Nothing is more emblematic of the rampant intellectual incoherence and moral equivalence of our age than the current debate about whether Bill Ayers is a "terrorist." Dean Millot at Edbizbuzz calls Mike a "McCarthyite"--one of the most vicious slanders in the political lexicon--for stating the obvious: Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist who shouldn't be part of the American Educational Research Association's leadership team. Leaving aside the AERA issue (and I don't think any respectable group should have a person who committed and championed violence to pursue political goals as a member, never mind as one of its leaders), how can Ayers's actions as part of the radical Weather Underground not be categorized as terrorism?
''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Ayers told the New York Times in an interview published (of all days) on September 11, 2001. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Well, he and the Weathermen did plenty: They launched a series of bombings against New York City Police Headquarters, the Capitol building, and the Pentagon during the early 1970s. Their goal was to bring violent Marxist revolution and the Vietnam War to the streets of America--or as they frequently called it, "Amerika," to connote its supposedly fascist underpinnings.
In 1970, Ayers summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at.'' Ayers now says his comments were a "joke" meant to stimulate discussion on the merits of wealth redistribution. Ha, ha. There is nothing funny about the comments--or about the Weathermen's acts. Their embrace of political violence and revolutionary utopianism directly led to the 1970 deaths of Ayers's then-girlfriend, Diana Oughton and two other people when bombs they were constructing mistakenly blew up in a Greenwich Village town house. After the incident, Ayers and his sidekick (later wife) Bernardine Dohrn went underground. The Weathermen subsequently committed 12 more bombings.
It was pure luck that innocent civilians weren't killed in the bombings against police headquarters and government buildings. But as Ayers admits in his memoir, Fugitive Days, the Weathermen's intent was to strike fear in America's ruling elites and galvanize a broad-based popular uprising. In other words, their actions fall under the classic definition of "terrorism" in Webster's Dictionary: "The violent or destructive acts (as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands."
The Weather Underground was a terror organization and Ayers was a terrorist--plain and simple. But to Mr. Millot and his ilk, this smacks of "McCarthyism" and adds unnecessary "emotion" to the debate. "People in positions like Mike's [Petrilli] need to think about the consequences of what they say," Mr. Millot says. "What he said has had consequences. And Mike bears some responsibility for helping the debate on education policy to sink a bit more." I don't know what planet Mr. Millot is living on, but since when did stating the obvious lower the education policy debate?
It's deeply disturbing that AERA is providing a platform and legitimacy to a man, who by his own admission, helped to plan, orchestrate, and implement terrorist attacks on American soil and against American institutions. It is doubly disturbing that, after the 9/11 atrocities, when the United States is engaged in a war on terrorism in which terrorists are killing American soldiers on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the FBI and Justice Department have repeatedly warned that radical groups are plotting attacks on the American homeland, to use the term terrorist for someone who committed terrorist acts is now somehow a form of "McCarthyism" and beyond the pale. This is moral anarchy at its worst.
Ayers confesses that, after watching a 1976 documentary about the Weathermen, he was ''embarrassed by the arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we and we alone knew the way." In particular, the "rigidity and the narcissism" disturbed him the most.
Ayers and the Weathermen represented the politics of narcissism. Most of them were children of privilege, born and raised in middle-class, if not wealthy homes. They knew nothing of real suffering or injustice. They spent most of their time, as Ayers points out in his memoir, engaging in "sexual experimentation" and drugs. They were hedonists with delusions of grandeur. They saw political militancy and radical chic as a way to give meaning to their empty, pathetic lives. That this man still cannot understand that his terrorist actions were not only illegal and wrong, but a profound assault on this country's democratic way of life, reveals his moral and intellectual bankruptcy. It also does not speak well for those who seek to downplay or minimize Ayers's inexcusable behavior.