Bin Laden's American blood brothers

The day terror struck our country, homegrown extremists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn waxed nostaglic about their own bombing exploits.

By David Horowitz

Sept. 17, 2001 | 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. In retrospect, the article's headline could not have been more flesh-crawling: "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, Mich., 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 high-heeled boots and a leather miniskirt -- 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 pregnant actress Sharon Tate had been stabbed in her womb with a fork), 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 resorted to a baldfaced lie. "It was a joke," she told the credulous 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 30 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.

Instead of a critique of this malignant couple and their destructive résumé, the Times' portrait provided a soft-focus promotion for Ayers' newly published "Fugitive Days," a memoir notable for its dishonesty and its celebration of his and Dorhn's malevolent exploits. Ayers' book wallows in familiar Marxist incitements and the homicidal delusions of '60s radicalism, including a loving reprint of an editorial from the old socialist magazine Alarm! written by Albert Parsons, one of the Haymarket anarchists, whom the Weathermen idolized:

"Dynamite! Of all the good stuff, that is the stuff! Stuff several pounds of this sublime stuff into an inch pipe ... plug up both ends, insert a cap with a fuse attached, place this in the immediate vicinity of a lot of rich loafers who live by the sweat of other people's brows, and light the fuse. A most cheerful and gratifying result will follow. In giving dynamite to the downtrodden millions of the globe, science has done its best work."

"Fugitive Days" has received glowing tributes from the liberal literary crowd, including Scott Turow, Phillip Lopate, Thomas Frank, Hunter Thompson and New York Observer columnist Ron Rosenbaum. Studs Terkel declared it "a deeply moving elegy to all those young dreamers who tried to live decently in an indecent world."

But there is nothing decent about Ayers' romantic portrait of political violence. In "Fugitive Days," Ayers has written a text that the bombers of the World Trade Center could have packed in their flight bags alongside the Koran, as they embarked on their sinister mission. Like Osama bin Laden, Ayers is a son of wealth (his father was the the chairman of Chicago's giant utility, Commonwealth Edison). And like bin Laden, Ayers was enthralled by the idea of moving history in the direction he desired through the instant gratification of explosives.

Why did Ayers and his comrades unleash their reign of terror? "I don't think you can understand a single thing we did," explains the pampered Weatherman bomber, "without understanding the violence of the Vietnam War." Here you have the banal excuse of all criminals posing as revolutionary heroes: The devil (or the Great Satan) made me do it.

Today Ayers is not merely an author favored by the New York Times and the literary elite but a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois. His Lady Macbeth is not merely a lawyer, but a member of the American Bar Association's governing elite, as well as the director of Northwestern University's Children and Family Justice Center. And these privileged radicals' view of America -- their facile defamation of our country's power and wealth, their ready appeasement of our mortal enemies -- are once again on public display as we struggle to deal with terrorist assault.

President Bush has correctly defined last week's repulsive deeds that left more than 5,000 dead as an "act of war," one that must be met by a prolonged and ferocious counteroffensive. But already, the voices of moral confusion, equivocation and surrender have been raised in the usual quarters. On the day of the bloody attack, New Yorker theater critic John Lahr warned readers of the Microsoft Internet journal Slate against a military response: "I fear the hysteria in the American character, which splits so easily into good and bad, which rushes to judgment rather than to thought. The terrorists have taken aim at the American government and American capitalism and brought them both symbolically at least down. America, from the point of view of the terrorists, has been humiliated and brutalized as they have felt humiliated and brutalized by America."

This is the we-feel-your-terrorist-pain appeasement perspective perfectly tuned. The hysteria in the American character! A character that permitted fanatical America-haters to bomb the World Trade Center not once but twice without so much as instituting serious security at its airports, lest the American Civil Liberties Union and other members of the appeasement coalition take their government to court to ensure that terrorists, too, have civil liberties. Hysterically "anti-Islamic" America, which during the Clinton years forbade its intelligence operatives from using "human rights violators" as intelligence assets to prevent such terrorist attacks. Who in these Middle Eastern thugdoms with any access to authority or power let alone terrorist networks is not a human rights violator?

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