Whaddya know. Academia did something right and honorable for once.

Denied:

The University of Illinois on Thursday denied 1960s radical William Ayers emeritus faculty status after trustees Chairman Christopher Kennedy noted Ayers dedicated a book to, among others, the man who killed Kennedy’s father, Robert F. Kennedy.

All nine voting trustees either opposed granting Ayers, a recently retired University of Illinois-Chicago professor, the largely honorary status or abstained from the vote. Universities often grant emeritus status to distinguished retired faculty members. At Illinois it doesn’t come with any monetary benefits, spokesman Tom Hardy said.

Ayers co-founded the Weather Underground, an anti-war group held responsible for a series of bombings during the Vietnam War era, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.

Trustees voted after a speech by Kennedy in which he noted the 1974 book “Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism,” by Ayers and other members of the Weather Underground. The book includes a dedication to a lengthy list of revolutionary figures, musicians and others, including Sirhan Sirhan, who shot Robert Kennedy to death in 1968 after the New York senator declared victory in the California Democratic presidential primary.

Good to know not everyone has forgotten Ayers’ forgotten Communist manifesto.

If you were reading this blog in October 2008, you know about “Prairie Fire” thanks to Internet sleuth Zombie’s investigative work.

In November 2008, Ayers showed himself to be the consummate crapweasel. Asked about the dedication to RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan and other “political prisoners” in the Weather Underground’s “Prairie Fire” manifesto, Bill Ayers denied that it’s true — then went on to express his “regret” for singling out the killer.

Flashback:

Meet Karl Armstrong. Via the Wisconsin State Journal (hat tip-reader Gregor):

The bombing of Sterling Hall on the UW-Madison campus by anti-war radicals in the early morning hours of Aug. 24, 1970 has a peculiar hold on Madison even 40 years later, in part because of the many lives that were changed by the blast — most notably the lives of Robert Fassnacht, the researcher killed in the explosion, and his family.

Here’s a look at what has happened to others involved in that history-changing moment.

Bomber: Karleton Armstrong

From his juice stand on Library Mall, Karleton Armstrong will hand you a strawberry smoothie and you might never know he was responsible for bombing Sterling Hall 40 years ago.

For the past 30 years, he has lived in Madison as a respectable businessman, the proprietor of Loose Juice, and before that, the popular sandwich shop Radical Rye.

Watch this video for more praise and paeans to Armstrong as he blithely makes smoothies on campus — and brags that the murderous attack was “the right thing to do.”

Another of the left-wingers bombers that day, Leo Burt, remains on the loose. Armstrong has called for the government to grant Burt amnesty because, he says, being on the run, has been “punishment enough.”

Tell that to the surviving wife and three children of Robert Fassnacht, the 33-year-old scientist killed in the bombing.

Obama’s double-talk on political dissent
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009

President Obama traveled all the way to China to praise the free flow of information. It’s the only safe place he could do so without getting heckled. With a straight face, Obama lauded political dissent and told Chinese students that he welcomed unfettered criticism in America. Fierce opposition, he said, made him “a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.” How do you say “You lie!” in Mandarin?

While the kowtower-in-chief’s press shop feeds paeans to free speech into Obama’s globe-trotting teleprompter, the White House is still waging war on vocal foes at home. Obama has lectured his critics in Washington stop talking and “get out of the way.” He has stacked his carefully-staged town halls with partisan stooges and campaign plants throughout the year. The president recently derided limited-government activists in the Tea Party movement with a vulgar sexual term used by left-wing cable hosts Anderson Cooper on CNN and the MSNBC smear merchants (just Google “teabagging” and you’ll see what they mean).

And there are now more muzzled watchdogs in the Obama administration than on the sidelines of the Westminster Kennel Club show.

Most recently, two EPA lawyers critical of the “fatally flawed” cap-and-trade system –peddled by their agency, the White House, and the Democrat majority — were told by their superiors to yank a video they posted to YouTube explaining their views. Despite including a caveat that the opinions expressed were their own and not the agency’s, the couple faces possible disciplinary action by the feds. While demanding the video be yanked, the EPA disingenuously claims it tolerates all dissenting views of its employees.

