So, to get everyone in the mood, let's start off with some excerpts from David Horowitz' article "Allies In War" from FrontPage.com. I bring it up for a lot of reasons.
Recently, on a trip to New York City, I stayed at a hotel called The Larchmont on W. 11th Street in Greenwich Village. Across the street is #18, which is a very infamous address in leftist circles; on March 6, 1970, its occupants - several members of the radical leftist group "The Weathermen" - blew themselves and the building to smithereens while constructing a bomb to detonate at a non-com officer's dance at Fort Dix.
Knowing the history behind this place, I checked out the video documentary "The Weathermen Underground" from the SFPL. It's an excellent documentary, even if you go away from it shaking your head - it is clear that the filmmakers were sympathetic to the radicals, but they don't engage in much out-and-out disinformation, so it lets the terrorists explain (and summarily hang) themselves with their own words..
Another thing I got from the film is that certain people in the group have absolutely no remorse for what they did, and, if anything, only wish that they had been more violent. Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers in particular strike me as being dangerous people, and... well, it would not surprise me in the slightest if the FBI was still keeping a very close eye on them. It would really surprise me if they weren't.
This is a reminder of what we are up against. Here's a few excerpts...
ON THE MORNING OF THE ATTACKS on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, along with a million other readers of the New York Times including many who would never be able to read the paper again, I opened its pages to be confronted by a color photo showing a middle-aged couple holding hands and affecting a defiant look at the camera. The article was headlined in an irony that could not have been more poignant, "No Regrets For A Love Of Explosives." The couple pictured were Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former leaders of the 1960s’ Weather Underground, America’s first terrorist cult. One of their bombing targets, as it happened, was the Pentagon.
"I don’t regret setting bombs," Ayers was quoted in the opening line of the Times profile; "I feel we didn’t do enough." In 1969, Ayers and his wife convened a "War Council" in Flint Michigan, whose purpose was to launch a military front inside the United States with the purpose of helping Third World revolutionaries conquer and destroy it. Taking charge of the podium, dressed in a high-heeled boots and a leather mini-skirt – her signature uniform – Dorhn incited the assembled radicals to join the war against "Amerikkka" and create chaos and destruction in the "belly of the beast." Her voice rising to a fevered pitch, Dohrn raised three fingers in a "fork salute" to mass murderer Charles Manson whom she proposed as a symbol to her troops. Referring to the helpless victims of the Manson Family as the "Tate Eight" (the most famous was actress Sharon Tate) Dohrn shouted:
Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!
Embarrassed today by this memory, but unable to expunge it from the record and unwilling to repudiate her terrorist deeds, Dorhn resorts to the lie direct. "It was a joke," she told the sympathetic Times reporter, Dinitia Smith; she was actually protesting America’s crimes. "We were mocking violence in America. Even in my most inflamed moment I never supported a racist mass murderer." In 1980, I taped interviews with thirty members of the Weather Underground who were present at the Flint War Council, including most of its leadership. Not one of them thought Dohrn was anything but deadly serious. Outrageous nihilism was the Weatherman political style. As soon as her tribute to Manson was completed, Dohrn was followed to the Flint platform by another Weather leader who ranted, "We’re against everything that’s ‘good and decent’ in honky America. We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mothers’ nightmares."
...And...
In my experience, what drives most radicals are passions of resentment, envy and inner rage. Bill Ayers is a scion of wealth. His father was head of Detroit’s giant utility Commonwealth Edison, in line for a cabinet position in the Nixon Administration before his son ruined it by going on a rampage that to this day he cannot explain to any reasonable person’s satisfaction (which is why he has to conceal so much). It could be said of Bill Ayers that he was consumed by angers so terrible they led him to destroy his father’s career. But in the 10 hours I interviewed him I saw none of it. What I saw was a shallowness beyond conception. All the Weather leaders I interviewed shared a similar vacuity. They were living inside a utopian fantasy, a separate reality, and had no idea of what they had done. Nor any way to measure it. Appreciating the nation to which they were born, recognizing the great gifts of freedom and opportunity their parents and communities had given them, distinguishing between right and wrong – it was all above their mental and moral ceiling.
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