"Obama has claimed in the last two days that he never heard his pastor make anti-American or hate-filled remarks. Perhaps he needs to be pressed on what he classifies as "anti-American." Davis also recounts a statement by Wright made to the New York Times last year that certainly sounds like Obama was well aware that his pastor's rhetoric could be a problem for him - meaning he was well aware of the kinds of thing Jeremiah Wright had said:
Political pundits have suggested that Obama's problems with Wright are not ones based on faith, but pure politics. The upstart presidential candidate needs to pull most of the black vote to have any chance of snagging the Democratic nomination. Obama's ties to Wright and the activist African American church helps in that effort."
I Don’t Believe Obama
By Aaron Goldstein Saturday, March 15, 2008 Excerpted from:
http://www.bearpit.net/index.php?act=Print&client=printer&f=2&t=9026
On March 13th, an ABC News report revealed incendiary excerpts from several sermons recorded on DVD by Obama’s spiritual advisor, The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr. Until his retirement last month, Wright was the pastor at the Trinity United Church in Chicago.
Reverend Wright suggested amongst other things that the United States government “lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.” He also claimed the United States bore some responsibility for 9/11 attacks. Wright said, “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because of stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own backyard. America is chickens coming home to roost.”
In one sermon delivered in April 2003, a month after the War in Iraq began, Reverend Wright said, “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes three-strike laws and wants them to sing God Bless America. No! No! No! God ###### America for killing innocent people. God ###### America for threatening citizens as less than humans. God ###### America as long as she tries to act like she is God and supreme.”
When Obama was initially asked about this quote by a reporter from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Obama appeared unconcerned. “Here is what happens when you just cherry-pick statements from a guy who had a 40-year career as a pastor. There are times when people say things that are just wrong. But I think it’s important to judge me on what I’ve said in the past and what I believe,” said Obama.
However, that did not quiet the storm. On March 14th, Obama issued a statement concerning the controversy. “I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy. I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies….In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue,” said Obama.
Yet I cannot bring myself to believe that Barack Obama is telling the truth where it concerns The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr.
It is because of the following paragraph in Obama’s statement:
The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links
to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.
The preceding simply does not pass the smell test.
Obama has been a member of Reverend Wright’s congregation for nearly two decades. Reverend Wright married Barack and Michelle Obama. Reverend Wright baptized their daughters.
Does Obama really expect us to believe that in nearly two decades he never attended a service where Reverend Wright uttered an unkind word about America? Did Reverend Wright only go off the deep end on the Sundays when Obama wasn’t around?
Does Obama really expect us to believe that in nearly two decades, the man whose sermon inspired his book The Audacity of Hope, never told him face to face he believed the United States was responsible for spreading HIV against people of color? Or what he really thinks about Israel?
Does Obama really expect us to believe he would not demand a white Republican politician disassociate with a church whose pastor denounced African Americans? Not on your life. Even if that pastor’s retirement was imminent.
If he does, Obama must really think the American people are stupid. One would hope that Democratic Primary voters might begin to clean their rose colored glasses. This, however, might not be in the offing. If Obama should prevail against Hillary, I suspect it will not be the last time we hear the name Jeremiah Wright.
People are judged by the company they keep. It is hard for me to believe that Obama would title one of his books based on one of Wright’s sermons and yet be unaware of what he preaches. That Obama should protest he only became aware of Wright’s views at the outset of his presidential campaign and yet retains him as a national leader of his campaign’s African American Religious Leadership Committee descends to the depths of disingenuousness. Now that’s what I call audacity.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/2248
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http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=3906861&cl=7004204&ch=4226716&src=news
'Newsmax Obama's Church: Cauldron of Division
Jim Davis, senior reporter for the Kansas City Business Journal.
NewsMax article written by Jim Davis, August 9, 2007, says Barack Obama was in attendance at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago on July 22, 2007, when Davis attended the service. In that service, Davis says Jeremiah Wright used profanity throughout the message and referred to the "United States of White America," and "white arrongance" during his sermon - to nodding agreement by Barack Obama. Here is part of Davis' account of that service:
Wright's strong sentiments were echoed in the Sunday morning service attended by NewsMax.
Wright laced into America's establishment, blaming the "white arrogance" of America's Caucasian majority for the woes of the world, especially the oppression suffered by blacks. To underscore the point he refers to the country as the "United States of White America." Many in the congregation, including Obama, nodded in apparent agreement as these statements were made.
