Professors For Terrorism?

We’ll admit it, for being such a leading conservative blog in a red-as-hell Southern state, we haven’t gotten as riled up about the whole Bill Ayers-Barack Obama controversy as we probably should have.

Part of our initial disinterest was undoubtedly due to our complete and total lack of enthusiasm for either of the major party candidates in the current U.S. Presidential election, which is the context for Ayers becoming a most undeserving 15-minute celebrity.

Given their shared aversion to the market principles on which this nation was built, we frankly want nothing to do with either Barack Obama or John McCain.

In fact, it was only when Sarah Palin’s legs seduced us – and then only when our founding editor’s alma mater was revealed as a big Ayers’ travel provider – did we even think the connection between Obama and this unrepentant former domestic terrorist was worth exploring.

Which is our bad.

Of course, another part of our initial disinterest stemmed from the fact that – McCain’s political opportunism notwithstanding – we simply didn’t think people would be in a big rush to defend a guy who earlier this decade said he “didn’t do enough” blowing stuff up during his previous life as a hippie hoodlum.

Certainly, Obama hasn’t been in a big rush to defend Ayers, whose Weather Underground terrorist group managed to kill a few cops as part of its “progressive advocacy” back in the seventies.

But apparently 3,247 people (and counting) are in a big rush to support Ayers, so much so that they’ve launched their own website, SupportBillAyers.org.

“It seems that the character assassination and slander of Bill Ayers and other people who have known Obama is not about to let up,” the website’s home page proclaims. “While an important concern is the dishonesty of this campaign and the slanderous McCarthyism they are using to attack Obama, we also feel an obligation to support our friend and colleague Bill Ayers. Many, many educators have reached out, asking what they could do, seeking a way to weigh in against fear and intimidation.”

How nice.

What about the actual assassination of two New York cops by Ayers’ group during an armored truck heist? Or the San Francisco cop who got blown to smithereens by a Weather Underground pipe bomb?

What about the “fear and intimidation” those men and their families were subjected to?

Not surprisingly, the pro-Ayers’ petition makes no mention of that sort of thing.

Comprised mostly of academics from New York, Chicago and Los Angeles (as well as representatives of the “Socialist Alliance,” the National Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO), it actually surprised us somewhat that most of petition’s signatories actually listed the colleges and universities where they work.

In fact, nine of them – Louise Jennings, Bruce E. Field, Craig Kridel, Elizabeth Powers-Costello, Gloria Boutte, Alan Wieder, Pamella Jewett and Michelle L. Jay – proudly identified themselves as faculty members at the University of South Carolina.

Specifically, all of them work at USC’s College of Education, where Ayers’ has spoken on at least two occasions to groups that included South Carolina public school children.

A tenth USC faculty member – English professor Katherine Adams – also signed the petition.

Additionally, two professors from Clemson University’s education department – Suzanne Rosenblith and Victoria Ridgeway Gillis – signed it as well.

That’s a dozen South Carolina professors, people, all of whom are apparently convinced that Ayers is a guy worth defending.

Frankly, we couldn’t disagree with them more – which is one reason we put that over-the-top image of the Oklahoma City bombing site at the top of this story.

Sure, Ayers and his buds weren’t as good as Timothy McVeigh when it came to being terrorists (they even blew up a few of their own members accidentally during a bomb-building session), but the fact remains that their violence did take innocent American lives – and domestic terrorism is domestic terrorism no matter how many people died from it, or how long ago it happened.

Now we’ve intentionally refrained from going after Obama too hard on his connections to Ayers – even after it became obvious he was lying about how well he knew the guy – because to be honest, we didn’t want to be perceived as another one of these typical GOP yokel-sites dedicated to the perpetuation of slippery slope logic.

But that doesn’t change our belief that Ayers should be in a jail cell right now, not getting paid by South Carolina taxpayers to lecture our public school kids.

Nor does it change our belief that anybody who signs a petition of support for this guy – who still refuses to apologize for his organization’s murderous acts – begs the question of whether or not they believe he and his cohorts were right to do what they did.

Again, domestic terrorism is domestic terrorism, people, and to tolerate those who practiced it at any point in their lives is to give others hope that they can do it, get away with it and one day become “respectable” and “distinguished” citizens, too.

That’s not the message any of these professors need to be sending …

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