The clampdown follows on the heels of the Obama EPA’s stifling of veteran researcher Alan Carlin’s dissent. He dared to challenge the agency’s reliance on outdated data to support its greenhouse gas “public endangerment” finding. Carlin’s report was squelched; his office is now on the chopping block.

In China, O proclaimed himself “a big supporter of non-censorship.” But his FCC “diversity” czar Mark Lloyd is bent on re-engineering public airwaves by redistributing free speech rights from conservative haves who earned their success to minority have-nots who demand talk radio entitlements in the name of “media justice.”

And among Obama’s closest advisers are a husband-and-wife duo who specialize in marginalizing and stifling the Democrat Party’s most effective enemies. Just days after White House interim communications director Anita Dunn – the administration’s resident Mao cheerleader and Fox News-basher – stepped down to take a planned role as a “consultant” behind the scenes, her husband Robert Bauer stepped up and shoved aside White House counsel Greg Craig.

The problem? Former Clinton lawyer Craig wasn’t tough enough for Chicago-on-the-Potomac. Obama needed an intimate ally who will put hardball politics ahead of policy and the law. Bauer fits the bill.

A partner at prestigious law firm Perkins & Coie, Bauer served as counsel to the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Obama for America. He has served as Obama’s personal attorney navigating the corrupted waters of former Democrat Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s pay-for-play scandals in Illinois. He also served as legal counsel to the George Soros-funded 527 organization, America Coming Together, during the 2004 campaign.

That get-out-the-vote outfit, helmed by Patrick Gaspard (the former Service Employees International Union heavy-turned Obama domestic policy chief), employed convicted felons as canvassers and committed campaign finance violations that led to a $775,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission under Bauer’s watch.

During the 2008 campaign, Bauer pooh-poohed GOP complaints about voter fraud. While decrying the Republicans’ “fear message,” it was Bauer who was on a fear-inducing crusade – pulling out all legal stops to silence conservative critics of Obama’s ties to the radical Left.

As I’ve noted previously, and in light of Obama’s self-serving praise for political dissent abroad, I note again: It was Bauer who lobbied the Justice Department unsuccessfully last fall to pursue a criminal probe of American Issues Project (AIP), an independent group that sought to run an ad spotlighting Obama’s ties to Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

It was Bauer and his legal goon squad who attempted to sic the DOJ on GOP donor Harold Simmons and sought his prosecution for funding the ad. In a parallel effort launched the same week as Bauer’s legal efforts, a nonprofit called “Accountable America” spearheaded by a former operative of the Obama-endorsing MoveOn outfit began trolling campaign finance databases and targeting conservative donors with “warnig letters” in a thuggish attempt to depress Republican fundraising.

It was Bauer who tried to bully television stations across the country to compel them to pull the spot. Team Obama then summoned their troops to bombard stations, many of them owned by conservative-leaning Sinclair Communications, with 93,000 e-mails to squelch the commercial.

With Bob “The Silencer” Bauer now working from the inside and Anita “News Commissar” Dunn working from the outside, Obama has a state media police apparatus the Chinese regime could love.

Earlier this week, I spotlighted White House interim communications director and chief Fox-basher Anita Dunn’s career-long commitment to flacking for one of the Beltway’s most entrenched and crooked creatures, Tom Daschle.

I also noted that Dunn is married to Obama thug lawyer Robert Bauer, who tried valiantly to get the DOJ to prosecute conservative critics and punish TV stations for running an ad critical of Obama’s relationship with Weather Underground Bill Ayers.

Add to the mix this fun fact from Glenn Beck…Dunn is a Mao enthusiast. The White House says she is joking.

Doesn’t seem that way. And, um, who would joke about such a thing?

Hat tip: Ace and HA.

***

More: Squier, Knapp, and Dunn — Dunn’s p.r. firm — has clients including:

*SEIU-National
*SEIU-Local 1199
*Ceres-Far Left environmentalists “for sustainable prosperity”
*American Rights at Work-Big Labor outfit chaired by David Bonior

And more from reader Dan:

1. Her firm did the ads for Rod Blagojevich in Illinois in 2002 and 2006. In other words, they used lies to help elect the most corrupt governor in Illinois.

