Education: The New Black For Liberals

University of Massachusetts will have Raymond Luc Levasseur, the former leader of the revolutionary group United Freedom Front, speak at its campus on November 12th. United Freedom Front is responsible for plotting a series of bombings and bank robberies along the East Coast between 1976 and 1984. Levasseur was the former leader of this group which also fatally shot a New Jersey state trooper and attempted to kill two Massachusetts state troopers.

Levasseur is one of three people scheduled to speak at the Amherst Libraries’ fifth annual Colloquium on Social Change. Citing "academic freedom," the school is allowing Levasseur to speak despite possible protests.

In 2007, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to speak at Columbia University. Despite protests, Ahmadinejad's speech spewed many of his traditional beliefs such as his claims that the Holocaust should be viewed as a "theory" rather than fact. He also defended his belief that Iran cannot recognize Israel "because it is based on ethnic discrimination, occupation and usurpation, and it consistently threatens its neighbors." Many of his statements were met with accelerated applause from a portion of the audience, the rest being anti-Ahmadinejad.

William Ayers is the unrepentant former SDS Weather Underground bomber of the 1960s. Ayers participated in the bombings of New York City Police Department headquarters in 1970, the United States Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. He is currently a Professor of Education at the University of Chicago at Illinois and an elementary education theorist.

At the University of Chicago, Ayers instructs future school teachers in the areas of social justice, urban educational reform, narrative and interpretive research, children in trouble with the law, and related issues. He was elected by the American Education Research Association (AERA) as vice president and head of its division of curriculum studies in 2008. The AERA defines itself as "the most prominent international professional organization with the primary goal of advancing educational research and its practical application."

Ward Churchill was a University of Colorado at Boulder professor from 1990 to 2007. He famously wrote an essay post- 9/11 called "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" in which he describes President Bush as the world's reigning terrorist, and those businessmen and women who lost their lives on September 11th as "Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who organized Nazi plans to exterminate Europe's Jews.

In that essay, Churchill wrote, "As to those in the World Trade Center ... true enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire." He also referred to President Bush saying, "He absolutely thumbs his nose at the rule of law. He's the head of a rogue state by definition, and it's a rogue state which dispenses carnage on people presumed to be inferior in some set of terms."

In May 2007, Churchill spoke at UC Irvine's Muslim Student Union (MSU) in which he characterized Israel as a terrorist state and then urged MSU students to go to the pro-Israel booth near the lecture hall, take a slice of cake, and eat Israel symbolically. Churchill was removed from his tenured teaching position citing academic misconduct and plagiarism in 2007. He later filed a First Amendment Lawsuit, seeking reinstatement and an unspecified amount of money.

Interestingly enough, 66% of young voters, ages 18-29, voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 elections. With "social justice" and "academic freedom" reducing the patriotic standard of our educational elite to such a lowly position as to invite the president of a Holocaust-denying nation to speak and home-grown terrorists to hold tenured teaching positions at some of our "finest" educational institutions, it is no surprise that socialism, tolerance and anti-American propaganda is the new black.

As you educate the young, so goes their belief system, so goes their vote, and so goes our nation.