Guilty as sin, free as a bird — America is a great country. — William Charles Ayers

obama-book-review-ayersYesterday, Churchmouse Campanologist provided background on a friend of President Obama’s.  His name is Bill Ayers.  (Photo courtesy of The Jawa Report.)

How do we know that the two are good friends?  We have some hints from Verum Serum from October 2008:

Obama and his wife were associated with Ayers and his wife from at least 1995 when Obama was hired to run the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (for which Ayers wrote the grant and served on the board) to 2001 when Ayers was serving on the board of the Woods foundation with Obama…

Barack Obama’s name was listed on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge’s Board of Directors in 2000.  But before that, in 1998 (highlights mine):

Under Obama and Ayers, the CAC distributed over $100 million dollars in an effort to place race, class, language and culture at the center of public school [curricula]. That’s why Obama, as head of the CAC, declined to fund an Algebra initiative (which received funds from other Challenge sites around the nation but not in Chicago), but found money for the South Shore African Village Collaborative …  

In addition to applauding a teacher whose goal seems to be to inculcate students of Mexican descent with a sense of grievance at America, the CAC was strongly against standardized testing and English immersion teaching. Barack Obama, presumably, agreed with all of this. I say presumably because the press hasn’t asked him about any of it.

If Barack Obama wants to claim he didn’t know about Ayers’ terrorist history, fine. I don’t believe it for a second, but let’s forget the distant past and focus on the recent past instead. It’s hard for me to imagine anything more hostile to America’s attempt to become a color blind society than telling impressionable kids in middle school that their race is central to their identities. Under Barack Obama, that’s what the CAC was about. It was Bill Ayers’ vision but Barack Obama was the man who implemented it. Ayers (the new, more respectable education expert) and Obama were ideological soul mates a mere ten years ago. Let’s just talk about that for a while, shall we?

Then, there’s this on another Verum Serum entry on the same day, ‘Crossing Paths Daily’:

Bill Ayers and Barack Obama shared an office. Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop, the one Obama directed all that money to is located at 115 S. Sangamon Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607 …

I’m going to suggest that two guys working in the same building for a period of years probably crossed paths pretty often. For all we know, they had lunch together on a daily basis. Maybe, in an effort at conservation, they were even carpool buddies. After all, Ayers is a guy from Obama’s neighborhood…

Update: … Also, Obama was a state senator from 1996-2004. However, he still likely spent some significant time at the Sangamon street address, especially in 1995. But even after his election he would presumably be working on his CAC duties at the Sangamon office, not from some other location…

Conservative Politics Today has a complete Ayers-Dohrn-Obama timeline here.

prairie-fire-305x400Now, onto Prairie Fire, as presented here (excerpts follow):

Ayers is now a respected, mainstream, mild-mannered and popular professor, so obviously his political views couldn’t have been that extreme.
This essay disproves all of these claims.

Ayers was not simply protesting “against” the Vietnam War. Firstly, he wasn’t against war in principle, he was agitating for the victory of the communist forces in Vietnam. In other words: He wasn’t against the war, he was against our side in the war.

He may have escaped conviction [see previous post for allegations] due to a legal technicality (the prosecutors failed to get a warrant during some of their surveillance of the Weather Underground), but this in no way means that Ayers was factually innocent of the crimes. As has been widely reported, after the case against him was dropped, Ayers decribed himself as “guilty as hell, free as a bird.”

Just because Ayers tries to appear respectable now doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a violent revolutionary in the past. In fact, as the text of Prairie Fire shows, Ayers was one of the most extreme extremists in American political history.

Just out of interest, note the similarity between Bill Ayers’s cover design, which I understand is his creative graphic, and Obama’s roundel, pictured at right. Obama roundel

Quotes from Prairie Fire:

We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years.

Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.

Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, political and economic, cultural and military, where all forms are developed in harmony with the armed struggle.

We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build the new society.

Other Prairie Fire facts:

the Weather Underground dedicated the book to Robert F. Kennedy’s killer Sirhan Sirhan, among many other now-obscure ’60s-era radicals, criminals and revolutionaries.

Stated objective: ‘Our final goal is the destruction of imperialism, the seizure of power, and the creation of socialism. Our strategy for this stage of the struggle is to organize the oppressed people of the imperial nation itself to join with the colonies in the attack on imperialism. This process of attacking and weakening imperialism involves the defeat of all kinds of national chauvinism and arrogance; this is a precondition to our fight for socialism…

‘Socialism is the total opposite of capitalism/imperialism. It is the rejection of empire and white supremacy. Socialism is the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the eradication of the social system based on profit. Socialism means control of the productive forces for the good of the whole community instead of the few who live on hilltops and in mansions. Socialism means priorities based on human need instead of corporate greed. Socialism creates the conditions for a decent and creative quality of life for all.’

Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese communists, whom William Ayers was glorifying and praising, themselves imprisoned and tortured for over five years a young pilot by the name of John McCain. Here’s a newly discovered video of McCain taken in January of 1968 as he lay injured in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war hospital shortly after his capture. What’s heart-rending about it is that he does not yet know that he will spend the next five years being tortured by William Ayers’ comrades

Currently, Ayers is a scheduled speaker at colleges and universities across America.  He may or may not have ghostwritten Obama’s Dreams of My Father.  Whatever he does, it is likely that he adopts the following philosophy, as he explained here in a 2002 interview for College Radio:

… I’m as much an anarchist as I am a Marxist, which is to say you know I find a lot of the ideas in anarchism appealing …

Is one of those regrets that I took extreme measures against the United States at a time of tremendous crisis?  No it is not.  I don’t regret that.  The people of the world are being exploited and oppressed and militarized by the great imperialist powers led by the United States.  That is the situation today in my view.  It’s a situation we should all be horrified at and we should all oppose.

One of Ayers’s favourite books for education majors and teachers to read is Brazilian Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire also wrote the popular Education as the Practice of Freedom.  DrKate’sView explains it to you here:

Both of these books call for an educational system that ‘teaches’ through presenting capitalism as the root of oppression of all individuals.  It links the root of peasant experience to capitalism, and essentially, America.   ‘Pedagogy’ is a style of instruction …

For example … the word ‘tractor’ not just taught [in terms of how to] spell the word and pronounce it, it is linked to why you do or do not have a tractor, how it contributes to the village economy,  and who is preventing you from having it.

Freire is a popular icon and instructor of all Marxist educators and politicians, and radical leftists in the United States, particularly Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, the SDS …

‘Progressive’ educators in the United States have locked onto Freire, whose very pedagogy derives from a Marxist philosophy … Our entire history as a people and nation is boiled down to capitalism preying on the poor and the rest of the world.  It is essentially a denigration of and an attack on individual liberties.

All the more reason to find out what education majors and your children are learning at school.