October 11, 2008

Bill Ayers in 2006: "education is the motor-force of revolution" (in Venezuela, with Hugo Chavez)

Bill Ayers (who's just some guy in Barack Obama's neighborhood and/or someone he used to serve on a couple boards with) gave a speech in November 2006 (when Obama was just 45 years old) at the World Education Forum in Caracas, Venezuela. The full text of his speech is at his site: billayers.wordpress.com/2006/11/07/world-education-forum with a copy here, and a discussion here. The speech is a bit... radical. The major question becomes finding instances of Ayers' radicalism seeping into his activities with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. If that can be done, it would help discredit sources such as FactCheck and Education Week [1], as well as the MSM sources which have downplayed the radicalism of the Challenge.

From the last link comes this excerpt:

Ayers voiced his support for "the political educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how . . . all of you continue to overcome the failures of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane."

Ayers told the great humanitarian Chavez: "Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions large and small. La educacion es revolucion."

He ended his speech with these:

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

[1] See '"He Lied" About Bill Ayers?' from Brooks Jackson and Viveca Novak of FactCheck.org (newsweek.com/id/163396), which says:

Education Week says the group's work "reflected mainstream thinking" among school reformers.

That article is subscriber-only: edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/10/09/08annenberg.h28.html

UPDATE: What's really needed here is direct evidence of BHO pushing some series of specific Ayers goals. BHO has to be shown to be not just a friend and collaborator with Ayers, but a direct supporter of his goals. Even this isn't close enough:

Yesterday, asked to comment on the Ayers relationship, David Axelrod, Obama's top political adviser, hilariously chirped, "There's no evidence that they're close." Translation: Get back to us when you can prove more damaging information — until then, we don't need to further refine our perjury.

And then Axelrod gave us still more lies: "There's no evidence that Obama in any way subscribed to any of Ayers' views."

Oh yeah? Well, Mr. Axelrod, how do you explain Obama's breathless endorsement of Ayers's 1997 Leftist polemic on the criminal-justice system, A Kind and Just Parent? As Stanley Kurtz has recounted, Ayers’s book is a radical indictment of American society: We, not the criminals, are responsible for the violent crime that plagues our cities; even the most vicious juvenile offenders should not be tried as adults; prisons should eventually be replaced by home detention; American justice is comparable to South Africa under Apartheid. Obama's reaction? He described the book as "a searing and timely account" — a take even the Times concedes was a "rave review."

BHO also blurbed Ayers' 'Fugitive Days', the book in which he recounted his terrorist acts.

Also worth following up is that at the same time BHO was studying at Columbia - something he won't discuss and the MSM won't press him on - Ayers was studying at Bank Street College, which is just 200' to 700' distant. Was Ayers just another guy in that neighborhood too?

UPDATE: A picture of BHO's blurb for Ayers' 1997 book is here.

Posted to Politics at October 11, 2008 03:42 PM