2. She or her partner Squier have widely been speculated to be one of the figures mentioned in Blagojevich indictment as a Washington consultant on a conference call mentioned by Patrick Fitzgerald.

3. Dunn’s husband was also the personal lawyer of Barack Obama related to the Blagojevich matter. Remember, he was questioned by the feds.

My column takes another swing at all the president’s radical education men. For more background on Commie Michael Klonsky, see Andrew McCarthy’s report from last October here. I mentioned some of the activists in the White House Teaching Fellowship program here. Don’t forget your Hall Pass on That. The guys at The Nose on Your Face have cooked up some Junior Czar badges, too.
And for more on the nationwide backlash, read here. Hope and change!

***
Why parents don’t trust the Educator-in-Chief and his comrades
By Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009

They think we’re crazy. “They” are the sneering defenders of Barack Obama who can’t fathom the backlash against the president’s nationwide speech to schoolchildren next Tuesday. “We” are parents with eyes wide open to the potential for politicized abuse in America’s classrooms.

Ask moms and dads in Farmington, Utah, who discovered this week that their children sat through a Hollywood propaganda video promoting the cult of Obama. In the clip, a parade of entertainers vow to flush their toilets less, buy hybrid vehicles, end poverty and world hunger, and commit to “service” for “change.” Actress Demi Moore leads the glitterati in a collective promise “to be a servant to our president.” Musician Anthony Kiedis pledges “to be of service to Barack Obama.”

The campaign commercial crescendos with the stars and starlets asking their audience: “What’s your pledge?”

This same “Do Something” ethos infected the U.S. Department of Education teachers’ guides accompanying the announcement of Obama’s speech – until late Wednesday, that is, when the White House removed some of the activist language exhorting students to come up with ways to “help the president.” Education Secretary Arne Duncan had disseminated the material directly to principals across the country – circumventing elected school board members and superintendents now facing neighborhood revolts.

O’s bureaucrats can whitewash offending language from the Sept. 8 speech-related documents, but they can’t remove the taint of left-wing radicalism that informs Obama and his education mentors. A spokesman maintained that the speech is “about the value of education and the importance of staying in school as part of his effort to dramatically cut the dropout rate.” But the historical subtext is far less innocent.

Obama served with Weather Underground terrorist and neighbor Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge education initiative. Downplaying academic achievement in favor of left-wing radical activism in the public schools is rooted in Bill Ayers’ pedagogical philosophy. Obama served as the program’s first chairman of the board, while Ayers steered its curricular policy. The two oversaw grants to welfare rights enterprise ACORN and to avowed communist Michael Klonsky – a close pal of Ayers and member of the militant Students for a Democratic Society. SDS served as a precursor to the violent Weather Underground organization.

As investigative journalist Stanley Kurtz reported, Klonsky and Ayers teamed up on the so-called “small schools movement” to steer schoolchildren away from core academics to left-wing politicking on issues of “inequity, war, and violence.”

A cadre of like-minded educators and national service administrators across the country share the same core commitment to transforming themselves from imparters of knowledge to transformers of society. The “change” agenda trains students to think only about what they should do for Obama – and rarely to contemplate how his powers and ambitions should be limited and restrained.

Ayers preached his education-as-“social justice” agenda to his “comrades” at the World Economic Forum in Caracas, Venezuela three years ago:

“This is my fourth visit to Venezuela, each time at the invitation of my comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice. Luis has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution and about the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President [Hugo] Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution, and I’ve come to appreciate Luis as a major asset in both the Venezuelan and the international struggle—I look forward to seeing how he and all of you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.”

Ayers continued:

“I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position—and from that day until this I’ve thought of myself as a teacher, but I’ve also understood teaching as a project intimately connected with social justice. After all, the fundamental message of the teacher is this: you can change your life—whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, another world is possible. As students and teachers begin to see themselves as linked to one another, as tied to history and capable of collective action, the fundamental message of teaching shifts slightly, and becomes broader, more generous: we must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!”

This is why informed parents do not trust the Educator-in-Chief and his “comrades.” You can take Obama from the radicals in Chicago. But you can’t take the Chicago radicalism out of Obama.

Well, well, well.

The White House has re-written its activist talking points for teachers/administrators disseminated by the US Department of Education and removed the language about “helping the president.”

