone here GM. All of us, every single one of us, will impact countless others with the actions we undertake. Though we may be anonymous, we are not unaccountable. Obama, knowing he had higher ambitions, should have chosen his friends and acquaintances more carefully. My parents told me, rightfully so, that we would be known by the company we kept, a lesson I passed on to my own children. Denying it won’t make it go away. Pretending it doesn’t matter only compounds the folly.
May 1st, 2008 at 9:29 am
Summary of some additional info.
● It looks like there was much more involvement between Obama and Ayers than has previously been recognized [1,2,3].
● Bill Ayers was one of three core co-founders of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform initiative [4,5,6,7]. They chose Obama to chair the group’s board in 1995, at the outset of the program [5,8,9]. Bill Ayers became co-chair of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, the operations arm of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge [4]. Obama continued to head the board for the next three years, and remained on the board until the project closed. Bill Ayers continued to be centrally involved in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge during this same period.
● Bill Ayers applied for the Annenberg funds because he wished to promote a specific education agenda - “local control” and a related concept called “small schools”[2,10]. He and the other organizers worked to preempt an application for these same funds by the Chicago School Board [7]. Annenberg provided $50 million in funds.
Ultimately, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge project was widely viewed as not successful, and the final report said it had “little impact” [11].
Bill Ayers’ educational agenda and his left political agenda are strongly intertwined. For Ayers, education can serve as the “motor force of revolution”. His 2006 speech in Venezuela, at the World Education Forum, gives a sense of his perspective [12].
● The Obamas and Bill Ayers/Bernadine Dohrn might first have become connected through Sidley & Austin, a Chicago law firm. Michelle and Barack Obama and Bernadine Dohrn all worked there in 1988 (Barack Obama as a summer associate)[13, 14]. Thomas Ayers, Bill Ayers’ father, had strong connections to the firm and might have helped Dohrn get a position there [2].
● It appears that Dohrn and Ayers were still involved in criminal acts with the Weathermen at a later date than often recognized. Dohrn appears to have been involved in customer ID theft in December 1979, while manager of a Manhattan children’s boutique store [15]. The ID information was used to apply for two false driver’s licenses. Members of the Weathermen continued to engage in armed robberies. In 1980, Ayers and Dohrn turned themselves in, but got off on technicalities. The false licenses were used to rent a getaway car in a 1981 Brinks robbery that left a security guard and two police officers dead [16].
● An article was just published by John Murtagh, the son of a judge who the Weathermen tried to assassinate (by firebombing his home)[17]. John Murtagh was a child, asleep in bed, at the time. He talks about his current feelings. Also, he notes that in Ayers’ 2001 interview with the Times, not only did Ayers say “I don’t regret setting bombs”, but also, when asked if he would do it all again, Ayers responded: “I don’t want to discount the possibility.”
References:
1. http://justoneminute.typepad.c.....check.html
2. http://globallabor.blogspot.co.....obama.html
3. http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2.....the-money/
4. http://72.14.205.104/search?q=.....&gl=us
5. http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/publications/p0b06.pdf
6. http://www.edexcellence.net/in.....bsubid=634
7. http://www.luc.edu/curl/pdfs/r.....tudies.pdf
8. http://www.edweek.org/login.ht.....debt=false
9. http://www.slate.com/id/2188010/
10. http://www.billayers.org/
11. http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/downloads/p62.pdf
12. http://billayers.wordpress.com/2006/11/
13. http://www.law.northwestern.ed.....rnBeCV.pdf
14. http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2007/.....-michelle/
15. http://www.chicagotribune.com/.....065.column
16. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brinks_robbery_(1981)
17. http://city-journal.org/2008/eon0430jm.html