One of the most dangerous
political felons of the modern era popped up in a forum in Washington,
DC last week: Bill Ayers, co-founder of the
Weather Underground, the most notorious of the domestic terror gangs in the US that bombed
their way into headlines from 1970 to 1980. Ayers and his current wife,
Bernadine Dohrn—co-founder of the gang and former poster girl on the FBI’s Most
Wanted list—turned themselves in after
Weather Underground involvement in 35 bombings and several deaths,
including the murder of two New York City policemen.
They received no jail time—due
to infractions of new rules ignored by the FBI—and both now hold
“distinguished” professorships, Ayers at the University of Illinois-Chicago and
Dohrn at the Northwestern University School of Law.
Gee, I asked Ayers, based on
your book (Fugitive Days; Beacon Press, 2001), America is a disgusting amalgam of
racism, chauvinism, imperialism, class violence and social injustice— even
today, you maintain. Yet, this “unjust” nation did not even punish you for your
crimes (and especially not your seditious views) and provided you with tenure
and good pay in a major university system where you remain free to criticize
the society that has been more than fair to you. And you still possess a
fanatic righteousness that prevents you from expressing any remorse for your
crimes.
Ayers certainly didn’t get it.
Instead, it appears he is on the lecture trail to revive the heady days of the
Weathermen, keying off the war in Iraq
as the new Vietnam
and the alleged unpopularity of the President. And Ayers repeats the incessant
accusations of racism—the recurring mantra of the Left, despite the lack of
evidence today in a nation legally bound to anti-discrimination, affirmative
action, school desegregation and set-aside government grants to minorities.
Indeed, where’s the beef? No visible anti-war demonstrations over Iraq; no
occupying the Dean’s office on campus. Ayers calls it apathy. I call it
agreement with current policy.
I had to comment—keying off the
new books The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third
World by Chris Andrew, and Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang—that everything
Ayers espoused in his “fugitive days” followed the KGB line, and that his
praise for Mao and his Little Red Book is nauseating propaganda in the light of
recent revelations about the genocide of the Great Helmsman.
I then asked him, since the
dogma and rhetoric of the New Left in the 1960s and ’70s is almost verbatim the
same as KGB propaganda of the era; and since you received money regularly from
“mysterious friends”; and because you had a Red Star tattoo and believed in the
same ideology as the Soviet Union, did you have any contact with the KGB?
Ayers, gazing at me as if I was reciting the Kama Sutra in a Christian Right
tent rally, replied, as all the old Leftists do: We were indigenous American
patriots with no connection to the KGB or the Soviet Union.
I then suggested that Ayers
read his own book. Waving the National Liberation Front flag in rallies;
forming the Weathermen to bomb targets in his own country; allying with the
Soviet-run Third World Movement and statements like: “Our group in SDS
(Students for a Democratic Society, headed by Tom Hayden, that spawned the
Weathermen), now calling itself the Revolutionary Youth Movement, siding with
Ho, believed in support for self-determination of oppressed nations as a matter
of principle. Capitalism had grown into a worldwide system, we said, an octopus
of conquest abroad but relying heavily on racism at home.” Or: “The revolution
was at hand, the question of power in the air, and, along with the question of
power, the question of armed struggle. We wondered how to develop an armed unit,
a brigade or a legion or a division, how to build a force of clandestine
militants with an advanced fighting capacity… We set about to found an American
Red Army.”
Ayers concluded, in answer to
the typically nave other questions from the audience, that “we are deluded
today if we think Iraq,
SUVs, New Orleans
and Katrina are unrelated.” Ayers proves once again that fools don’t know they
are fools, but this one, apparently suffering from paranoid delusions, is as
dangerous now as he was in the salad days of the Weathermen.
SQUAD 47
Joining Ayers in the talk was
former FBI agent Don Strickland, a member of Squad 47, the special unit of the
Bureau’s New Left Fugitive Squads tasked specifically to infiltrate student
radical groups such as the Weathermen (the original name: In an act of
anti-chauvinism, the group changed its moniker to the Weather Underground).
Squad 47’s 20-man task force—it was all men, a weakness Strickland laments—grew
long hair and took on the garb of student radicals. They discovered that the
Weathermen were a new kind of anarchist and difficult to capture. They were
mostly from middle-class and affluent homes, many were college educated and all
were trained in effective tradecraft.