The sermon also addressed the Iraq war, a frequent area of Wright's fulminations.
"Young African-American men," Wright thundered, were "dying for nothing." The "illegal war," he shouted, was "based on Bush's lies" and is being "fought for oil money."
In a sermon filled with profanity, Wright also blamed the war on "Bush administration bulls--t."
Davis also lists some of Wright's more controversial statements over the years. Remember, this article was written last August, long before this became a raging controversy this week:
Several prior remarks by Obama's pastor have caught the media's attention:
• Wright on 9/11: "White America got their wake-up call after 9/11. White America and the Western world came to realize people of color had not gone away, faded in the woodwork, or just disappeared as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns." On the Sunday after the attacks, Dr. Wright blamed America.
• Wright on the disappearance of Natalee Holloway: "Black women are being raped daily in Africa. One white girl from Alabama gets drunk at a graduation trip to Aruba, goes off and gives it up while in a foreign country and that stays in the news for months."
• Wright on Israel: "The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for over 40 years now. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community and wake up Americans concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism."
• Wright on America: He has used the term "middleclassness" in a derogatory manner; frequently mentions "white arrogance" and the "oppression" of African-Americans today; and has referred to "this racist United States of America."
Obama has claimed in the last two days that he never heard his pastor make anti-American or hate-filled remarks. Perhaps he needs to be pressed on what he classifies as "anti-American." Davis also recounts a statement by Wright made to the New York Times last year that certainly sounds like Obama was well aware that his pastor's rhetoric could be a problem for him - meaning he was well aware of the kinds of thing Jeremiah Wright had said:
Political pundits have suggested that Obama's problems with Wright are not ones based on faith, but pure politics. The upstart presidential candidate needs to pull most of the black vote to have any chance of snagging the Democratic nomination. Obama's ties to Wright and the activist African American church helps in that effort.
But the same experts same those same ties may come to haunt him if he were to win the nomination and face a Republican in the general election.
The worry is not lost on Wright.
"If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me," Wright told The New York Times with a shrug. "I said it to Barack personally, and he said 'yeah, that might have to happen.'"
UPDATE: Rich Lowry provides an excerpt from Obama's own book, Dreams of My Fathers, in which Obama gives evidence that he heard and apparently appreciated some of the same themes Jeremiah Wright is still spouting today:
“It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That’s the world! On which hope sits!”
And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House. As the sermon unfolded, though, the stories of strife became more prosaic, the pain more immediate. The reverend spoke of the hardship that the congregation would face tomorrow, the pain of those far from the mountaintop, worrying about paying the light bill…
http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/obama-attended-wrights-hate-sermons.html
'Presidential candidate Barack Obama preaches on the campaign trail that America needs a new consensus based on faith and bipartisanship, yet he continues to attend a controversial Chicago church whose pastor routinely refers to "white arrogance" and "the United States of White America."
In fact, Obama was in attendance at the church when these statements were made on July 22.
Obama has spoken and written of his special relationship with that pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
The connection between the two goes back to Obama's days as a young community organizer in Chicago's South Side when he first met the charism
atic Wright. Obama credited Wright with converting him, then a religious skeptic, to Christianity. [Editor's Note: Can Oprah Winfrey make Barack Obama president?
"It was ... at Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago that I met Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who took me on another journey and introduced me to a man named Jesus Christ. It was the best education I ever had," Obama described his spiritual pilgrimage to a group of church ministers this past June.
Since the 1980s, Obama has not only remained a regular attendee at Wright's services in his inner city mega church, Trinity United Church of Christ, along with its other 8,500 members, he's been a close disciple and personal friend of Wright.
Wright conducted Obama's marriage to his wife Michelle, baptized his two daughters, and blessed Obama's Chicago home. Obama's best-selling book, "The
Audacity of Hope," takes its title from one of Wright's sermons.
Because of this close relationship, questions have been raised as to the influence the divisive pastor will have on the consensus-building potential president.
Obama and Wright appear, at first blush, an unlikely pair. Wright is Chicago's version of the Rev. Al Sharpton.
It was no surprise that Sharpton recently announced that with Wright's backing, he was setting up a chapter of his New York-based National Action Network in Chicagoland. The chapter will be headed by Wright's daughter, Jeri Wright.
Minister of Controversy
Obama was not the only national African-American figure to cozy up to Wright. TV host Oprah Winfrey once described herself as a congregant, but in recent years has disassociated herself from the controversial minister.
