First of all this is not a piece to justify the Weather Underground or their poor attempts at bombings (the only people who died were their own members, as they always called in an advance warning). This is an attempt to dig below the media concoction that is Ayers to try and find out who the real person is.
This is a man who according to Hillary and co is Jack the Ripper, Bin Laden and the 'O' Bomber combined. The man with a cold heart who is attributed to have said in response to 9/11 that "I don't regret setting off bombs. I only regret we didn't do enough".
Well, that is a load of CRAP But lets here it from him in this post on his own blog:
http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/episodic-notoriety-fact-and-fantasy/ Day in and day out I go about my business, I hang out with my kids and my grandchildren, take care of the elders, I go to work, I teach and I write, I organize and I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful movement for peace and social justice; now and then (and unpredictably) I appear in the newspapers or on TV with a reference to my book Fugitive Days, a memoir of the revolutionary action and militant resistance to the Viet Nam War—the years of miracle and wonder—and some fantastic assertions about what I did, what I said, and what I believe. The other night, for example, I heard Sean Hannity tell Senator John McCain that I was an unrepentant terrorist who had written an article on September 11, 2001 extolling bombings against the U.S., and even advocating more terrorist bombs. Senator McCain couldn’t believe it, and neither could I.
Here are his words on regret:
Regrets. I’m often quoted saying that I have “no regrets.” This is not true. For anyone paying attention—and I try to stay wide-awake to the world around me all/ways—life brings misgivings, doubts, uncertainty, loss, regret. I’m sometimes asked if I regret anything I did to oppose the war in Viet Nam, and I say “no, I don’t regret anything I did to try to stop the slaughter of millions of human beings by my own government.” Sometimes I add, “I don’t think I did enough.” This is then elided: he has no regrets for setting bombs and thinks there should be more bombings.
The illegal, murderous, imperial war against Viet Nam was a catastrophe for the Vietnamese, a disaster for Americans, and a world tragedy. Many of us understood this, and many tried to stop the war. Those of us who tried recognize that our efforts were inadequate: the war dragged on for a decade, thousands were slaughtered every week, and we couldn’t stop it. In the end the U.S. military was defeated and the war ended, but we surely didn’t do enough.
So he never mentioned the regrets comment in reference to 9/11. More can be read over here (thanks marmar from highlighting this in your post):
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/041708a.html In the April 16 debate in Philadelphia, Sen. Clinton lit up when her husband’s former adviser, George Stephanopoulos, finally asked one of her campaign’s long-plotted attack lines – raising a tenuous association between Obama and an aging Vietnam-era radical William Ayers.
Stephanopoulos, acting as an ABC News debate moderator, and Clinton also injected a false suggestion that Ayers had either hailed the 9/11 attacks or had used the occasion as a grotesque opportunity to call for more bombings.
(In reality, an earlier interview about his memoir was coincidently published by the New York Times in its Sept. 11, 2001, edition, which went to press on Sept. 10, before the attacks. But Stephanopoulos and Clinton left the impression with the public that Ayers's comments represented a ghoulish reaction to the 9/11 attacks.)
Here are his words on terrorism:
Terror. Terrorism—according to both official U.S. policy and the U.N.—is the use or threat of random violence to intimidate, frighten, or coerce a population toward some political end. This means, of course, that terrorism is not the exclusive province of a cult, a religious sect, or a group of fanatics. It can be any of these, but it can also be—and often is—executed by governments and states. A bombing in a café in Israel is terrorism, and an Israeli assault on a neighborhood in Gaza is terrorism; the September 11 attacks were acts of terrorism, and the U.S. bombings in Viet Nam for a decade were acts of terrorism. Terrorism is never justifiable, even in a just cause—the Union fight in the 1860’s was just, for example, but Shernan’s March to the Sea was indefensible terror. I’ve never advocated terrorism, never participated in it, never defended it. The U.S. government, by contrast, does it routinely and defends the use of it in its own cause consistently.
So the point to note is that Ayers belongs to the Vietnam era of anti-establishment, anti-authority movement and he did do things that he regrets. There is also some truth in what he says regarding the interpretation of acts of terror.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.Violent forms of protest are abhorrent and should be rejected in every form and manner, but let us at least reject the right person rather than a media created caricature. Let us also place his acts in a historical perspective and understand that people evolve. If we hold a person trapped in the prism of historical actions, even after he has paid the price for them, then we are refusing to let go of those same actions.
Barack Obama is able to understand this, why are many of us not?
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