Whitewashing: It’s the Obama way.

What they can’t whitewash is the radicalism of many of the White House Teaching Fellows responsible for drafting the material — or the radicalism of the educational mentors with whom Obama served, starting with Chicago Annenberg Challenge/Woods Fund/neighbor Bill “education is the motor-force of revolution” Ayers.

You can take Obama out of Chicago. But you can’t take the Chicago out of Obama.

Illinois is receiving copious amounts of federal tax payer dollars to “boost awareness” for the upcoming census.

How are they planning on boosting awareness? By handing out millions of dollars to Obama-Progressive friendly groups.

A push to reverse low census participation in Illinois will soon be coming via barber, baby-sitter, tax preparer, librarian and even iTunes download, part of a first-of-its-kind collaboration by local charities.

The “Count Me In” project on Wednesday will announce $1.2 million in grants to 26 groups for census outreach in 37 traditionally undercounted Chicago neighborhoods and cities around Illinois.

The name of one recipient in particular jumps off the page….The Woods Fund.

The Woods Fund was home to jihadi apologist Rashid Khalidi, Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, and Barack Obama — who served on the Board of Directors at a time when the foundation was making grants to ACORN and Jeremiah Wright’s church.

You can take Obama out of Chicago, but you can’t take the Chicago out of Obama.

I thought this would be a useful refresher as President Obama’s September 8 junior lobbyist recruitment speech approaches. It’s his Chicago pal Bill Ayers’ 2006 speech at the World Economic Forum in Caracas, Venezuela.

You can separate Obama from radical Ayers’ neighborhood. But you can’t separate Ayers’ radicalism from Obama.

President Hugo Chavez, Vice-President Vicente Rangel, Ministers Moncada and Isturiz, invited guests,comrades. I’m honored and humbled to be here with you this morning. I bring greetings and support from your brothers and sisters throughout Northamerica. Welcome to the World Education Forum! Amamos la revolucion Bolivariana!

This is my fourth visit to Venezuela, each time at the invitation of my comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice. Luis has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution and about the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution, and I’ve come to appreciate Luis as a major asset in both the Venezuelan and the international struggle—I look forward to seeing how he and all of you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane. Thank you, Luis, for everything you’ve done.

I also thank my youngest son, Chesa Boudin, who is interpreting my talk this morning and whose book on the Bolivarian revolution has played an important part in countering the barrage of lies spread by the U.S. State Department and the corrupted Northamerican media.

On my last trip to Caracas I spoke of traveling to a literacy class—Mission Robinson— in the hills above the city along a long and winding road. As we made our way higher and higher, the talk turned to politics as it inevitably does here, and someone noted that the wealthy—here and everywhere, here and in the US surely—have certain received opinions, a kind of absolute judgment about poor and working people, and yet they have never traveled this road, nor any road like it. They have never boarded this bus up into these hills, and not just the oligarchy or the wealthy—this lack of first-hand knowledge, of open investigation, of generous regard is also a condition of the everyday liberals, and even many of the radicals and armchair intellectuals whose formulations sit lifeless and stifling in a crypt of mythology about poor people. Everyone should come and travel these roads into the hills, we agreed then—and not just once, but again and again and again – if they will ever learn anything of the real conditions of life here, surely, but more important than that, if they will ever encounter the wisdom and experience and insight that lives here as well.

We arrived at eight o’clock to a literacy circle already underway being conducted in a small, poorly-lit classroom. And here in an odd and dark space, a sun was shining: ten people had pulled their chairs close together—a young woman maybe 19, a grandmother maybe 65, two men in their 40s—each struggling to read. And I thought of a poem called A Poor Woman Learns to Write by Margaret Atwood about a woman working laboriously to print her name in the dirt. She never thought she could do it, the poet notes, not her– this writing business was for others. But she does it, prints her name, her first word so far, and she looks up and smiles— for she did it right.

The woman in the poem—just like the students in Mission Robinson—is living out a universal dialectic that embodies education at its very best: she wrote her name, she changed herself, and she altered the conditions of her life. As she wrote the word, she changed the world, and another world became—suddenly and surprisingly—possible.

