A little background on this William Ayers fellow.

[FlyingSquirrel]

I'm posting this because a lot of people on DU seem to just react to the news media and other DU'ers' posts without actually doing even the most cursory research to examine the topic.

(Warning, it's from Wikipedia and the page is currently protected from editing which is NOT an endorsement of the current edition)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers

Radical history

Ayers became involved in the New Left and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He rose to national prominence as an SDS leader in 1968 and 1969. As head of an SDS regional group, the "Jesse James Gang", Ayers made decisive contributions to the Weatherman orientation toward militancy. The group Ayers headed in Detroit, Michigan became one of the earliest gatherings of what became the Weatherman.

Between the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the June 1969 SDS convention, Ayers became a prominent leader of the group, which arose as a result of a schism in SDS. "During that time his infatuation with street fighting grew and he developed a language of confrontational militancy that became more and more pronounced over the year (1969)", disaffected former Weatherman member Cathy Wilkerson wrote in 2001.

Ayers had previously become a roommate of Terry Robbins, a fellow militant, Wilkerson wrote. Robbins would later be killed while making a bomb. In June 1969, the Weatherman took control of the SDS at its national convention, where Ayers was elected Education Secretary.

Later in 1969, Ayers participated in planting a bomb at a statue dedicated to riot police casualties in the 1886 Haymarket Riot confrontation between labor supporters and the police. The blast broke almost 100 windows and blew pieces of the statue onto the nearby Kennedy Expressway. (The statue was rebuilt and unveiled on May 4, 1970, and blown up again by other Weathermen on October 6, 1970. Rebuilding it yet again, the city posted a 24-hour police guard to prevent another blast.)

Ayers participated in the Days of Rage riot in Chicago in October 1969, and in December was at the "War Council" meeting in Flint, Michigan. Larry Grathwohl, an FBI informant in the Weatherman group from the fall of 1969 to the spring of 1970, thought that "Ayers, along with Bernardine Dohrn, probably had the most authority within the Weatherman".

Statements made in 2001

Chicago Magazine reported that "just before the September 11th attacks," Richard Elrod, a city lawyer injured in the Weathermen's Chicago "Days of Rage," received an apology from Ayers and Dohrn for their part in the violence. "(T)hey were remorseful," Elrod says. "They said, 'We're sorry that things turned out this way.'"

In the months before Ayers' memoir was published on September 10, 2001, the author gave numerous interviews with newspaper and magazine writers in which he defended his overall history of radical words and actions. Some of the resulting articles were written just before the September 11 terrorist attacks and appeared immediately after, including one often-noted article in The New York Times, and another in the Chicago Tribune. Numerous observations were made in the media comparing the statements Ayers was making about his own past just as a dramatic new terrorist incident shocked the public.

Much of the controversy about Ayers during the decade since 2000 stems from an interview he gave to The New York Times on the occasion of the memoir's publication. The reporter quoted him as saying "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough", and, when asked if he would "do it all again" as saying "I don't want to discount the possibility." Ayers has not denied the quotes, but he protested the interviewer's characterizations in a Letter to the Editor published September 15, 2001: "This is not a question of being misunderstood or 'taken out of context', but of deliberate distortion."

In the ensuing years, Ayers has repeatedly avowed that when he said he had "no regrets" and that "we didn't do enough" he was speaking only in reference to his efforts to stop the United States from waging the Vietnam War, efforts which he has described as ". . . inadequate (as) the war dragged on for a decade." Ayers has maintained that the two statements were not intended to imply a wish they had set more bombs.

The interviewer also quoted some of Ayers' own criticism of Weatherman in the foreword to the memoir, whereby Ayers reacts to having watched Emile de Antonio's 1976 documentary film about Weatherman, Underground: "(Ayers) was 'embarrassed by the arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we and we alone knew the way. The rigidity and the narcissism.' " "We weren't terrorists," Ayers told an interviewer for the Chicago Tribune in 2001. "The reason we weren't terrorists is because we did not commit random acts of terror against people. Terrorism was what was being practiced in the countryside of Vietnam by the United States."

In a letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune, Ayers wrote, "I condemn all forms of terrorism — individual, group and official". He also condemned the September 11 terrorist attacks in that letter. "Today we are witnessing crimes against humanity on our own shores on an unthinkable scale, and I fear that we may soon see more innocent people in other parts of the world dying in response."


