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Ayers: G-8 Decision ‘A Victory for the People’s Movement'

Obama friend says 'I don’t think what I did was terrorism'

Left-wing domestic terrorist and Obama-ally Bill Ayers has hailed the president’s decision to move the upcoming G-8 Summit from Chicago to Camp David as a victory for the "Occupy" movement.

The State Journal-Register reports:

The Occupy movement should take credit for chasing the G-8 Summit out of Chicago in May, a founder of the radical 1970s Weather Underground said in Springfield Tuesday.

"They realized the couldn’t actually put on their little show of power," Bill Ayers told about 50 people at the Golden Frog Cafe in an appearance hosted by a new Springfield group, Foundation for a United Front. "It’s a defeat for them and a victory for the people’s movement."

The G-8 Summit brings together leaders of the world’s largest economies. The upcoming summit was abruptly moved to Camp David this week.

Ayers also spoke to the State Journal-Register about his relationship with Obama and addressed claims that he was a domestic terrorist.

INTERVIEWER: Just politically speaking. You became a big issue because you are a friend, a colleague on a panel in Chicago with Obama. Was it fair for people to trash him for knowing you?

AYERS: Well there’s two things. One is that when people began to mobilize to try to figure out how to run against this charismatic young man from Chicago, this young law professor from Chicago, they developed a narrative. And it was developed by Hillary Clinton, that’s worth remembering--it wasn’t McCain-Palin. It was the Hillary Clinton campaign that said he’s a mystery man, who is he, nobody knows. And then they expanded on that and said look at these sketchy friends he has and what the hell is this, who is he, why does he hang around with these people? In a democracy, in a flourishing, healthy democracy, we would say of our politicians, we want them to know the widest range of people in this wildly diverse community we live in. And we want them to have a mind of their own at the end of the day. So the fact that Barack Obama sat on a board with me--first of all, I'm not poison--but secondly, even if I were, there would be nothing poisonous about having sat down with me. So yes, I think it was dangerous, treacherous, and bad, I think we should avoid all those kinds of approaches...

INTERVIEWER: Obviously in the organization there were bombings that were set up. I know you’ve written about it, you said maybe it was a mistake. Is it fair to say you were a domestic terrorist?

AYERS: That is not true. Well the reason it is not fair is because if you define terrorism in an even-handed way what you would say is that terrorism is any act that indiscriminately targets civilians for the purpose of coercing a political view, and I never did that, and we never hurt anybody, and we never killed anybody.  It is a well-known fact for example that the war in Vietnam was a war of terror and if terrorism. If you take a stable definition of terrorism, it can apply to a cult or a political group or a religious group or a group of fanatics or a government, and overwhelmingly the amount of violence that is perpetrated on people indiscriminately by governments is overwhelmingly greater than by cults or groups or political... So with that stable definition, what would we call Russia’s behavior in Chechnya? Would you call that terrorism? I would. Would you call China’s behavior in Tibet terrorism? I would. And we can go right down the line. We can even say, for example, that Sherwood’s march to the sea, even though it was for a good cause, but it was indiscriminate killing of innocents. I don’t think what I did was terrorism. It may have crossed the lines of legality, it may have crossed the lines of commonsense, you could call it despicable, and I have my own criticisms of it.