I began teaching when I was 20 years old in a small freedom school affiliated with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The year was 1965, and I’d been arrested in a demonstration. Jailed for ten days, I met several activists who were finding ways to link teaching and education with deep and fundamental social change. They were following Dewey and DuBois, King and Helen Keller who wrote: “We can’t have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1,900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now.”

I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position—and from that day until this I’ve thought of myself as a teacher, but I’ve also understood teaching as a project intimately connected with social justice. After all, the fundamental message of the teacher is this: you can change your life—whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, another world is possible. As students and teachers begin to see themselves as linked to one another, as tied to history and capable of collective action, the fundamental message of teaching shifts slightly, and becomes broader, more generous: we must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!

I taught at first in something like a Simoncito—called Head Start—and eventually taught at every level in barrios and prisons and insurgent projects across the United States. I learned then that education is never neutral. It always has a value, a position, a politics. Education either reinforces or challenges the existing social order, and school is always a contested space – what should be taught? In what way? Toward what end? By and for whom? At bottom, it involves a struggle over the essential questions: what does it mean to be a human being living in a human society?

Totalitarianism demands obedience and conformity, hierarchy, command and control. Royalty requires allegiance. Capitalism promotes racism and militarism – turning people into consumers, not citizens. Participatory democracy, by contrast, requires free people coming together voluntarily as equals who are capable of both self-realization and, at the same time, full participation in a shared political and economic life.

Education contributes to human liberation to the extent that people reflect on their lives, and, becoming more conscious, insert themselves as subjects in history. To be a good teacher means above all to have faith in the people, to believe in the possibility that people can create and change things. Education is not preparation for life, but rather education is life itself ,an active process in which everyone— students and teachers– participates as co-learners.

Despite being under constant attack from within and from abroad, the Bolivarian revolution has made astonishing strides in a brief period: from the Mission Simoncito to the Mission Robinson to the Mission Ribas to the Mission Sucre, to the Bolivarian schools and the UBV, Venezuelans have shown the world that with full participation, full inclusion, and popular empowerment, the failings of capitalist schooling can be resisted and overcome. Venezuela is a beacon to the world in its accomplishment of eliminating illiteracy in record time, and engaging virtually the entire population in the ongoing project of education.

The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote a poem to his fellow writers called “The Poet’s Obligation” in which he instructed them in their core responsibility: you must, he said, become aware of your sisters and brothers who are trapped in subjugation and meaninglessness, imprisoned in ignorance and despair. You must move in and out of windows carrying a vision of the vast oceans just beyond the bars of the prison– a message of hope and possibility. Neruda ends with this: it is through me that freedom and the sea will call in answer to the shrouded heart.

Let those of us who are gathered here today read this poem as “The Teacher’s Obligation.” We, too, must move in and out of windows, we, too, must build a project of radical imagination and fundamental change. Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education– a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation. This World Education Forum provides us a unique opportunity to develop and share the lessons and challenges of this profound educational project that is the Bolivarian Revolution.

Viva Mission Sucre!
Viva Presidente Chavez!
Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana!
Hasta La Victoria Siempre!

Last night, they teamed up in the People’s Republic of Boulder, Colorado, to whine about their victimization at the hands of their academic oppressors, stroke each others’ massive egos, and pat themselves on the back for their heroism:

William Ayers, the former Weather Underground radical whose past made him a lightning rod in the 2008 presidential campaign, said Thursday that fired Colorado professor Ward Churchill became the victim of a “witch hunt” after comparing Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi.

“There’s no doubt in my mind he was persecuted because of his politics,” Ayers said before appearing with Churchill at a student rally on academic freedom at the University of Colorado at Boulder…

…Ayers is now an education professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago and an outspoken critic of intimidation of professors. “Again and again, we have political leaders who weigh in on what’s appropriate to teach and who’s appropriate to teach,” Ayers said Thursday. He cited the University of Nebraska’s decision to cancel his scheduled appearance at the Lincoln campus last fall after criticism from Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman. “Is that where we’re heading, is the university a fiefdom of the governor? That’s a little frightening,” he said.

…Ayers said he worries less about himself and Churchill than “about the teacher in Denver who can’t bring herself to ask the critical question because she saw what happened to Ward Churchill.” He also acknowledged that what the Weather Underground did failed to stop the Vietnam war but he refused to apologize for it.

