Obama’s Real Bill Ayers Problem

http://www.city-journal.org ^ | 23 April 2008 | Sol Stern

[Para-Ord.45]

Barack Obama complains that he’s been unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. Obama has a point. In the ultraliberal Hyde Park community where the presidential candidate first earned his political spurs, Ayers is widely regarded as a member in good standing of the city’s civic establishment, not an unrepentant domestic terrorist. But Obama and his critics are arguing about the wrong moral question. The more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation’s schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today.

A Chicago native son, Ayers first went into combat with his Weatherman comrades during the “Days of Rage” in 1969, smashing storefront windows along the city’s Magnificent Mile and assaulting police officers and city officials. Chicago’s mayor at the time was the Democratic boss of bosses, Richard J. Daley. The city’s current mayor, Richard M. Daley, has employed Ayers as a teacher trainer for the public schools and consulted him on the city’s education-reform plans. Obama’s supporters can reasonably ask: If Daley fils can forgive Ayers for his past violence, why should Obama’s less consequential contacts with Ayers be a political disqualification? It’s hard to disagree. Chicago’s liberals have chosen to define deviancy down in Ayers’s case, and Obama can’t be blamed for that.

What he can be blamed for is not acknowledging that his neighbor has a political agenda that, if successful, would make it impossible to lift academic achievement for disadvantaged children. As I have shown elsewhere in City Journal, Ayers’s politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.

Indeed, the education department at the University of Illinois is a hotbed for the radical education professoriate. As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K–12 teachers need to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.” Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes. One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change.

Unfortunately, neither Obama nor his critics in the media seem to have a clue about Ayers’s current work and his widespread influence in the education schools. In his last debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama referred to Ayers as a “professor of English,” an error that the media then repeated. Would that Ayers were just another radical English professor. In that case, his poisonous anti-American teaching would be limited to a few hundred college students in the liberal arts. But through his indoctrination of future K–12 teachers, Ayers has been able to influence what happens in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of classrooms.

Ayers’s influence on what is taught in the nation’s public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for. In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.

AERA already does a great deal to advance the social-justice teaching agenda in the nation’s schools and has established a Social Justice Division with its own executive director. With Bill Ayers now part of the organization’s national leadership, you can be sure that it will encourage even more funding and support for research on how teachers can promote left-wing ideology in the nation’s classrooms—and correspondingly less support for research on such mundane subjects as the best methods for teaching underprivileged children to read.

The next time Obama—the candidate who purports to be our next “education president”—discusses education on the campaign trail, it would be nice to hear what he thinks of his Hyde Park neighbor’s vision for turning the nation’s schools into left-wing indoctrination centers. Indeed, it’s an appropriate question for all the presidential candidates

[The_Republican]

Constant ranting on Ayers is probably helping Obambi out. Its much safer negative publicity, compared to Jeremiah Wright debacle.

[Para-Ord.45]

Wrights`s hate of the US and the Constitution is visceral and wildy emotional. Ayers was that but now has infiltrated the entire education system and works from within intellectually to spread his/their marxism.

Guess it all depends how you percieve the threat of the “progressive” “liberal” marxist threat.

[gridlock]

We need to close the loop on the Ayers thing, and concentrate how his acceptance by Barack Obama is symptomatic of the Hyde Park mindset, where old radicals who bombed police stations are considered heroes. This is where Barack Obama chose to build his political base, and it is every bit as out-of-step with Middle America as Berkeley or San Francisco.

The people need to be introduced to the concept of “Hyde Park Democrats”. The Ayers thing is the perfect opportunity to do so. It is an elitist mindset, and this is where Obama will be most vulnerable.

[Travis McGee]

[DuncanWaring]

As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K–12 teachers need to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.” Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes.

Partial explanation of why the government schools have descended into the mire.

[Para-Ord.45]

Bernardine Dohrn/William Ayers :

Members of the terrorist group Weatherman Underground and Students for a Democratic Society offshoots.
Dohrn approved publicly and enthusiastically of the Charles Manson murders while Ayers in a memoir, “Fugitive Days,” published in 2001, and on the day of the September 11 terrorist attacks, was quoted by the New York Times as saying: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

1995- State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

1997- Ayers and Obama participated in a panel at the University of Chicago entitled Should a child ever be called a “super predator?” to debate “the merits of the juvenile justice system”.

