With all the attention to Barack Obama’s association with Bill Ayers, I thought it readers might be interested to see what Ayers has had to say recently about the actions of the Weather Underground. The most often-cited recent piece to examine Ayers’ views on his days as a fugitive is this one from the New York Times. An excerpt:
”I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. ”I feel we didn’t do enough.” Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970’s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago… So, would Mr. Ayers do it all again, he is asked? ”I don’t want to discount the possibility,” he said.
Ayers also has a blog, in which he rambles about requests that he apologize for his actions:
The episodic notoriety is upon us again. And always the same demand: Say you’re sorry! Of course there is much to regret in any lived life, much to rethink and redo. But opposing the War in Viet Nam with every fiber is not one of them.
If you’re looking for more about Ayers, and how he now views his days as a young and violent radical, check out Ronald Radosh’s review of Ayers’ memoir, published in THE WEEKLY STANDARD shortly after September 11:
What Ayers does not mention is that the bomb that killed his friends was an antipersonnel bomb meant for an army dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Had it exploded at its chosen target, thousands of soldiers and their dates would have been killed. “Terrorists destroy randomly,” he writes, “while our actions bore…the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate.” Somehow, the GIs his comrades aimed to kill-or the policemen he might have murdered had a bomb he planted in a Chicago station gone off-do not count. And the GIs’ dates, and the civilians working at the police station, also do not count. Their deaths would simply have been a way of educating people-as Bill Ayers continues to educate them at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Does Obama really think that Ayers is just like his Senate colleague, Tom Coburn?
