Ayers Op-Ed

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Ayers Op-Ed
183
Sun, 12-07-2008 - 4:53am

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Real Bill Ayers

By WILLIAM AYERS
Published: December 5, 2008
Chicago

IN the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”

Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.

I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.

With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.

Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.

Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.

I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.

I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.

The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.

We — the broad “we” — wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war.

The dishonesty of the narrative about Mr. Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other’s behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we’ve been unable to rise above it.

President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others, I wish I knew him better.

Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let’s hope they never will again. And let’s hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.

William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of “Fugitive Days” and a co-author of the forthcoming “Race Course.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/opinion/06ayers.html?_r=1&em

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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-04-2003
In reply to: sild
Thu, 12-11-2008 - 1:22pm

ROFL!

iVillage Member
Registered: 11-20-2008
In reply to: sild
Thu, 12-11-2008 - 3:13pm
I read through your link thoroughly. There is no Bill Clinton quote that we should go into/invade Iraq.
iVillage Member
Registered: 11-19-2008
In reply to: sild
Thu, 12-11-2008 - 3:24pm
Didn't you know? In the topsy-turvy world of liberals, Ayres is a hero...just like Osama Bin Laden. It's the President who's a terrorist. LOL!
iVillage Member
Registered: 11-19-2008
In reply to: sild
Thu, 12-11-2008 - 3:25pm

>>> IF a leader takes a nation to war, with all the horror, destruction and cost, it had better be for damn good reasons.

The President, the Congress, the UN and our allies disagreed with your...opinion.

iVillage Member
Registered: 11-20-2008
In reply to: sild
Thu, 12-11-2008 - 7:34pm
No it didn't
.
.
iVillage Member
Registered: 11-19-2008
In reply to: sild
Fri, 12-12-2008 - 1:11am

>>> All wrong. Clinton never said there were "stockpiles of WMDs" in Iraq when Bush started the Iraq War.

Um...wrong...

"it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons." - Bill Clinton, to Larry King
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/23/clinton.iraq.sotu/

Clinton also said...

"So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the U.N. to say, 'You got to let these inspectors in, and this time if you don't cooperate the penalty could be regime change, not just continued sanctions.'"
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/23/clinton.iraq.sotu/

>>> Clinton never claimed Iraq had nukes. I don't think anyone did!

Knock, knock? Who's there? History lesson...

"Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors.

Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons.

First, without a strong inspection system, Iraq would be free to retain and begin to rebuild its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs in months, not years.

- President Bill Clinton, address to the nation
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/12/16/transcripts/clinton.html

You might take note of the word "nuclear"...it was used several times in this ONE speech.

>>> Maybe Hussein postured about having a nuclear weapon but we know why now, right? All of Hussein's posturing about WMDs was to hold off war with Iran. It's amazing that 5 years later, people still don't understand why Hussein lied about having WMDs. Rather, they actually believed Hussein!!

So you're saying that Hussein was justified in defying the UN and pushing the US and our allies into a war. You voted for Obama, right?

>>> As far as regime change, yes, Clinton gave it lip service.

Um...yeah...signing that policy into law is kind of like "lip service." (where's my eye roll icon when I need it?)

>>> But when he had the opportunity to use ground forces in Iraq, he chose instead to launch 150 air strikes over Iraq. Go figure.

Why would he use ground forces to strike strategic targets? He also probably figured he couldn't muster 150,000 troops and get them over to Iraq in time to provide a distraction for his impeachment the next day.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-24-2008
In reply to: sild
Fri, 12-12-2008 - 5:05am

One more time, shall we?

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-24-2008
In reply to: sild
Fri, 12-12-2008 - 5:10am

I guess the revisionist history begins?

iVillage Member
Registered: 11-20-2008
In reply to: sild
Fri, 12-12-2008 - 5:46pm

It's going to be a lot tougher to rewrite history with the internet now a factor. Once upon a time, journalists, authors and historians were the arbiters of what happened (or didn't, as the case may be). Ideologues could get their story out, reinforce the story with other ideologues and have it served up as reality. Not so readily done now. For good or for bad, the internet allows much more populism, many more points of view, and there's far less ability to spin and control perceptions.

At the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, I asked what impact the internet would have on how the war was fought. One answer was that jihadists had far more opportunity to recruit. Another answer may have been that politicians can't suppress past words/actions or serve up faux hostile encounter stories (the Straits of Hormuz nonsense comes to mind).

iVillage Member
Registered: 11-19-2008
In reply to: sild
Fri, 12-12-2008 - 8:48pm

"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line."
--President Bill Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."
--President Bill Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

"The community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists. If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow." -- Bill Clinton in 1998

"Senator, unlike some of your Republican friends during Kosovo, I support our troops in Iraq and the president." - Bill Clinton, appearance on CBS's 60 Minutes, March 30, 2003

So, you're sitting there as president, you're reeling in the aftermath of this, so, yeah, you want to go get bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that. But you also have to say, well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. I've got to do that. That's why I supported the Iraq thing.

So that's why I thought Bush did the right thing to go back. When you're the president, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for." - Bill Clinton. Time Magazine, June 28, 2004

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