The FBI found that the usual
tactics didn’t work. The radical fugitives knew not to communicate with family
and friends. They didn’t have the usually effective weakness of scorned
lovers—who get back by turning in their former girl or boy friends—due to their
free-love philosophy. The absence of reliable informants made them hard to
track, as did their tactics. They stayed on the run and left no evidence when
they evacuated safe houses. Strickland added that back then the FBI was
hampered by the use of “zone coverage,” meaning that if a New York agent was
trailing a suspect who left town, surveillance was turned over to the agent in
the destination city. However, “spot
coverage” of former bombing sites and certain films popular with the Left were
somewhat successful. Strickland noted that the Weathermen fugitives were well
financed, he says from “radical chic angels,” not recalling that recent
declassified data prove the Soviets made direct payments to their agents in the
US.
Then who should enter the
discussion but Deep Throat, former assistant FBI director Mark Felt, who was
later charged with civil rights violations in failing to inform agents in the
field to be mindful of the “Keith Decision” in the US Supreme Court in 1972
that banned “warrantless searches.” It was this twist of legal fate that saved
Ayers and Dohrn and some of the others from jail time for their crimes.
Strickland and Peter Earnest,
director of the International Spy Museum, host of the event, took the posture
that the lethal and criminal activities of the Weathermen and Ayers were simply
interesting times, except, said Strickland, the murder of the two cops in New
York City. I found it “interesting” that Ayers was hardly repentant or
remorseful. Instead, he is making noises that he was right in the eyes of
history, that America remains loathsome in his eyes and that he still believes
in the violent overthrow of the United States government. But worst of all, Ayers and his ilk are
embedded in the university, espousing the theories that have brought education
in the US to an appalling mediocrity, flavored with elemental anti-Americanism
and the abandonment of Western culture and values.
Bill Ayers may not be armed and
dangerous, but he is definitely dangerous.
NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
John Stossel, of ABC-TV’s news
magazine 20/20, one of the only sane commentators in the wasteland, took the
offensive last month against the teacher unions and their role in the scandal
surrounding the decline and fall of public education in America. He began with
the standard excuse from educators that we need to throw more money at the
problem, and then demonstrated that money is hardly the problem. The US spends
on average $10,000 per child annually. And the results over the past 30 years:
declining standardized test scores, higher dropout rates, and a downward
free-fall in academic results measured against the top industrialized nations
worldwide. Stossel interviewed the head of the failing South Carolina school
system who repeated that, yes, things are bad but they are getting so much
better (they are not), a chilling parallel to the propaganda from the NC
system. He then went after the over-arching reason American public schools are
failing: the teacher unions. It is plain from Stossel’s interviews that teacher
unions (or associations, as they remind us) do not care about education. They
care only for themselves.
•••
Don’t blame George Bush for the
mess in New Orleans, blame the environmental activists who prevented the
construction of a series of dams in the bayou (swamps, what we now call
“wetlands”) and gates on Lake Pontchartrain. The enviro-nazis want to wipe the
footprint of man from earth, as stated by green author Jacque Leslie, who says,
“Dams are loaded weapons aimed down rivers… relics of the 20th century, like
Stalinism and gasoline-powered cars, symbols of the allure of technology and
its transience… of the delusion that humans are exempt from nature’s domain.”
•••
Is the AIDS epidemic everyone
is so worked up about in Africa real? Bill Clinton trotted out on NPR on the
subject (the radio network loves him and hopes he will become Secretary-General
of the UN) said that 90 percent of victims don’t know they have it. Are we
dealing with the same statistical lie that says earth is losing 40,000 species
a year? Turns out this accepted fact in the major media came from an
“ecologist” in Britain. He maintains that there are thousands of life forms we
don’t know about, so we must be losing at least that many phantom species.
Science is too often the political tool for the advancement of bogus causes.
•••
The Episcopal Church of
America, now in its final days as a credible religious institution, is
considering consecrating former US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall a
saint. Many of us were not even aware of Episcopal saints so this is news
indeed. However, Marshall’s beatification could be delayed by a resolution
circulating amongst the grandees of the church requiring a 50-year waiting
time. But that’s not stopping the move by some to honor Marshall for “heroic
faith,” “joyousness” and “service to others for Christ’s sake,” as the
requirements read. Here is a selection of current saints as reported in the
Washington Post: Martin Luther King Jr.; Thomas Aquinas; Martin Luther;
Sojourner Truth; Harriet Taubman; Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Catherine of Siena
and Thomas Beckett. According to a spokesman, “We don’t pray to them; it’s very
different from the Roman Catholic Church.”
The man who suggested the use
of dolphins by the US Navy died recently. James W. Fitzgerald trained dolphins
to seek out underwater mines, attach explosives and eavesdropping devices on
enemy ships and help divers recover lost weapons from the ocean floor. In 1965,
according to Fitzgerald’s obituary, a bottle-nose dolphin named Tuffy became
the Navy’s first sea mammal to complete an open-ocean exercise, delivering
tools and mail to aquanauts 200 feet below the surface.