Last week it was Jeremiah Wright who burst back on to the national scene casting himself in the role of a victim. Now it’s Bill Ayres’ turn have his say. Anything these two men could have to say can only bedevil the Barack Obama transition team.
In an opinion piece published Friday, Nov 7, by In These Times, Bill Ayres expresses his feelings about what he calls a “surreal campaign season.”
Ayres writes that he’s still in a daze “What was all that mess?”
According to the unrepentant domestic terrorist, Ayres, he’s been minding his own business by hanging out with his kids, taking care of his elders, working, teaching, writing, and participating “in the never-ending effort to build a powerful and irresistible movement for peace and social justice.”
Uh let’s see, might that movement for peace and social justice actually be Marxism?
He writes about how it was in years past when he wrote his 2001 memoir Fugitive Days. According to Ayres it was an exhilarating and difficult time while he was part of the resistance against the war in Vietnam.
It was a time when the world was in flames, revolution was in the air, and the serial assassinations of black leaders disrupted our utopian dreams.
Ayres claims that the media offered up “extravagant and fantastic assertions” about what he did, but then he quickly moves on to the current political season.
Ayres repeats the mantra that he and Obama served together on the Woods Foundation board, they knew each other as Chicago’s Hyde Park neighbors, and that he and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, held a coffee gathering at their house for Obama and they donated to his campaign for the Illinois State Senate.
Ayres failed to mention other well-documented engagements they attended together. See Another Obama/Ayres Connection.
Obama’s political rivals and enemies thought they saw an opportunity to deepen a dishonest perception that he is somehow un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist who sympathizes with extremism—and they pounced.
Ayres blames Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign for providing the guilt by association “script” that demonized people Obama knew.
Then Ayres blames Sean Hannity of Fox News for springing the story that Ayres was a terrorist on Sen. John McCain during a March 13 interview.
Ayers is an unrepentant “terrorist,” he explained, “On 9/11, of all days, he had an article where he bragged about bombing our Pentagon, bombing the Capitol and bombing New York City police headquarters. … He said, ‘I regret not doing more.’ “
Ayres claims that McCain couldn’t believe it and that even he, Ayres, couldn’t believe it??? What couldn’t he believe, that he actually said this in 1980 when he walked free from tyranny charges for the bombing of the New York police headquarters in 1970?
"Guilty as sin, free as a bird, America is a great country."
Or maybe he can’t believe that he actually said this:
"I don't regret setting the bombs; I feel we didn't do enough."
You would think that this op-ed piece would be a perfect time for Ayres to clearly come out and disavow, once and for all ,what he said just for the sake of his association with his neighbor, Obama, but NO. Once again Ayres tried to slip by.
Anyone who thinks that Ayres should be given a free pass for things he did when Obama was only 8 years old needs to read the firsthand account Fire In the Night by John H. Murtagh. Here’s an excerpt.
In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan . . .
Though no one was ever caught or tried for the attempt on my family’s life, there was never any doubt who was behind it. Only a few weeks after the attack, the New York contingent of the Weathermen blew themselves up making more bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse. The same cell had bombed my house, writes Ron Jacobs in The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. . .
As the association between Obama and Ayers came to light, it would have helped the senator a little if his friend had at least shown some remorse. But listen to Ayers interviewed in the New York Times on September 11, 2001, of all days: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Translation: “We meant to kill that judge and his family, not just damage the porch.” When asked by the Times if he would do it all again, Ayers responded: “I don’t want to discount the possibility.” . . .
Ayres claims that when Gov. Sarah Palin got hold of the story it went viral, but the Ayres story went viral long before Palin was even considered to run alongside of McCain.
He is upset that someone in the crowd chanted “Kill him! Kill him!”
He even got hate messages on his voice mail. Imagine that. Is there a law against hating unrepentant self-confessed domestic terrorists?
He’s happy that every time that McCain or Palin mentioned his name, they lost a point or two in the polls.
Really? Don’t think so! Facts don’t support that. Actually McCain had gained slightly on Obama in the polls just before the economy suddenly went south.
Imagine the kind of ego that actually thinks his name carries more weight with American voters than the economy completely tanking!!!
Ayres wants to offer his readers a few lessons from the 1960’s and to suggest what is really important to take away from the long, strange trip he’s been on. Could any of us be less interested in what he has to say with regard to his outmoded anarchist political philosophy?
Once again he brings up the subject of his connection with Obama yet refuses to share the full extent of his relationship with Obama. Ayres has principles, you know, and those principles don’t allow for an old fashioned notion of “guilt by association. “
McCain and Palin demanded to “know the full extent” of the Obama-Ayers “relationship” so that they can know if Obama, as Palin put it, “is telling the truth to the American people or not.”
This is just plain stupid.
Obama has continually been asked to defend something that ought to be at democracy’s heart: the importance of talking to as many people as possible in this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the possibility of learning something new, and of speaking with the possibility of persuading or influencing others.
