President Elect's Terrorist Family Friend Stopped at the Border

A domestic terrorist was denied exit from the United States last night, and will presumably return home to Chicago.

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."

Indeed, if the competence of a terrorist were a determining issue, Ayers would very much be a free-traveling citizen of the world. But terrorist threats aren't based upon competence, but intent, and on three occasions Ayers' Weather Underground attempted spectacular mass murders.

In February of 1970 Ayers' Weathermen built bombs using propane canisters as crude incendiaries, roofing nails as shrapnel to rend flesh, and 44 sticks of dynamite to rip buildings apart.

One of those bombs was meant to destroy the 13th Precinct of the Detroit Police Department, killing police officers, criminals and citizens inside. The other bomb targeted the Detroit Police Benevolent Association. Both were set to go off when it would kill the maximum number of people.

Neither bomb went off thanks to the incompetence of the bomb designer (some suspect Ayers himself designed them), which was good news for the innocents inside these two locations, as well as a nearby diner filled with African-American families that would have born the brunt of the second blast.

The third attempt, the March 6, 1970, resulted in a premature detonation on the day of a planned attack. Ayers' girlfriend and two other Weathermen were killed making nail-studded pipe-bombs to bomb an enlisted officers dance that took place at Fort Dix, NJ that night.

If the bombers had not blown themselves up while constructing their bombs, and had carried out their attack with less than half of the bombs they made, the resulting blast could very well have been the largest terrorist attack in American history prior to Timothy McVeigh's truck bomb in Oklahoma City.

Canada showed simple common sense in rejecting this terrorist, who once discussed with absolute sincerity the need to murder 25 million Americans in concentration camps.

It's too bad the man who be our new President tomorrow lacks the same discernment.