Stories at Politico and ABC refer to William Ayers as a "former radical," but wouldn't Ayers need to disavow his Sixties extremism to be a "former" radical? He infamously told the New York Times in a story published on September 11, 2001, that he regretted not setting more bombs. As late as April 2008, he publicly railed against "terrorism" being committed by the U.S. military and called for a "revolution" against capitalism. Andrew Ferguson wrote in his TWS cover story on Hyde Park ("Mr. Obama's Neighborhood," June 11):
As it happened, I'd spent the evening before reading Ayers's blog, and lingered over a manifesto he posted in early April, after his friendship with Obama became national news. "I've never advocated terrorism," Ayers wrote, "never participated in it, never defended it. The U.S. government, by contrast, does it routinely and defends the use of it in its own cause consistently." Capitalism, he went on, "is exhausted as a force for progress: built on exploitation, theft, conquest, war, and racism, capitalism and imperialism must be defeated and a world revolution--a revolution against war and racism and materialism, a revolution based on human solidarity and love" and so on.
In that same blog post, Ayers wrote:
"A bombing in a café in Israel is terrorism, and an Israeli assault on a neighborhood in Gaza is terrorism; the September 11 attacks were acts of terrorism, and the U.S. bombings in Viet Nam for a decade were acts of terrorism."
William Ayers--a man who had once plotted to kill hundreds of U.S. soldiers and their dates at a dance at Fort Dix--is still a left-wing radical who thinks that U.S. troops in Vietnam were the real terrorists. There's no indication that he ever tried to keep his radical beliefs secret--and there's every indication that Obama knew that Ayers was a terrorist who had not repented for his deeds when the two teamed up as political allies in Chicago and became "friends."
Just because the Obama campaign and the media want to say that Ayers is "now mainstream" doesn't make it so.