The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they also assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a conversation.
Many Americans, perhaps the 46% of Americans who didn’t vote for Obama, actually do believe that “You are known by the company you keep.”
I’m sure there are a lot of folks who will shake their liberal fingers at such an antiquated notion of “guilt by association.” Let me remind them that one day they just might have a wild teenager, perhaps not unlike a young Bill Ayres, and I’d be willing to bet plenty that they’ll choke when they hear themselves saying to their little darling, “Well, you ARE known by the company you keep!”
.jpg)
.jpg)
.BMP)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
http://www.alanstang.com/
ReplyDelete«Thursday, November 06, 2008
A Warning for America From South Africa
I read this warning on my daily radio talk show last week, before the election. It is even more relevant now, because the same thing that was imposed on South Africa – by the United States – is now happening here. So many people have asked for a copy of this message from a South African journalist that I post it here. My comments on her comments are in bold. Of course the parallels cannot be exact, but see whether you recognize any of this.
____________________________________
By Gemma Meyer (Gemma Meyer is the pseudonym of a South African journalist. She and her husband, a former conservative member of parliament, still reside in South Africa.)
People used to say that South Africa was 20 years behind the rest of the Western world. Television, for example, came late to South Africa (but so did pornography and the gay rights movement).
Today, however, South Africa may be the grim model of the future Western world, for events in America reveal trends chillingly similar to those that destroyed our country.
America’s structures are Western. Your Congress, your lobbying groups, your free speech, and the way ordinary Americans either get involved or ignore politics are peculiarly Western, not the way most of the world operates. But the fact that only about a third of Americans deem it important to vote is horrifying in light of how close you are to losing your Western character.
Writing letters to the press, manning stands at county fairs, hosting fund-raising dinners, attending rallies, setting up conferences, writing your Congressman - that is what you know, and what you are comfortable with. Those are the political methods you’ve created for yourselves to keep your country on track and to ensure political accountability.
But woe to you if - or more likely, when - the rules change. White Americans may soon find themselves unable or unwilling to stand up to challenge the new political methods that will be the inevitable result of the ethnic metamorphosis now taking place in America. Unable to cope with the new rules of the game - violence, mob riots, intimidation through accusations of racism, demands for proportionality based on racial numbers, and all the other social and political weapons used by the have-nots to bludgeon treasure and power from the haves - Americans, like others before them, will no doubt cave in. They will compromise away their independence and ultimately their way of life.
That is exactly what happened in South Africa. I know, because I was there and I saw it happen.
South Africa used to be one of the most advanced nations on earth. Then Washington intervened.
Faced with revolution in the streets, strikes, civil unrest and the sheer terror and murder practiced by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), the white government simply capitulated in order to achieve “peace.”
Mandela was in jail for twenty seven years not because he was an innocent black man but because he was a Communist terrorist who said in court that he was planning to kill people with bombs. He could have been released at any time simply by renouncing terrorism. He refused.
Westerners need peace. They need order and stability. They are builders and planners. But what we got was the peace of the grave for our society.
The Third World is different - different peoples with different pasts and different cultures. Yet Westerners continue to mistake the psychology of the Third World and its peoples. Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe are perfect examples of those mistakes. Sierra Leone is in perpetual civil war, and Zimbabwe - once the thriving, stable Rhodesia - is looting the very people (the white men) who feed the country. Yet Westerners do not admit that the same kind of savagery could come to America when enough immigrants of the right type assert themselves. The fact is, Americans are sitting ducks for Third World exploitation of the Western conscience of compassion.
Those in the West who forced South Africa to surrender to the ANC and its leaders did not consider Africa to be the dangerous, corrupt, and savage place it is now in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Those Western politicians now have a similar problem looming on their own doorsteps: the demand for power and treasure from the non-Western peoples inside the realm.
Again, Washington forced Rhodesia into Communist hands. Rhodesia exported tons of food. Zimbabwe typically starves. Washington did this.
It is already too late for South Africa, but not for America if enough people strengthen their spine and take on the race terrorists, the armies of the “politically correct” and, most dangerous of all, the craven politicians who believe “compassionate conservatism” will buy them a few more votes, a few more days of peace.
White South Africans, you should remember, have been in that part of Africa for the same amount of time whites have inhabited North America; yet ultimately South Africans voted for their own suicide. We are not so very different from you.
South Africans voted for their own suicide. Did you?
We lost our country through skillful propaganda, pressure from abroad (not least from the U.S.A.), unrelenting charges of “oppression” and “racism,” and the shrewd assessment by African tyrants that the white man has many Achilles’ heels, the most significant of which are his compassion, his belief in the “equality of man,” and his “love your neighbor” philosophy - none of which are part of the Third World’s history.
See my recent piece – Before the Election: What You Must Do – about the deliberate cultivation of white guilt in the Communist government schools.
