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Arizona Shooter's Leftist Connections To Ayers, Obama
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/crime/5876-arizona-shooters-leftist-connections-to-ayers-obama
by R. Cort Kirkwood
Thursday, 13 January 2011
Far from being a tool of the Right, it appears as if Jared Loughner,
the notorious mass murderer who killed six persons last week in
Arizona, was schooled in a program hatched by that American terrorist
par excellence, Bill Ayers. World Net Daily reports that Loughner was
a student in one of Ayers' radical education projects. And the man
who ran the program, WND adds, is "a former top communist activist
who is an associate of Ayers."
By now, everyone knows Loughner (left). Last week, he mowed down 18
persons outside a shopping center in Tucson, Ariz. Six people died,
including federal judge John M. Roll and a nine-year-old girl.
Critically wounded was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a sometime
conservative Democrat.
Police had barely put the cuffs on Loughner when the leftist media
and its commentators, such as former Enron advisor Paul Krugman, a
columnist at the New York Times, quickly blamed conservatives for
inciting Loughner's mad attack.
Turns out, however, he went to a high school associated with radicals
and communists most notably, Ayers. The school program to which the
high school was attached was funded by the Chicago Annenberg
Challenge, whose chairman at the time was Barack Obama.
We all know who he is.
Bill Ayers
For those unschooled in the history of American radical politics,
Bill Ayers was a Weather Underground terrorist from the 1960s. He is
the likely culprit behind the murder of San Francisco policeman Brian
McDonnell. As this website described the crime in its article on Ayers:
That grim day in 1970, the Park Police station was busy with officers
coming and going at a watch change, as former officer James Pera
described it at a press conference held by America's Survival.
Unbeknownst to Sgt. Brian McDonnell and his comrades in blue, the
Weathermen planted a bomb on a window ledge just outside the station.
The murderers hoped that setting the bomb to detonate at a shift
change would obliterate dozens of cops. Fortunately, it exploded a
few minutes too early, but unfortunately for McDonnell, it was timed
perfectly to catch him in the blast. Just across the room from the
window, McDonnell was checking teletypes when the bomb exploded,
sending fence staples and lead bullets into McDonnell's neck, eyes,
face, and brain. Another officer lost an eye. Others retired on
disability because of damaged hearing.
Police believe the Weathermen planted the bomb and murdered
McDonnell. Informant Larry Gratwohl, who testified before a committee
of the U.S. Senate, remembers Ayers' comments in the aftermath of the bombing:
It was a success. But it's a shame when someone like Bernadine
[Dohrn] has to make all the plans, make the bomb and then place it
herself. She should have to do only the planning.
To this day, Ayers avers that he never hurt anyone a flat-out lie.
Of course, the mainstream media believe Ayers, either from
gullibility or sympathy, but in more candid moments Ayers flatly
admits that he did, indeed, perpetrate bombings. As he told the New
York Times on September 11, 2001, ironically enough, "I don't regret
setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Then there is his book,
Fugitive Days, where he admits his role "in the bombings of New York
City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971,
and the Pentagon in 1972," or his simple rendition of what radicals
must do: "Kill all the rich people.... Kill your parents." Beyond
that, he admitted to David Horowitz, a former comrade in the radical
revolution, that he was, indeed, guilty. "I interviewed Ayers ten
years ago," Horowitz writes at his website, Front Page magazine, "in
a kindergarten classroom in uptown Manhattan where he was employed to
shape the minds of inner city children. Dressed in bib overalls with
golden curls rolling below his ears, Ayers reviewed his activities as
a terrorist for my tape recorder. When he was done, he broke into a
broad, Jack Horner grin and summed up his experience: 'Guilty as
hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.'"
Free as a bird is right. Ayers and Dohrn went underground in 1970
after the failed Fort Dix plot, hiding from the police until they
finally surfaced and surrendered in 1980.
The Ayers-Loughner Connection
Despite the terrorist acts on his résumé, Ayers landed a job teaching
at the University of Illinois, from which he retired on a
taxpayer-subsidized pension. There, instead of planting bombs, he
planted his radical ideas. His targets in some cases were children
who attended member schools of his Small Learning Community. One of
those kids was Loughner, whose Mountain View High School participated
in Ayers' radical consortium.