A visit to Wright's Trinity United is anything but Oprah-style friendly.
As I approached the entrance of the church before a recent Sunday service, a large young man in an expensive suit stepped out to block the doorway.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"I came to hear Dr. Wright," I replied.
After an uncomfortable pause, the gentleman stepped aside.
On this particular July Sabbath morning, only a handful of white men — aside from a few members of Obama's Secret Service detail — were present among a congregation of approximately 2,500 people.
The floral arrangements were extravagant. Wright, his associate pastors, choir members, and many of the gentlemen in the congregation were attired in traditional African dashiki robes. African drums accompanied the organist.
Trinity United bears the motto "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian."
Wright says its doctrine reflects black liberation theology, which views the Bible in part as a record of the struggles of "people of color" against oppression.
A skilled and fiery orator, Wright's interpretation of the Scriptures has been described as "Afrocentric."
When referring to the Romans, for example, he refers to "European oppression" — not addressing the fact that the Egyptians, who were also a slave society, were people of Africa.
The Trinity United Web site tells of a "commitment to the black community, commitment to the black family, adherence to the black work ethic, pledge to make all the fruits of developing acquired skills available to the black community."
"Some white people hear it as racism in reverse," Dwight Hopkins, a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ, tells The New York Times. Blacks tend to hear a different message, Hopkins says: "Yes, we are somebody; we're also made in God's image."
Controversy Abounds
Several prior remarks by Obama's pastor have caught the media's attention:
• Wright on 9/11: "White America got their wake-up call after 9/11. White America and the Western world came to realize people of color had not gone away, faded in the woodwork, or just disappeared as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns." On the Sunday after the attacks, Dr. Wright blamed America.
• Wright on the disappearance of Natalee Holloway: "Black women are being raped daily in Africa. One white girl from Alabama gets drunk at a graduation trip to Aruba, goes off and gives it up while in a foreign country and that stays in the news for months."
• Wright on Israel: "The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for over 40 years now. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community and wake up Americans concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism."
• Wright on America: He has used the term "middleclassness" in a derogatory manner; frequently mentions "white arrogance" and the "oppression" of African-Americans today; and has referred to "this racist United States of America."
Bush's Bulls--t
Wright's strong sentiments were echoed in the Sunday morning service attended by NewsMax.
Wright laced into America's establishment, blaming the "white arrogance" of America's Caucasian majority for the woes of the world, especially the
oppression suffered by blacks. To underscore the point he refers to the country as the "United States of White America." Many in the congregation, including
Obama, nodded in apparent agreement as these statements were made.
The sermon also addressed the Iraq war, a frequent area of Wright's fulminations.
"Young African-American men," Wright thundered, were "dying for nothing." The "illegal war," he shouted, was "based on Bush's lies" and is being "fought for oil money."
In a sermon filled with profanity, Wright also blamed the war on "Bush administration bulls--t."
Those are the types of statements that have led to MSNBC's Tucker Carlson describing Wright as "a full-blown hater."
Wright first came to national attention in 1984, when he visited Castro's Cuba and Col. Muammar Gaddafi's Libya.
Wright's Libyan visit came three years after a pair of Libyan fighter jets fired on American aircraft over international waters in the Mediterranean Sea, and four years before the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland — which resulted in the deaths of 259 passengers and crew. The U.S. implicated Gaddafi and his intelligence services in the bombing.
In recent years, Wright has focused his diatribe on America's war on terror and the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
For a February 2003 service, Wright placed a "War on Iraq IQ Test" on the Pastor's Page of the church Web site. The test consisted of a series of questions and answers that clearly portrayed America as the aggressor, and the war as unjustified and illegal. Marginally relevant issues regarding Israel received attention.
The test also portrayed the Iraqi people as victims of trade sanctions, but Saddam Hussein's propensity for using "oil for food" proceeds to build palaces rather than buy medicine was never mentioned.
At the end of the test, the pastor wrote, "Members of Trinity are asked to think about these things and be prayerful as we sift through the ‘hype' being poured on by the George Bush-controlled media." Obama's campaign staff did not respond to a NewsMax request for the senator's response to Wright's statements.
In April, however, Obama spoke to The New York Times about Wright, and appeared to be trying to distance himself from his spiritual mentor. He said, "We don't agree on everything. I've never had a thorough conversation with him about all aspects of politics."
More specifically, Obama told the Times, "The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification," adding "It sounds like [Wright] was trying to be provocative."