“I don’t claim much for myself, but I’m not going to align myself at this late date with those who want to make war heroes out of criminals and criminals out of heroes,” he said.

More from Slapstick Politics.

See the Denver Post article for the laughable spectacle of these two violence-promoters moaning about their security needs. In moonbat Boulder. Seriously.

I’ve got a few graphic words for this latest bit of news about Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers’ capitalist pursuits. I bet you do, too:

Teachers College Press, a scholarly, professional and trade publisher focused on the theory and practice of teacher education, has reached agreement on a two-book deal with William Ayers, the University of Illinois at Chicago professor, lauded educational theorist and former leader of the radical 1960s Weather Underground. And, yes, Ayers is indeed the same figure dragooned into the 2008 presidential race in a controversial attempt to use his background in radical politics and a minor acquaintance with Barack Obama to undermine Obama’s presidential run.

In spring 2010, TCP will publish a graphic novel adaptation of To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, a much-praised memoir of Ayers’s life as a teacher, tentatively to be called To Teach: The Graphic Memoir with art by Xeric Award-winner Ryan Alexander-Tanner. More than a simple memoir, To Teach is also a peer-reviewed work of scholarship on Ayers’s teaching precepts as well as a vivid recollection of his adventures in the classroom. At the same time, TCP will publish a new and revised third edition of the original prose To Teach: The Journey of a Teache. One of TCP’s all-time bestselling titles, To Teach was originally published in 1993 and has sold more than 75,000 copies over three printings, the last one released in 2001.

“For an academic/scholarly press, that’s a major bestseller,” noted TCP acquisitions editor Meg Lemke, who “co-acquired” the book with TCP director Carol Saltz, who will edit the new prose edition. Lemke will oversee the production of the graphic edition. Despite the media hoopla over his radical past, Ayers is a serious and much respected Chicago-based educational activist and theorist who has been with TCP for years and published at least five books at the house.

Hat tip: DS Hube

As for Ayers’ “serious and much respected” track record as an “educational activist and theorist,” I highly recommend you read Steve Sailer’s investigation of how Bill Gates blew $2 billion on Ayers’ educational boondoggle.

How about a graphic novel of that?

You’ve heard by now about the Canadian border agents who prevented Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers from entering their country for a speaking gig.

Bravo to them.

I’m thinking they should moonlight as security guards at the Obama inaugural prayer service. They’d make sure jihadi apologists don’t penetrate the premises.

Next, they should freelance as security guards at American campuses — and start protecting the free speech rights of those who wish to criticize Ayers.

Well, this is rich.

I told you last month that Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers was invited to speak at Florida State University. The FSU president defended the idea by asserting: “Danger lies not in some speaker’s ideas. Danger lies in teaching students that ideas they don’t agree with are not important.”

Sadly, but predictably, conservative ideas with which liberals on FSU’s campus disagree were not important enough to allow within Bill Ayers’ earshot. At the event earlier this week, students and other protesters who objected to Ayers’ speech were hauled off to a separate “free speech zone” to protect Ayers’ supporters from being subjected to dissent.

FSU student Richard Keeth e-mailed me:

I along with about 50 other students and various people from the Tallahassee community were protesting peacefully outside our Oglesby Union Ballrooms (the location of the event) about 1 hour prior to it starting. Other than a few jeers from the Liberals the protest was very peaceful, no physical conflicts or anything even close to that emerged. However, when the FSU PD arrived, they started corralling us and telling us we weren’t allowed to “protest” there. They moved us far away from the event, in what they designated “free speech zones.” I had heard of them before, but never actually witnessed the police enforce it. Apparently on our public University campus, you can utilize your first amendment rights in “zones.” I had assumed America was a free speech zone, but apparently not.

Liam Julian blasts the administration:

If there’s one thing America’s students (especially disadvantaged ones) do not need, it’s to be inundated in classrooms with noxious notions about revolution, violence and tyranny. Every real education reformer worth his salt, whether conservative or liberal, agrees that the ideology of victimization that Ayers preaches is toxic. Pupils learn best when taught reading, writing and math in disciplined environments by teachers who accept no excuses for failure.

