Ayers Defends Weather Underground Bombing Campaign, Says He's Not Like Boston Bombers

On Saturday, former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers expressed his continued support for his bombing campaign back in the 1970s. “There is no relationship at all between what Weather Underground members did and the bombings that two brothers allegedly committed on April 15 in Massachusetts,” Ayers told the Akron Beacon Journal. “No one died in the Weather Underground bombings.” He said the comparison was just as ineffective as comparing “the shooting in Connecticut” and “shooting at a hunting range.”

That, of course, is not true. The only difference between what the Weather Underground did and what the Tsarnaevs did in Boston is that the Tsarnaevs were significantly more competent. But Ayers said that he was less culpable for his terrorism in the 1970s than Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was for his actions during the Vietnam War. “I get asked about violence,” Ayers complained, “when 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. 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.”

Except when he wasn’t. In 1969 and 1970, the Weathermen and their allies conducted approximately 250 attacks. They bombed police stations, the Pentagon, and the homes of private citizens. They met with the North Vietnamese in Cuba.

But Ayers says he’s not like the Tsarnaevs. “To conflate a group of fundamentalist people whoa re 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? There’s no equivalence. Property damage. That’s what we did.” 

The Tsarnaevs also thought they were stopping Western killing of indigenous peoples. The only difference is that they didn’t live long enough to become college professors.

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).