Bill Ayers, Israel's Latest Attacker
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/07/bill-ayers-israel%E2%80%99s-latest-attacker-by-p-david-hornik/
by P. David Hornik
Jan 7th, 2010
"What a country. It makes me want to puke." Thus spoke Bill Ayers,
the former but unrepentant Weatherman terrorist who's now a professor
of education at the University of Illinois, in 2001. The country he
had in mind was the United States. It's a safe bet that people with
his degree of America-hatred don't like Israel, either. Indeed, Ayers
has now joined 431 academics in signing an anti-Israeli petition.
Not surprisingly, it accuses Israel of apartheidthe ritual
accusation of the Israel-hating crowd that dreams of Israel's
Jewish-majority government being forced to dissolve the way South
Africa's white-minority government was forced to. The petition also
"urge[s] our colleagues, nationally, regionally, and internationally,
to stand up against Israel's ongoing scholasticide and to support the
non-violent call for academic boycott, disinvestment, and sanctions."
Soon after signing the petition Ayers, along with his wife and fellow
former terrorist Bernadine Dohrn, was in Egypt, agitating to be
allowed into Gaza to express "solidarity" with the Gazans and their
leadership, Hamas.
It's a testament to the irresistible pull, for people like Ayers and
Dohrn, of terrorism directed at a democratic societyin their own
case, the U.S., in Hamas's, Israel. In a 1974 manifesto, Ayers,
Dohrn, and two other coauthors wrote that "We are communist women and
men
deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the
struggle against U.S. imperialism." Somehow, that morphs into
sympathy for fanatically religious, socioculturally troglodyte
Hamaswith the spilt blood of democratic citizens as the connecting glue.
Ayers's antics are still of interest because of his close past
connections with the current U.S. president. Ayers helped get Obama's
political career going in the mid-1990s by featuring him in meetings
at his home. Ayers also appointed Obama as the first chairman of his
school-reform group, Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and the two of them
apparently worked closely together. There is even considerable
evidence that Ayers ghost-wrote Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.
It was particularly Obama's association with Ayers and with Obama's
longtime pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that sparked fears that
America was on the way to electing a radical president. Wright and
Ayers were intensely worrisome from Israel's standpoint, too. Ayers,
for his part, accused Israel in a 2006 blog post of "invading" the
New York public schools with its "elaborate, self-aggrandizing, and
thoroughly dishonest story of itself
." Last month he said that
"small little Israel
tends to make U.S. foreign policy" and called
this a "disaster" and "something we could end."
Were Israel's fears that Obama would be influenced by such attitudes
justified? It seemed that way for a while. As when, in his speech
last June in Cairo, Obama found ways to relativize and mitigate all
evils that occur in the Muslim world and referred only to Israeli
settlements as an intolerable offense that "must stop," and then
continued (along with other members of his administration) to pound
away on the settlements issue while referring only delicately and
obliquely to the mounting domestic brutalities of the Iranian regime.
More recently, though, Obama and his administration have taken a
softer line on Israel and allayed some of these fears. As Israel's
ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren pointed out, the U.S. under Obama
has in the past months backed Israel by opposing the Goldstone report
and by pulling out of joint military maneuvers with Turkey after
Turkey forced Israel out of them.
Reasons for the change could include Israeli prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu's deft deflection of the administration's pressures;
Obama's preoccupation with a host of other issues from health care to
domestic terror to Afghanistan to Yemen; and perhaps even the evident
intransigence and refusal to negotiate of Palestinian Authority
president Mahmoud Abbas.
Ideally, however, the change would reflect Obama's progress from an
Ayers-type view of the world, in which the United States and Israel
are its main troublemakers, to realism about the actual threats that
civilization faces. On that score, though, Obama's continued
ineptitude in dealing with Tehran means it's much too soon to
celebrate. Israel, as the country most directly threatened by Iran's
nuclear drive, can only hope he can still shed the old myopia that
led him to people like Ayers in the first place.
.
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