The mainline churches played a big role in the demise of Western influence throughout Africa, too; especially in South Africa. Today’s tyrants were yesterday’s mission-school protégés. Many dictators in Africa were men of the cloth. They knew their clerical collars would deflect criticism and obfuscate their real aims, which had nothing whatever to do with the “brotherhood of man.”
Other tyrants, like the infamous Idi Amin, were trained and schooled by the whites themselves, at Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard. After receiving the best from the West, they unleashed a resentful bloodlust against their benefactors.
From what I have seen and read thus far, I fear Americans will capitulate just as we did. Americans are, generally, a soft lot. They don’t want to quarrel or obstruct the claims of those who believe they were wronged. They like peace and quiet, and they want to compromise and be nice.
A television program that aired in South Africa showed a town meeting somewhere in Southern California where people met to complain about falling standards in the schools. Whites who politely spoke at the meeting clearly resented the influx of Mexican immigrants into their community. When a handful of Chicanos at the back of the hall shouted and waved their hands at them, the whites simply shrunk back into their seats rather than tell the noisemakers to shut up. They didn’t want to quarrel.
In America, the courts are still the final arbiters of society’s laws. But what will happen when your future majority refuses to abide by court rulings - as in Zimbabwe. What will happen when the new majority says the judges are racists, and that they refuse to acknowledge “white man’s justice”? What will happen when the courts are filled with their people, or their sympathizers? In California, Proposition 187 has already been overturned.
What will you do when the future non-white majority decides to change the names of streets and cities? What will you do when they no longer want to use money that carries the portraits of old, dead white “racists” and slave owners? Will you cave in, like you did on flying the Confederate flag? What about the national anthem? Your official language?
Don’t laugh. When the “majority” took over in South Africa, the first targets were our national symbols.
In another generation, America may well face what Africa is now experiencing - invasions of private land by the “have-nots;” the decline in health care quality; roads and buildings in disrepair; the banishment of your history from the education of the young; the revolutionization of your justice system.
In South Africa today, only 9 percent of murderers end up in jail. Court dockets are regularly purchased and simply disappear. Magistrates can be bribed as can the prison authorities, making escapes commonplace. Vehicle and airplane licenses are regularly purchased, and forged school and university certificates are routine.
What would you think of the ritual slaughter of animals in your neighbor’s backyard? How do you clean up the blood and entrails that litter your suburban streets? How do you feel about the practice of witchcraft, in which the parts of young girls and boys are needed for “medicinal” purposes? How do you react to the burning of witches?
Don’t laugh. All that is quite common in South Africa today.
Don’t imagine that government officials caught with their fingers in the till will be punished. Excuses - like the need to overcome generations of white racism - will be found to exonerate the guilty.
In fact, known criminals will be voted into office because of a racial solidarity among the majority that doesn’t exist among the whites. When Ian Smith of the old Rhodesia tried to stand up to the world, white South African politicians were among the Westerners pressuring him to surrender.
When Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe murders his political opponents, ignores unfavorable court decisions, terrorizes the population and siphons off millions from the state treasury for himself and his friends, South Africa’s new President Thabo Mbeki holds his hand and declares his support. That just happened a few weeks ago.
Your tax dollars will go to those who don’t earn and don’t pay. In South Africa, organizations that used to have access to state funds such as old age homes, the arts, and veterans’ services, are simply abandoned.
What will happen is that Western structures in America will be either destroyed from without, or transformed from within, used to suit the goals of the new rulers. And they will reign either through terror, as in Zimbabwe today, or exert other corrupt pressures to obtain, or buy votes. Once power is in the hands of aliens, don’t expect loyalty or devotion to principle from those whose jobs are at stake. One of the most surprising and tragic components of the disaster in South Africa is how many previously anti-ANC whites simply moved to the other side.
Once you lose social, cultural, and political dominance, there is no getting it back again.
Please note. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Whatever you do later, however hard you fight, you cannot get it back.
Unfortunately, your habits and values work against you. You cannot fight terror and street mobs with letters to your Congressmen. You cannot fight accusations of racism with prayer meetings. You cannot appeal to the goodness of your fellow man when the fellow man despises you for your weaknesses and hacks off the arms and legs of his political opponents.
To survive, Americans must never lose the power they now enjoy to people from alien cultures. Above all, don’t put yourselves to the test of fighting only when your backs are against the wall. You will probably fail.
Millions around the world want your good life. But make no mistake: They care not for the high-minded ideals of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and your Constitution. What they want are your possessions, your power, and your status.
And they already know that their allies among you, the “human rights activists,” the skillful lawyers and the left-wing politicians will fight for them, and not for you. They will exploit your compassion and your Christian charity, and your good will.
They have studied you, Mr. and Mrs. America, and they know your weaknesses well.
They know what to do.
Do you?»