The man running those "communities" is a Red named Mike Klonsky, WND
reports. Klonsky directs what is called the Small School Workshop, of
which the Smaller Learning Community is a part.
Mountain View was part of the Smaller Learning Communities throughout
Loughner's entire attendance there, from 9th grade until he withdrew
without graduating before his senior year.
The high school received grants to research the concepts of Smaller
Learning Communities and work to implement them. ...
Smaller Learning Communities had its conceptual genesis in 1991, when
Ayers founded a group, Small Schools Workshop, which provides
training and resources to teach schools on how to implement the
Smaller Learning Communities. ...
Ayers' Small Schools Workshop has the stated goal of providing
support for teachers who want to create smaller learning
environments. Ayers reportedly recruited a radical activist, Mike
Klonsky, to head the Workshop. Klonsky still serves as director. ...
In 1995, with Obama as its chairman, the newly formed Chicago
Annenberg Challenge, or CAC, a school reform organization, gave the
Workshop a grant of $175,000. The CAC provided another $482,662 to
the Workshop over the next few years.
Ayers was on a working group of five that originally founded the
Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Correspondence shows Ayers was
instrumental in recruiting Obama to serve as the CAC's first chairman.
The Maoist communist Klonsky is a longtime associate of Ayers and his
terrorist wife, Bernardine Dohrn, WND reports. "In the 1970s, Klonsky
became a top communist activist and leader of the Marxist-Leninist
Communist Party. He reportedly identified as a Maoist, and traveled
in 1977 to Beijing, where he held friendly meetings with the Chinese
leadership."
Two of Loughner's favorite books, according to his YouTube channel,
are The Communst Manifesto and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.
One of Loughner school friends, WND reports, said he was "quite
liberal" and "more left."
"As I knew him," Caitie Parker wrote at her Twitter account, "he was
left wing, quite liberal and oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy."
Loughner's roots are in the radical Left.
-------
A Horrid Crime, a Dishonest Debate
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/256813/horrid-crime-dishonest-debate-andrew-c-mccarthy
The same Left that embraces terrorist Bill Ayers seeks a tactical
victory in Tucson.
January 11, 2011
by Andrew McCarthy
On June 5, 1968, a deranged 25-year-old Jordanian named Sirhan Sirhan
slithered through a crowd toward Sen. Robert Kennedy as the
Democratic presidential candidate basked in the glow of his
California presidential primary triumph. Sirhan shot and killed
Kennedy, wounding several others. The ensuing investigation showed
that Sirhan was a raging anti-Semite who'd become fixated on Senator
Kennedy because of the latter's support for Israel.
Two people profoundly impressed by the assassination were the
terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. In 1974, they dedicated
their own communist manifesto, Prairie Fire, to Sirhan, hailing him
among a cast of violent radicals as a courageous political
prisoner. In the book itself, they and the rest of the Weathermen
went on to identify themselves proudly as "communist women and
communist men underground in the United States" who were determined
to lead a violent leftist revolution a "fight [to] seize power and
build the new society." Their rhetoric, their heedless dehumanization
of those they maligned as ideological "enemies," was coupled with
acts of horrific violence, including a plot to mass-murder U.S.
soldiers in Fort Dix, a plot that went awry when the nail bomb
accidentally exploded during construction, killing some of the terrorists.
This history is one the modern Left, in which Ayers and Dohrn remain
icons, would rather you'd forget today. Today, instead, is for
politicizing the wanton savagery of another deranged radical,
22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, who stunned the nation by slithering
through a Tucson crowd and unleashing a 31-shot fusillade, gravely
wounding his primary target, Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of
Arizona. In the spree, Loughner also killed six people: nine-year-old
Christina Green; three elderly Arizonans, Dorothy Morris, Dorwin
Stoddard, and Phyllis Schneck; John M. Roll, Arizona's chief federal
district judge; and Gabriel Zimmerman, an aide to Representative
Giffords. Two other legislative aides, Pamela Simon and Ron Barber,
were wounded.
Already, we have learned a great deal about the assassin. He is a
deeply disturbed pot-head. In order to give meaning to the addling
emptiness of his life, he turned to the anti-Semitic rants of Adolph
Hitler, Marx's Communist Manifesto, the occult, and what appears to
have been an obsession with Representative Giffords, a Jewish
congresswoman and supporter of Israel. Some acquaintances and
schoolmates who'd endured his tirades over the years predicted he'd
come to an end just like this.
