"I Don't Regret Setting Bombs ... I Feel We Didn't Do Enough."
--William Ayers, September 11th, 2001
TERROR VICTIM'S QS FOR BARACK
Ayers: Terrorist aided O's rise.
By MAGGIE GALLAGHER
NY Post
October 8, 2008
WHEN John Murtagh was 9 years old, Bill Ayers' friends tried to kill him.
"I remember my mother's pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn't leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside," wrote Murtagh recently in City Journal.
It wasn't personal. John's dad was a judge presiding over a trial of some Black Panthers. John still remembers the red graffiti on the sidewalk the next morning: "Free the Panther 21; The Viet Cong Have Won; Kill the Pigs."
As best he recalls, Bernardine Dohrn, who's now Ayers' wife, first claimed credit for bombing John's home in 1970.
John Murtagh is a now lawyer and Yonkers city councilman running for the state Senate on the GOP ticket. I reached him this week through his campaign. It wasn't hard.
Has Barack Obama ever tried?
Obama was only 8 when Murtagh's house was bombed. He has nothing to do with the trauma the Murtagh family went through. But Obama was a grown man when he decided his path to power lay through Bill Ayers' connections.
In the Chicago establishment, which embraced former terrorists like Ayers and his wife, Obama was encouraged to look beyond the obvious - the lawlessness, the attacks on cops, judges, army outposts - to embrace larger goals.
What were these goals? How does Obama come to continue to associate with Ayers - a man who can't bring himself to say to John Murtagh or to John's mother or any other kin of the attacked: I'm sorry. I was wrong. It was a terrible thing to do.
Obama's campaign is busy fudging. His top political adviser claims Obama just didn't know Ayers' history when they first met. Bomber? What bomber? Right.
"If that's true, Obama has to be the dumbest man who ever graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School," snorts Murtagh. "I don't buy that at all."
Murtagh believes the relationship between the Obamas, Ayers and Dohrn goes back 30 years, to Michelle Obama's time at Sidley Austin, a law firm that also employed Dohrn.
Murtagh doesn't blame Obama for what Ayers and his friends did. He blames Obama for picking a man like Ayers as a friend and mentor - and then covering up the friendship.
In politics, things get complicated. Truth becomes hard to find. But not this.
"The night they attacked our home, they also firebombed an army recruiting station out in Brooklyn and police patrol cars outside of Greenwich Village," notes Murtagh. "Three weeks later, they accidentally blew themselves up. They intended to attack the officer's club at Fort Dix."
Lay your cards on the table, says Murtagh. "Obama's free to associate with Dohrn and Ayers; that's his right," he tells me. "But don't hide the relationship, and be forthcoming and let people decide the significance of it for themselves."
No comments:
Post a Comment