Obama attributed Wright's controversial views to Wright being "a child of the '60s" who Obama said "expresses himself in that language of concern with institutional racism, and the struggles the African-American community has gone through."
"It is hard to imagine, though, how Mr. Obama can truly distance himself from Mr. Wright," writes Jodi Kantor of The New York Times. On the day Sen. Obama announced his presidential quest in February of this year, Wright was set to give the invocation at the Springfield, Ill. rally. At the last moment, Obama's campaign yanked the invite to Wright.
Wright's camp was apparently upset by the slight, and Obama's campaign quickly issued a statement "Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church."
Since that spat, there is little evidence, indeed, that Sen. Obama has sought to distance himself from the angry Church leader. In June, when Obama appeared before a conference of ministers from his religious denomination, Wright appeared in a videotaped introduction.
One of Obama's campaign themes has been his claim that conservative evangelicals have "hijacked" Christianity, ignoring issues like poverty, AIDS, and racism.
This past June, in an effort to build a new consensus between his new politics and faith, Obama's campaign launched a new Web page, www.faith.barackobama.com.
On the day the page appeared on his campaign site, it offered testimonials from Wright and two other ministers supporting Obama. The inclusion of Wright drew a sharp rebuke from the Catholic League. Noting that Obama had rescinded Wright's invitation to speak at his announcement ceremony, Catholic League President Bill Donohue declared that Obama "knew that his spiritual adviser was so divisive that he would cloud the ceremonies."
He noted that Wright "has a record of giving racially inflammatory sermons and has even said that Zionism has an element of ‘white racism.' He also blamed the attacks of 9/11 on American foreign policy."
Donohue acknowledged that Obama may have different views than Wright and the other ministers on his Web site, but "he is responsible for giving them the opportunity to prominently display their testimonials on his religious outreach Web site."
Political pundits have suggested that Obama's problems with Wright are not ones based on faith, but pure politics. The upstart presidential candidate needs to pull most of the black vote to have any chance of snagging the Democratic nomination. Obama's ties to Wright and the activist African American church helps in that effort.
But the same experts same those same ties may come to haunt him if he were to win the nomination and face a Republican in the general election.
The worry is not lost on Wright.
"If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me," Wright told The New York Times with a shrug. "I said it to Barack personally, and he said 'yeah, that might have to happen
http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2008/03/barack-hussein-obama-is-liar.html
Fox news reports there is evidence that Obama may have been in Miami On July 22 when Reverend Wright his “God D am n America” speech of hate and racism.
http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/03/17/report-places-obama-at-controversial-july-07-wright-sermon-official-schedule-places-him-in-miami/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfNEfEBYIZs
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Obama once visited '60s radicals
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 a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.
“I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress,” said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. “[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor.”
Obama and Palmer “were both there,” he said.
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 been 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 who served together on the board of a Chicago foundation.
But Obama’s relationship with Ayers is an especially vivid milepost on his rise, in record time, from a local official who unabashedly reflected a very liberal district to the leader of national movement based largely on the claim that he can transcend ideological divides.
Page 2
“I feel very uncomfortable with their past, but neither of them is thought of as horrible types now — so far as most of us know, they are legitimate members of the community,” said Cass Sunstein, a University of Chicago law professor who has known Obama since the early 1990s and supports his campaign.
“Not only is Obama the opposite pole from radicals like Ayers and Dohrn at least as one point were, he’s not a conventional left liberal by any means,” he said.
Others are less inclined to even consider forgiveness.
“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.
“Sen. 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 8-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost 40 years ago is ridiculous.”
He described Ayers as “a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a former aide to Mayor Richard J. Daley,” referring to printed reports that he had “advised” Daley on school reform.
As Bloomberg News reported recently, Obama and Ayers have crossed paths repeatedly in the last decade. In 1997, Obama cited Ayers’ critique of the juvenile justice system in a Chicago Tribune article on what prominent Chicagoans were reading. He and Ayers served together on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago for three years starting in 1999. In 2001, Ayers also gave $200 to Obama’s state Senate reelection campaign.
Many details of the 1995 meeting are shrouded by time and by Obama’s and Ayers’ refusals to discuss it.
The exact date is not known, but it was in the second half of 1995, before Palmer’s decision — late in her losing congressional primary against Jesse Jackson Jr. — to jump back into the special election for her state Senate seat. (Her decision produced a rift between her and Obama, who was able to get her thrown off the ballot on technical grounds.)
“That’s too long ago — that’s ancient history,” Palmer said, when asked of the meeting.
