Bill Ayers defends Weather Underground bombings, dismisses comparison to Boston blasts

Left-wing radical Bill Ayers, a longtime friend of President Barack Obama, recently defended the series of bombings that he carried out as a member of the Weather Underground, saying that his bombings were not like the Boston Marathon attack and that America is the most violent country that has ever been created.

Ayers — who participated in a series of anti-Vietnam War bombings in the early 1970s including an attack on New York City police department headquarters and the Pentagon — answered an Akron Beacon Journal reporter’s questions after giving a keynote speech at an event commemorating the anniversary of the 1970 Kent State National Guard shootings.

Ayers said that there is no equivalence between his bombings and the deadly bombings that rocked the Boston Marathon.

“What I did was some destruction of property to issue a scream and cry against an illegal war in which 6,000 people a week are being killed,” Ayers said.

Ayers reportedly said that the United States is the most violent country that has ever been created, and said that Republican Senator and Vietnam War hero John McCain committed daily war crimes.
“Six thousand a week being killed and I destroyed some property. Show me the equivalence. You should ask John McCain that question … I’m against violence,” Ayers said.

“To conflate a group of fundamentalist people [in Boston] who are nihilistic in some way with a group of people who spent their lives trying to oppose the murder of 6,000 people a week … and still the killing went on. And still the killing went on. What would you have done?” Ayers said.

“There’s no equivalence [with Boston]. Property damage. That’s what we did,” Ayers said.

But Ayers was involved in a Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in 1970 that resulted in the accidental deaths of three Weather Underground members who were preparing a bomb. Ayers subsequently went underground as a fugitive from justice.

Ayers has since served as a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has been a “family friend” to Obama, who previously lived in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where Ayers and wife Bernadine Dohrn reside.

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