George Washington Was A Domestic Terrorist
So, I’m sure we’ve all heard about the Obama/Ayers connection. William Ayers is the bomb-planting radical of the Weather Underground, a violent group from the 1970s who were responsible for bombs going off at the NYC Police HQ, the U.S. Capitol building, and the Pentagon. Except for three Weathermen who blew themselves up while making a bomb, no one was ever killed in one of their blasts. Some could argue that the Weathermen were to the hippie movement what the IRA was to Sinn Fein; hippies with bombs.
Regardless of your politics, the Weathermen were domestic terrorists (provided we use a non-loaded version of that word). And Bill Ayers was one of their leaders.
Add a great documentary about the Weathermen to your queue
Now, Sen. Obama is connected to this man. Since the connection was revealed during the primaries, his campaign has been jumping up and down, telling anyone who will listen that this connection is tenuous at best, and that regardless of the connection, it simply doesn’t matter, because Sen. Obama doesn’t seek his advice.
I’m not going to get into how strong or how weak the connection is — there are plenty of reporters already working that beat — but I would like to say that, frankly, this connection, tenuous as it may be, boosts my support of Sen. Obama.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Stanley Kurtz writes what will probably become the primary source of a million right-wing bloggers. In an article entitled, Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools, Mr. Kurtz documents how Sen. Obama and Mr. Ayers each served in a leadership role with an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). “The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.”
The beginning of the article shows why their positions at the CAC connects them more than the Obama campaign has admitted.
Okay. Fine.
But check out these little tidbits about Ayers and the CAC, and explain to me why this is — from my liberal standpoint — a bad thing.
- The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism
- In works like ‘City Kids, City Teachers’ and ‘Teaching the Personal and the Political,’ Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression
- Ayers views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system
- External partners [of the CAC] focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education.
- [It] funded programs designed…to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children’s education.
- Mr. Ayers is the founder of the ’small schools’ movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to ‘confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.’
- [Ayers] believes teacher education programs should serve as ’sites of resistance’ to an oppressive system.
- The point, says Mr. Ayers…is to “teach against oppression,” against America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.
Now, I understand the hot water this puts Sen. Obama in. I understand that a presidential election is all about the fight to win the center, and that there’s a huge swath of Americans who would rather burn Mr. Ayers alive than see him teaching a classroom full of children. I do. I understand that.
But frankly, I just don’t care. I don’t know where I come down on the question of the Weathermen, but on the question of teaching children how to fight against tyranny and oppression…there doesn’t seem to be anything more American than that.