Views on his past expressed since 2001

Ayers was asked in a January 2004 interview, "How do you feel about what you did? Would you do it again under similar circumstances?" He replied: "I've thought about this a lot. Being almost 60, it's impossible to not have lots and lots of regrets about lots and lots of things, but the question of did we do something that was horrendous, awful? ... I don't think so. I think what we did was to respond to a situation that was unconscionable." On September 9, 2008, journalist Jake Tapper reported on the comic strip in Bill Ayers's blog explaining the soundbite: "The one thing I don't regret is opposing the war in Vietnam with every ounce of my being.... When I say, 'We didn't do enough,' a lot of people rush to think, 'That must mean, "We didn't bomb enough s---."' But that's not the point at all. It's not a tactical statement, it's an obvious political and ethical statement. In this context, 'we' means 'everyone.'"

Obama-Ayers Controversy

Bill Ayers and Barack Obama at one time lived in the same neighborhood in the city of Chicago, and both had worked on education reform in the state of Illinois. The two met "at a luncheon meeting about school reform." Obama was named to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Project Board of Directors to oversee the distribution of grants in Chicago. Later in 1995, Ayers hosted "a coffee" for "Mr. Obama's first run for office." The two served on the board of a community anti-poverty group, the Woods Fund of Chicago, between 2000 and 2002, during which time the board met twelve times.

In April 2001, Ayers contributed $200 to Obama's re-election fund to the Illinois State Senate. Since 2002, there has been little linking Obama and Ayers. The senator said in September 2008 that he hadn't "seen him in a year-and-a-half." In February 2008, Obama spokesman Bill Burton released a statement from the senator about the relationship between the two: "Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous."

CNN's review of project records found nothing to suggest anything inappropriate in the non-profit projects in which the two men were involved. Internal reviews by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time magazine, The Chicago Sun-Times, The New Yorker and The New Republic "have said that their reporting doesn't support the idea that Obama and Ayers had a close relationship".

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My overall impressions:

(1) Barack Obama cannot be expected to thoroughly vet any person he meets or serves on a board with.

(2) IMO to call Ayers a "terrorist" is to distort what terrorism is. Destroying inanimate objects is a lot different than attacks aimed at innocent people. In the case in which a person WAS injured due to their actions, Ayers apologized. Now that does not condone what he did by any means and clearly more people COULD have gotten hurt. But the fact remains that the bombs he helped set were not intended to kill people.

(3) Clearly Ayers has very strong beliefs regarding what's right and wrong, but chose to act on these beliefs in an inappropriately violent way. He has rehabilitated himself and has expressed remorse for the violence, and has been completely misquoted by several 'reporters' who clearly have an interest in making it seem that he still holds the same views and has not renounced violence.

(4) Regardless of (2) or (3), the simple fact is that Obama was a child when the acts occurred, does not in any way share Ayers' former views that violence is the way to resolve things, and is purely a repugnant attempt to attack Obama's character based on an innocent and not-at-all-close association with Ayers.

[rug]

1. It's really silly to equate Obama to this.

"The convention quickly fell into disarray as the PL Worker Student Alliance faction, which was about evenly divided with the Revolutionary Youth Movement forces at the convention, moved to exert its power over SDS as a whole. When the Black Panther representatives attacked PL but at the same time proved itself inclined towards sexism by advocating "pussy power," the entire convention fell into something approaching chaos, or, worse, farce.

"The RYM and the National Office faction, led by Bernardine Dohrn, voted by about 500 to 100 to expel the PL, and then walked out of the conference hall with that 500. By the next day there were two SDS organizations, neither of them recognizable to an older SDSer, nor to the bulk of the members back on the campuses. In the Fall of 1969 many of the SDS chapters also split up or disintegrated. The Weatherman faction evolved into a small underground organization that first took to street confrontations and then to a bombing campaign. There were no more national conventions. SDS was fully defunct by 1972."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_a_Democratic_Society_(1960_organization)

[Window]

2. I looked up the info in Wikepedia, also. I was very surprised by what I found,

in that they were making so much of this when, really, there is no there insomuch as it involves Barack Obama.

[IndianaGreen]

3. The real crime is the one committed by our government on the people of Vietnam

All of those war criminals are now hailed as heroes, from Nixon to Ollie North.

[Irishman26]

4. Any explanation of Ayers or Obama's so-called "association" to him

will be far too nuanced for most americans to pay attention too. Most voters are swayed but sound bytes, buzz words and imagery. For this reason I think it's better to just try and leave this issue alone and put it behind us. Any explanation will just go over everyone's head while also keeping the subject alive.