1999- Ayers and Mr. Obama served together on the nine-member board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago nonprofit, for three years.

2005- Ayers, Obama and many on the radical left attend a farewell dinner for the radical Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi, who was leaving the Arab American Action Network to take the Edward Said endowed chair at Colombia University, where Obama, Ayers, and Dohrn all gave glowing testimonials to Khalidi – whose group received $75,000 from the Woods Foundation.

2008-(from above article) From Ayers`s from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers.

The relevance comes in his indoctrination of future K–12 teachers as a professor. As a radical leftist determined to destroy the USA Ayers preaches not education but leftism to his students . As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K–12 teachers need to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.” Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change.
This dovetails with Marx`s Communist Manifesto and Plank Number 10. ‘ Free education for all children in government schools’ , which creates a monopoly where Ayers`s propaganda can reign supreme and create not education but indoctrination schools.

OBAMA IS NOT “GUILTY BY ASSOCIATION”, HE IS GUILTY PERIOD, BECAUSE OF HIS LONG STANDING RELATIONSHIPS WITH TERRORISTS, MARXISTS AND THOSE WHO HATE ISRAEL/JEWS AND SEEK THEIR DESTRUCTION

[devistate one four]

That a hole is nothing but a PUNK! How did he even get to a line-up?

[The_Republican]

You got something there.....Hyde Park Democrats.....this should be made popular.

[Brilliant]

Put those mug shots next to photos of Bill and Hill in 1969, and you would not know the difference.

[Cheburashka]

That a hole is nothing but a PUNK! How did he even get to a line-up?

---

Blowing up stuff.

“I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough.”

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

[Mount Athos]

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Powerline reference to this article:

The nuances of Bill Ayers

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

It’s difficult to imagine they are so blatantly antiAmerican!

See this :

Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left

And a review:

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By	Kat Bakhu (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Hardcover)

I had long wondered why people on the Left had the propensity to speak more positively about people who would slit their throats than they do about their own country, which affords them more freedom and opportunity than anywhere else. David Horowitz has answered that question thoroughly and convincingly in his Unholy Alliance. Where I felt bewildered and confused, I now feel crystal clear. Unholy Alliance is such a great book.

It begins with the leftist movements at the beginning of the 20th Century, and works its way up to the present day, exploring the anti-American attitude of these movements in detail. Horowitz shows that the enemies of the US back then are largely the same group today, operating under the same misperceptions, making the same mistakes, and pursuing the same impossible utopia.

Individual chapters are included on the Patriot Act (I was persuaded that it is a GOOD thing); the democratic flip-flop on Iraq once G.W. Bush implemented what they agreed with Clinton needed to be done; the driving components of the current anti-war movement; as well as chapters on individual personalities who are major spokespeople of the Left. Horowitz covers a lot of ground, and he covers it concisely and clearly. Unholy Alliance is richly informative without ever being boring or plodding.

This book is so illuminating that I simply cannot do justice to it here. I love people who reason so clearly that they help me get my own reasoning clear. Horowitz is just that type of person! In the terrain of mindless clichés (no-blood-for-oil, etc.), he is a breath of real fresh air.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

AND:

Indoctrination U:The Left's War Against Academic Freedom

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by David Horowitz (Author)

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AND:

The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Paperback)

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by David Horowitz (Author)

****************EXCERPTS************

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Horowitz, author of Unholy Alliance and founder of FrontPageMag.com, profiles 101 professors whose politics run left of center (in many cases, very, very left of center), and though his list is impressive in size and the amount of research that went into it, the most egregious crimes perpetrated by the majority of these academics is that their politics don't mesh with Horowitz's. Which isn't to say Horowitz hasn't turned up a few surprises: a Northwestern University law professor has a sordid history involving the Weather Underground,

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks E.

[george76]

The more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation’s schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today.

[elpadre]

It might be helpful for the debate to find and publish the Marxist quotes that said in essence they would spread communism by using the schools and children to proclaim their cause and conquer America and the world..