Feb 22 2008

Obama hung out with 60s terrorists?

Posted by: Neocon in 2008 Race, Democrats, Nutter Butters, Terrorism

(via Hot Air) Here’s a story from The Politico that should (but won’t) give Obama supporters pause.

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious – and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from the Hyde Park left to a man closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.

…

Obama’s connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home—part of a campaign courtship—reflects more extensive interaction than has previously reported.

Neither Ayers nor the Obama campaign would describe the relationship between the two men. Dr. Young described Obama and Ayers as “friends,” but there’s no evidence their relationship is more than the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago political circles, and served together on the board of a Chicago foundation.

Like many of the most extreme figures from the 1960s Ayers and Dohrn are ambiguous figures in American life.

They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb – designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper FBI surveillance.

So Barack Obama, the man who would unite the world in peace and harmony, is all too willing to go meet with former terrorist bombers. I suppose this isn’t too much of a shocker given that Obama continues to profess that the only way to make ourselves safe from those who would kill us is to meet with them unconditionally and on equal footing. (More on that in another post if I have time today)

It isn’t out of the ordinary for a liberal politician to meet with far-left activists, but to have casual political meetings with people who advocated violence as a means of political expression for personal gain is completely hypocritical for anyone who wants to lead our country in the War on Terror. It shows how quickly Obama is willing to throw common sense and principle to the wind in order to tack on a few more supporters when he needs them.

It isn’t as if these terrorists regret their actions in the least.

… unlike some other fringe figures of the era — they’re also flatly unrepentant about the bombings they committed in the name of ending the war, defending them on the grounds that they killed no one, except, accidentally, their own members.Dohrn, however, was jailed for less than a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating other Weather Underground members’ robbery of a Brinks truck, in which a guard and two New York State Troopers were killed.

“I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough,” Ayers told the New York Times in 2001.

With quotes like that, is this the sort of person you would EVER shake hands with? Apparently even some liberals groups won’t touch these folks.

Though he is a respected figure in liberal educational circles, Ayers wrote recently about how in 2006 he was informed he was persona non grata at a progressive educators’ conference in the summer of 2006.

“We cannot risk a simplistic and dubious association between progressive education and the violent aspects of your past,” he quoted the conference organizers, whom he described as friends, as writing to him.

Despite ‘radical’ in the title of the article, once you get down into the meat of it, the truth comes out clearly:

“Ayers was a terrorist. Bernardine Dohrn was a terrorist. Ayers has never offered one word of apology – he glories in it, thinks it’s terrific. And that to me is not what I would call acceptable or mainstream behavior,” said Dan Polsby, a former law professor at Northwestern who is now dean of George Mason University Law School. “If Obama takes a different view on that–well, ok, that’s data about Obama.”

On Thursday, Ayers spoke at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where he refused to answer questions from Politico about his relationship with Obama.

Dohrn did not respond to a message left at her office.

Obama’s campaign dismisses the notion that his relationship with Ayers should be seen through the lens of the latter’s violent past, or his present lack of regret for the bombings.

“Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence,” said Obama’s press secretary, Bill Burton. “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.”

Intellectual honesty. Apparently you don’t need it when you have hope.

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