Bill Ayers: Violent Resistance Not Necessarily the Answer
Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 8:57:37 am PDT
Former Weather Underground terrorist and long-time Barack Obama associate William Ayers has posted a cartoon at his blog, trying to explain away his statement that he feels he “didn’t do enough” during his tenure as a violent radical.
Here it is; pay particular attention to the last sentence: “I don’t think violent resistance is necessarily the answer...”
Maybe Ayers would also like to explain this statement that he made during the “Days of Rage” riots:
“We’re not urging anyone to shoot from a crowd. But we’re also going to make it clear that when a pig gets iced, that’s a good thing, and that everyone who considers himself a revolutionary should be armed, should own a gun, should have a gun in his home.”
Source: Rolling Stone, September 30, 1982
UPDATE at 9/9/08 9:18:46 am:
Also see: The Weathermen tried to kill my family.
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, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course, we’d call that a car bomb.) A neighbor heard the first two blasts and, with the remains of a snowman I had built a few days earlier, managed to douse the flames beneath the car. That was an act whose courage I fully appreciated only as an adult, an act that doubtless saved multiple lives that night.
I still recall, as though it were a dream, thinking that someone was lifting and dropping my bed as the explosions jolted me awake, and I remember my mother’s pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn’t leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: FREE THE PANTHER 21; THE VIET CONG HAVE WON; KILL THE PIGS.
For the next 18 months, I went to school in an unmarked police car. My mother, a schoolteacher, had plainclothes detectives waiting in the faculty lounge all day. My brother saved a few bucks because he didn’t have to rent a limo for the senior prom: the NYPD did the driving. We all made the best of the odd new life that had been thrust upon us, but for years, the sound of a fire truck’s siren made my stomach knot and my heart race. In many ways, the enormity of the attempt to kill my entire family didn’t fully hit me until years later, when, a father myself, I was tucking my own nine-year-old John Murtagh into bed.
(Hat tip: jill e.)
UPDATE at 9/9/08 9:40:11 am:
Zombie points out another fact that’s rather inconvenient for Ayers’ claim that his bombings were intended to “resist” the war in Vietnam: the majority of their attacks occurred after the US had already pulled out of Vietnam.
