Obama’s Weathermen Ayers and Dohrn revisited

The following article was originally published April 24, 2008, at RezkoWatch.

Obama’s Weathermen Ayers and Dohrn

Sol Stern, who authored this Summer 2006 article in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, about former domestic terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, wrote April 24, 2008, that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.)’s real William Ayers problem 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.” As several bloggers have headlined, “What Obama omitted to mention … Ayers is now teaching your children.”

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. [...]

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.

Ed Lasky commented April 25, 2008 in American Thinker:

Barack Obama has been attempting to burnish Ayers’ reputation by characterizing him as a university professor — still one of the more honored and respected professions in America. He peddled the notion that Ayers is an educator now and this should absolve him of the burden of his bomber background.

However, what has Ayers done for academia? He has continued to wreak harm — just in a different but longer lasting way.

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass wrote April 23, 2008, that links to the Weather Underground—and two of its key participants, William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, now college professors who have contributed to Sen. Obama’s political career—are “likely to resurface.”

After relating a tale about the former Weathermen, Kass remarks:

A few years later, Ayers got his job as a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And Dohrn was employed at the Children and Family Justice Center affiliated with Northwestern University’s School of Law.

I’ve always been fascinated as to how the radical underground stop running and get jobs in academia. Is there a Terrorist Patronage Office for Rich White People? And how did a convicted Dohrn get hired to teach at a law school?

“I am afraid I don’t know an answer to that,” NU spokesman Alan Cubbage said. “The person who was the dean at the time is no longer with the law school. And the person who was the president at the time is no longer the president. So I just don’t know.”

Cubbage did not mention that Ayers’ late father—Commonwealth Edison boss Thomas Ayers—was an NU trustee and former board chairman. UIC spokesman Mark Rosati couldn’t help either, but suggested I file a Freedom of Information Act request to find out how terrorists get hired by taxpayers.

“It’s nothing personal,” Rosati said.

How amusing. They don’t want to explain how terrorists were hired, so they know nothing.

Comment RezkoWatcher pm pointed out that Kass’s story puts an end to the “fatal flaw in Dohrn’s defense that she never hurt anyone” and predicted that “Broadway Baby” will become the new blogosphere buzzword.

Update #1: Transcript excerpt from CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, April 17, 2008 (emphasis added):

DOBBS: Bill Ayers, we’re hearing today from Mayor Daley that he also knows Ayres and he’s just a fine fellow and no problem, don’t be — please don’t be discomforted by Senator Obama’s relationship with him.

MCCARTHY: Look, of all the people who’ve ever bombed the Pentagon and the State Department and the New York City police headquarters, I’m sure he’s one of the best. But I — my sense is that regular Americans aren’t going to see it that way.

DOBBS: Senator Obama, you are declaring rather straight forwardly, is denying some relatively close relationships that he is suggesting are not — are distant.

MCCARTHY: Yeah, well he’s denying the relationship, but I think more importantly what he’s trying to obfuscate is that there’s a trajectory to all of this and there’s a theme that runs through it and whether its some of the statements made by his wife or Reverend Wright or Bernadine Dohrn and Ayers, the fact is he’s comfortable… Bernadine Dohrn being Ayers’ wife. The other Weather Underground terrorist who was Ayers’ wife. But, he’s comfortable with people who hate this country. And I think when he talks about and makes the theme of his campaign “Change,” and since he hasn’t really explained to us much about the change, we’re entitled to infer, from the people he’s comfortable with, who are social revolutionaries, the kind of change he wants to make in America.

DOBBS: You’re including, obviously, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

MCCARTHY: Of course, right.

DOBBS: And — and Ayers (ph). Others?

MCCARTHY: Well, there’s Rashid Khalidi, who was a recipient of some of the largess that Obama controlled when he was on the Woods Board. He is somebody who was –

DOBBS: He was on the board with Ayers (ph)?

MCCARTHY: Yes, when Obama was on the Woods Board with Ayers, they gave grants to Rashid Khalidi, and his work. Now, he has denied being a member of the PLO. But there’s no question he’s an apologist for Palestinian terrorism, including suicide attacks against Israeli soldiers.

Update #2: John Hinderaker of Power Line blog has done an excellent 2-part series—The Friends of Barack Obama—with fresh information on Ayers and Dohrn: Part 1, April 22, 2008, and Part 2, Power Line, April 23, 2008.

Update #3: Rick Moran, linking to the Power Line blog articles in Update #2, commented April 25, 2008, at Rightwing Nuthouse:

Ayers most recent pronouncements (and Dohrns) are contained on some audio tapes dug up by a small radio station in Chicago and blasted over the internet on Wednesday by Powerline and Hugh Hewitt. The tapes show that Ayers and Dorhn are in the mainstream of Chicago politics only if Josef Stalin is mayor and Pol Pot is Cook County Commissioner.

This would come as a surprise to Mayor Daley who also has had kind words to say about Ayers/Dorhn – no doubt because he doesn’t wish to anger the liberals in Hyde Park and because he has a sneaking admiration for the former terrorist’s chutzpah. Daley is also a crook who gets away with his crimes which at least gives him something in common with Ayers. There is no excuse for Obama.

Update #4: Larry Johnson at No Quarter provided proof on April 26, 2008, that Sen. Obama has not been telling the truth about the length or depth of his relationship with William Ayers. In fact, in 1995 Ayers was one of the “architects” of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge; he selected Obama to serve as its first Chairman of the Board and Obama continued to serve on the board for eight years, until 2003.

This appointment came at a crucial time in Barack’s life. He was on the verge of challenging longtime state Senator, Alice Palmer for her job. When Barack decided to run it is no surprise that he turned to William Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn for help in organizing the campaign and in hosting his first fundraiser in the district. [...]

Ayers helped select Obama to exercise a leadership role on the Annenberg Challenge. And Obama wants us to believe they never talked? Never exchanged ideas? Never identified issues to raise and policies to pursue? What is Barack hiding?

Update #5: In an April 27, 2008, op-ed, Jeff Jacoby wrote:

In Chicago the other day, radio producer Guy Benson discovered video recordings of Ayers and Dohrn speaking at a reunion of antiwar radicals in November 2007. To live in the United States, Dohrn told the group, is to be “inside the heart of the monster” that is such a “purveyor of violence in the world.” Ayers denounced America as an imperial warmonger steeped in “jingoistic patriotism, unprecedented and unapologetic military expansion, white supremacy . . . attacks on women and girls, violent attacks, growing surveillance in every sphere of our lives, on and on and on.” h/t pm

Go to the next page for the May 3, 2008, article “Obama’s Weathermen Ayers and Dohrn – Part 2″.

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