Nevertheless, the instantaneous reaction of the hard Left, President
Obama's base, was to politicize the Tucson atrocity as a natural, an
inevitable, result of conservative ideology, enthusiasm for
immigration-law enforcement and gun ownership by law-abiding
Americans, and dissent from Obama's policies Giffords, a centrist
Democrat (indeed, a former Republican) having supported Obamacare and
amnesty for illegal aliens.
The atrocity has called on us to indulge a double fantasy. First,
that it is worth the time and effort to engage Obama's base in a
debate about the root cause of the shootings, and specifically about
whether what the Left frames as an atmosphere of toxic rhetoric
(translation: the Tea Party, talk radio, and Fox News) is to blame.
Second, that without such a debate, we wouldn't and couldn't know why
this atrocity happened.
To grasp the absurdity of the first point, one need only remember the
reaction to terrorist attacks by two jihadists: Maj. Nidal Hassan,
who killed 13 people and wounded numerous others in the Fort Hood
massacre, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to explode a plane
over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. There could not have been a more
committed effort to deny that Islamist ideology and its hateful
rhetoric had anything whatsoever to do with these events.
Very simply: The Left likes Islam and sympathizes with the Islamist
critique of America, while it seethes with contempt for the likes of
Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and any person or institution that can
serve as a symbol of conservatism or bourgeois American life.
Consequently, any heinous act that can be contorted, however
counterfactually, into a condemnation of the Right will be exploited
for that purpose. Conversely, there is to be quick rationalization
for, and then studious suppression of, any shameful episode that is
too clearly traceable to a leftist cause célèbre Islam, a movie
pining for George W. Bush's assassination, ghoulish wishes that
Clarence Thomas or Dick Cheney will meet swift and painful deaths, or
Senate Democrats' comparing U.S. troops to Nazis, Soviets, Pol Pot,
or terrorists.
There is no point debating any of this. Two years ago, we were still
being told dissent was the highest form of patriotism; now it's the
root cause of murderous rampage. Modern leftists are tacticians.
They've convinced themselves of the rightness of their cause,
obviating the need to be consistent or faithful to facts in any
single episode. For them, it's all about how the episode can be spun
to help the cause. That's worth understanding, but not debating.
Second, can we forget that Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn's
atrocities transformed them into icons of the modern Left respected
"educators" still passionate about "social justice"? Barack Obama
didn't say, "I'll have nothing to do with unrepentant terrorists who
dedicate books to deranged assassins." He chose to hold his political
coming-out party in their living room and cultivated relationships
with them, just as he cultivated a relationship with other
hate-mongering radicals.
It is as stupid to claim that rhetoric causes violence as it is to
claim that normal people can be entrapped into terrorism. What
vitriolic thing would someone need to say to you, whether the vitriol
could be cast as right-wing or left-wing, that would get you to pick
up a gun and start spraying bullets at people with whom you
disagreed, however vigorously, about some political or social issue?
It wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen.
If wanton violence has a cause other than mental illness, it is a
culture that lionizes the savages. That culture is not the culture of
the Tea Partiers so despised by the Left. Many Tea Partiers are part
of what until recently was called "the Christian Right," an amorphous
group of Americans, not all of whom are actually Christians, tied
together by their shared acceptance of basic Judeo-Christian
principles, such as equality and the sanctity of life (even the lives
of their ideological opponents). They love liberty, because in their
hands it is guided by virtue. It leads to the good life and the good
society, not to dissipation and anarchy. Many of them pray for
President Obama despite their revulsion at most of his policies. All
of them consider him their president and would rally behind him if
the good of the nation demanded it. Their dissent does not diminish
their patriotism.
For our opinion elites, though, they are a punch line or, when
disaster strikes, a punching bag. Those elites scoff at the very idea
of real, knowable virtue unless it is rhetorically useful in
showing that America has failed to measure up. They would erase any
traditional understanding of virtue from public life, replacing it
with their vapid "values." Under these, the young learn, a terrorist
can still be a hero if he kills for noble reasons, if it becomes
fashionable to deny the humanity of those he takes as his enemies.
And then we wonder at the depravity of the next atrocity.
--
Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute,
is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the
Left Sabotage America.
.
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