William Ayers: Good Enough For Obama, But Not For Canada

Posted by: Tristan

Former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers may be the kind of company that Barack Obama chose to keep in Chicago, but apparently Canada sets itself higher standards.

An American education professor, one of the founders of a radical 1960s group known as the Weather Underground, which was responsible for a number of bombings in the United States in the early 1970s, was turned back at the Canadian border last night.

Dr. William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a leader in educational reform, was scheduled to speak at the Centre for Urban Schooling at University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. But that appearance has now been temporarily cancelled.

“I don’t know why I was turned back,” Ayers said in an interview this morning from Chicago. “I got off the plane like everyone else and I was asked to come over to the other side. The border guards reviewed some stuff and said I wasn’t going to be allowed into Canada. To me it seems quite bureaucratic and not at all interesting … If it were me I would have let me in. I couldn’t possibly be a threat to Canada.”

“Not at all interesting”?  Then again, Ayers was more a man of action than of bureaucracy.

Ayers first rose to notoriety in the early 1970s with the Weather Underground. The group claimed responsibility for bombings at the U.S. Capitol, a Pentagon restroom and New York City police headquarters. In 1970, a townhouse in New York the group was using to build a bomb blew up.

Why wouldn’t Canada let this anti-Vietnam “activist” into its borders after letting hundreds of thousands of draft-dodgers in during the war?  Is this a snub to the President-Elect on the eve of his inauguration?  Stay tuned.