So: The harmful and flawed educational notions of a man who hid from the law after bombing buildings in which served our nation’s police, elected officials and military personnel is, according to FSU, protected speech that public money should fund.

But protestations against Ayers’ ideas apparently do not deserve similar protection. The Democrat reported that two men — one dressed as Osama bin Laden, the other as Timothy McVeigh — attempted to make evident their disapproval of Ayers’ views and actions by distributing, outside the student union, fliers mockingly described as “from the terrorist community.” The men were removed to Landis Green, a designated “free-speech zone” that has the considerable drawback of being nowhere near the ballroom where Ayers spoke and, thus, allowing only the free speech that nobody is free to hear. Oh well: At least neither was tased.

The university’s actions are discordant. They are especially so because FSU President T.K. Wetherell defended the invitation to Ayers in part by writing, “Danger lies not in some speaker’s ideas. Danger lies in teaching students that ideas they don’t agree with are not important.”

Wetherell’s first sentence is baseless: History offers innumerable examples of danger lying in the ignoble ideas that certain speakers advance. Wetherell’s second sentence is unobjectionable but was pointedly violated at the Ayers event when FSU police unaccountably transported protesters to campus Siberia.

Taken together, though, his two sentences are superfluous.

For no matter one’s position on Ayers’ ideas, they are not, as Wetherell suggests, “important.” The sole reason anyone outside Chicago gives a hoot about Ayers is because he planted bombs and, decades later, had fleeting contact with the president-elect. When, in 2007, Columbia University hosted the racist Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, its administration could at least justify the invitation by noting that Ahmadinejad, for all his ranting, was a national leader. Ayers has no such clout.

What, then, about protecting campus free speech at FSU? Whether Ayers should have visited campus is less a matter of free speech than of taste and discernment. To civilized and intelligent people, Ayers’ ideas are (should be) plainly foolish; his actions and associations are (should be) plainly revolting. Certainly Ayers can say what he wishes. But the question for FSU’s administration was whether to assent to pay him thousands of dollars to do so in the university’s environs. The administration’s acquiescence, then, signaled not that Ayers’ ideas merited free-speech protection (which they already have) but that his ideas merited promulgation on FSU’s dime.

And — the irony! — at the same time FSU was furthering the disbursement of shoddy thinking under the guise of protecting free speech, it was actively suppressing free speech by banishing protesters to an Orwellian-sounding “free-speech zone.”

Should Ayers have come to FSU or not? Let the debate continue if it must, but let us not pretend the argument is one about the free exchange of important ideas.

Compare how FSU handled dissenters with how Berkeley handled protesters at lectures by Daniel Pipes and me.

File under “Double standards.”

Just thought you might be interested in what Barack Obama’s friendly neighborhood terrorist is up to these days.

Reader Tom B., a student at Florida State University, e-mails: “Our Student Government passed a resolution tonight allocating $5000 of the University’s money to pay William Ayers to speak at our school under the guise of ‘education reform.’ Obviously he was chosen for his radical views and ‘activist’ fame, and I thought it was definitely newsworthy that a state school is giving money to a terrorist to spread his radical agenda. Hope you can help us college conservatives get the word out!”

Meantime, a community organizing group in Illinois lists some of its holiday auction items, including:

–Dinner for 4 from Bill Ayers at Bill and Bernadine’s house, starting at $30.

Proceeds benefit AREA Chicago, a grassroots activist/research organization committed to social justice.

Second Annual “Wants and Needs” Auction to Benefit AREA Chicago
December 6th, 2008 7-11pm; 511 N. Noble St.
$10 donation, or $20 for admission and a T-shirt
To RSVP or pre-pay for admission, e-mail areachicago@gmail.com
(Cost of admission includes one complimentary drink.)

Molotov cocktails, perhaps?

He concludes by asserting that he would dedicate the book today to millions of “political prisoners” currently behind bars. (Undoubtedly, this would include imprisoned Weather Underground terrorists David Gilbert and Judith Alice Clark and the likes of cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal.)

Via Breitbart.tv:

Flashback:

***

More: Ayers whines about Fox News.