Dr. Young and another guest, Maria Warren, described it similarly: as an introduction to Hyde Park liberals of the handpicked successor to Palmer, a well-regarded figure on the left.
“When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the living room of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn,” Warren wrote on her blog in 2005. “They were launching him — introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.”
Contacted by e-mail, Warren declined to describe the meeting further and later blogged of her concern that Republicans would use accounts of the event for “left-baiting.”
Young described the gathering as a matter of “due diligence” for Palmer to introduce her chosen successor to constituents. “Many of us knew him already,” he said.
They, like others in his old Chicago world, now consider him a bit too “conservative” for their liking, as Warren wrote recently.
Ackerman, the Hyde Park activist, complained of his votes for continued funding for the Iraq war.
“A lot of people were very angry when he voted to fund the war,” he said. “But any candidate running for president is going to strive for broader appeal and move more to the center — I don’t believe that Barack has departed from his basic principles.”
Dr. Young said, however, that he isn’t supporting either of the leading presidential candidates because he is a single-issue voter, and the issue is single-payer health care.
He said he was disappointed that Obama is “equivocating” on his support for single-payer health care, after saying in the past that he supported it. But he said Obama’s style — “cautious, deliberate, defensive” — was also familiar from the senator’s Hyde Park days.
“In fairness, there’s no double dealing,” he said. “It’s part of his stated strategy: He wants to get maximum unity.”
Stringer Andrew Lipkowitz contributed to this story
In one sense, Obama’s journey toward the cultural and political center is not unusual among national politicians. But its velocity is.
Politicians of an earlier generation had their own relationships with figures now far to their left. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for instance, interned at a radical San Francisco law firm while in law school.
On the other side of the political spectrum, many in the generation before hers shifted dramatically on civil rights. John McCain voted against creating a holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. and later called that a mistake.
The relationship with Ayers gives context to his recent past in Hyde Park politics. It’s milieu in which a former violent radical was a stalwart of the local scene, not especially controversial.
It’s also a scene whose liberal ideological features — while taken for granted by the Chicago press corps that knows Obama best — provides a jarring contrast with Obama’s current, anti-ideological stance. This contrast between past and present — not least the Ayers connection — is virtually certain to be a subject Republican operatives will warm to if Obama is the Democratic nominee.
The tension between the present and recent Chicago past is also evident in some of his positions on major national issues. Many national politicians, including Clinton, have moved toward the center over time. But Obama’s transitions are still quite fresh.
A questionnaire from his 1996 campaign indicated more blanket opposition to the death penalty, and support of abortion rights, than he currently espouses. He spoke in support of single-payer health care as recently as 2003.
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.
Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she’s an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.
But — 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.
And their rehabilitation in establishment circles, even in Hyde Park, has its limits.
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.
But the couple has been embraced, by and large, in the liberal circles dominating Hyde Park politics.
“Bill Ayers is one of my heroes in life,” said Sam Ackerman, a longtime local activist. “I knew Tony Rezko, and he ain’t no Rezko.”
But others in Hyde Park, whose intellectual and political life revolves around the University of Chicago, view the couple with ambivalence
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8630_Page2.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers
“Weathermen”
Weatherman, known colloquially as the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground Organization, was a violent U.S. Radical Left group consisting of splintered-off members and leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society which formed on the campus on the University of Michigan in the 1960s. They took their name from a line from the Bob Dylan song 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." The group referred to itself as a revolutionary organization of men and women whose purpose was to carry out a series of attacks that would achieve the revolutionary overthrow of the Government of the United States.[citation needed] Their attacks were mostly bombings of government buildings. The Weathermen imploded shortly after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973 and the conquest of South Vietnam by the communist North in 1975, which saw the general decline of the New Left, of which Weatherman had been a part.
Early on, the Weathermen were part of the Revolutionary Youth Movement within the Students for a Democratic Society. When they split — first from the RYM's Maoists and then from SDS itself — they distinguished themselves from other self-proclaimed revolutionary groups by claiming that there was no time to build a vanguard party and that revolutionary war against the United States and the capitalist system should begin immediately. To that end, they carried out one of the first domestic terror campaigns in the United States, consisting of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots.
http://rezkowatch.blogspot.com/2008/02/rezkowatch-factchecker-weatherman-bill_14.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_(organization)... (more)
Excerpted from: http://www.bearpit.net/index.php?act=Print&client=printer&f=2&t=9026