[Peace-discuss] N-G Editorial on Ayers

[Marti Wilkinson]

Ayers ought to be UI embarrassment Wednesday October 29, 2008  A University
of Illinois professor's history of criminality cannot be minimized.

The Associated Press reports that more than 3,200 people, identified as
"mostly academics," have signed an online petition objecting to the
"demonization" of University of Illinois-Chicago faculty member William
Ayers.

Ayers is an admitted and unrepentant terrorist who, by his own admission,
participated in more than 20 bombings in the early 1970s as part of a group
of militant leftists known as the Weather Underground.

Ayers has come to national attention during the current presidential
campaign because of a multiyear association with Democratic presidential
candidate Barack Obama. Both live in the Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago.
Until Obama's recent denunciations of Ayers for his "detestable" criminal
conduct, the pair were longtime associates. Ayers was among Obama's active
supporters for public office and Obama served as chairman of an
education-related committee organized by Ayers.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has challenged the wisdom of
Obama's association with Ayers, but the public does not appear to be
offended. Memories fade with time, so more people seem to accept Ayers'
current persona as a professor than his former role as a political radical
who engaged in serial criminal activities, urged the overthrow of the U.S.
government, encouraged the poor and middle-class to "kill all the rich" and
children to "kill your parents."

Ayers' supporters are complaining bitterly about his "demonization," as the
petition states. But any fair reading of Ayers' long history of criminality
demonstrates that he has demonized himself.

In defense of his bombing spree, which he describes in detail in his memoir
"Fugitive Days," Ayers downplays his conduct on the grounds that no one was
injured. He's much too modest. There were numerous casualties left by Ayers
and his Weather Underground associates, and he can't escape responsibility.

There was the 1970 bombing in Greenwich Village in New York, where Ayers'
comrades, including his then-girlfriend Diana Oughton, were killed or
injured. They were making bombs to use for an attack on Fort Dix, N.J., when
an explosion occurred.

Let's not forget the Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969, when Ayers and his
associates engaged in a vandalism spree in downtown Chicago and assaulted
pedestrians. Richard J. Elrod, a former Cook County sheriff and current
judge, was paralyzed in the melee.

In 1980, members of the Weather Underground, including Ayers' friend Kathy
Boudin, robbed a Brink's truck. Two police officers and a security guard
were murdered. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, a law school graduate
denied a law license in Illinois on character grounds, raised Boudin's son
after she was arrested and imprisoned.

So don't get too carried away about what a swell fellow Ayers is. The son of
a wealthy utility company executive, he's a moral reprobate who brags that
not only does he not regret his criminal behavior but that he wishes he and
his fellow revolutionaries had been more destructive.

His presence on the University of Illinois faculty should be a source of
shame, not grounds to leap to the defense of an indefensible man.
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