Didn’t sleep much last night, so I was already feeling queasy when I tuned in to watch a bit of the Good Morning America interview with Barack Obama’s good family friend, Bill Ayers. Now, I’m really feeling sick in my stomach. The interviewer actually did an adequate job of trying to press Ayers on his terrorist past. But in the end, he acquiesced and let Ayers have the last, morally equivalent word. (Allah’s got the vid clips and more deconstruction.)

Ayers refused to say that the violent crimes of the Weather Underground were wrong. He talked about domestic terrorism as if it were akin to toilet-papering a neighbor’s tree. He magnanimously acknowledged that the Pentagon bombings “crossed lines of propriety, legality, and perhaps common sense.” Perhaps?

Confronted with the Prairie Fire manifesto’s dedication to Sirhan Sirhan, he waved it off with a quick “I reject that.” Asked about his 9/11 quote in the NYTimes lamenting that his terrorist outfit “should have done more,” Ayers whinnied that the quote was taken out of the context of the number of people killed in Vietnam.

Huh?

More:

“What you call the violent past, that was a time when thousands of people were being murdered every month by our own government. … We were on the right side,” he told “GMA.”

The co-founder of the Weather Underground was, as McCain has claimed, unrepentant about the the bombings his group committed during the 1960s.

“The content of the Vietnam protest is that there were despicable acts going on, but the despicable acts were being done by our government. … I never hurt or killed anyone,” Ayers said.

“Frankly, I don’t think we did enough, just as today I don’t think we’ve done enough to stop these wars,” he said.

Ayers adamantly denied that the Weather Underground engaged in terrorism because it didn’t “target people to kill and injure them.” Oh, yeah? Tell it to the families of Waverly Brown, Edward O’Grady, and Peter Paige.

I suggested yesterday on Fox that those families should be offered equal time to rebut Ayers’ self-whitewashing.

Here is equal time:

Sergeant Edward J. O’Grady Jr.
Nyack Police Department
New York
End of Watch: Tuesday, October 20, 1981

Incident Details
Cause of Death: Gunfire
Date of Incident: Tuesday, October 20, 1981
Weapon Used: Rifle; Automatic
Suspect Info: Paroled in 2003

Police Officer Waverly L. Brown
Nyack Police Department
New York
End of Watch: Tuesday, October 20, 1981

Biographical Info
Age: 45
Tour of Duty: 15 years
Badge Number: 19

Incident Details
Cause of Death: Gunfire
Date of Incident: Tuesday, October 20, 1981
Weapon Used: Rifle; Automatic
Suspect Info: Paroled in 2003

Peter Paige, Brinks security guard, killed October 20, 1981

Sergeant Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly Brown were shot and killed by heavily armed members of a domestic terrorist group, the Weather Underground, who had just robbed a bank and were attempting to escape. The suspects had just murdered an armored car guard and wounded two other guards before loading themselves into the back of a rental truck to be driven away by accomplices. The truck was stopped at a roadblock manned by several Nyack officers.

One of the female occupants in the cab of the truck told the officers their guns were making her nervous. Thinking they had stopped the wrong truck, the officers began to holster their weapons. Almost immediately afterwards several of the heavily armed men exited the back of the truck and opened fire with automatic weapons, fatally wounding Officer Brown and Sergeant O’Grady. The suspects fled the scene in different directions but were all eventually apprehended and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. One of the suspects was paroled in August 2003.

A suspect convicted of killing Police Officer John G. Scarangella of the New York City Police Department, was a prime suspect in the murders of Sergeant O’Grady and Officer Brown. When he was arrested for the murder of Officer Scarangella, he was in possession of a gun linked to the murders of Sergeant O’Grady and Officer Brown. That suspect was never charged in these murders.

Sergeant O’Grady was a Vietnam War veteran. He was survived by his wife and three children.

The Weather Underground was also connected to the Black Liberation Army, which was responsible for the murders of at least one dozen other police officers throughout the country. The Weather Underground is believed responsible for the unsolved bombing murder of San Francisco, California, Police Department Sergeant Brian McDonnell on February 16, 1970.

The Black Liberation Army was a violent, radical group that attempted to fight for independence from the United States government in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s. The BLA was responsible for the murders of more than 10 police officers around the country. They were also responsible for violent attacks around the country that left many police officers wounded.