Kathy Boudin, a notorious terrorist, bomber, and robber with the murderous Weather Underground in the 1970s and ’80s, has been back in the news lately. Folks in New York and across the nation are outraged to learn that she has been awarded an adjunct professorship at Columbia University’s School of Social Work in New York City. She has also been honored as the Rose Sheinberg Scholar-In-Residence at the New York University School of Law.
On March 4, 2012, “Professor” Boudin delivered The Nineteenth Annual Rose Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence Lecture at NYU. Some of her remarks at that lecture are now rekindling anger over her actions decades ago. During her talk, Boudin made an appeal for the parole of her fellow murderers in the 1981 Brinks armored truck robbery/ambush, including David Gilbert, her partner and the father of their son, Chesa Boudin, who was an infant when they were arrested.
Arthur Keenan, a retired police detective from Nyack, New York, where the Brinks robbery/murders took place, is outraged that Boudin is being given a prestigious soapbox to continue her radical activities. Keenan was shot in the leg but survived the Brinks attack that killed his fellow officers Sgt. Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly “Chipper” Brown, and Brinks guard Peter Paige.
“She’s using NYU and Columbia as a soapbox, so now I’m on my own soapbox,” Keenan said at an April 9 press conference. “She’s not rehabilitated,” says Keenan. “She’s always been a radical; she always will be. And the proof is that she’s freely speaking about trying to get her husband and other co-defendants out of jail.” Keenan calls Boudin an “unrepentant terrorist” and is angry that Columbia University hired her.
“It’s like people forgiving her even though she has no remorse for her crimes,” he said.
Keenan’s sentiments are shared by many. Police Chief James Watt of Goshen, New York, likens her to Osama bin Laden. “Her and her group advocated the violent overthrow of the government,” says Watt. “They acted on it. Two police officers and a security guard were murdered. To me, it’s tantamount to having Osama bin Laden lecture at Columbia University.”
Ed Day, a Rockland County legislator, as well as a former detective commander for the NYPD, is calling on Columbia to fire Boudin from her professor’s job. “I come to this both as a former police officer and parent of a Columbia student,” Day said. “Kathy Boudin should never have been paroled in 2003, and she certainly should not be educating students. She was directly responsible for the deaths of those police officers, asking them to lower their weapons so her compatriots could ambush and kill them.”
“At issue here,” Day continued, “is not whether there should be academic diversity or a broad spectrum of life experiences amongst the faculty at a university. At issue is that there are certainly dozens, if not hundreds, of potential professors just as qualified for the job, but who never took part in the killing of innocent people in an attempt to fund a revolution.”
The Brinks robbery/murder, for which she was finally tried and convicted, was but the most “celebrated” of Boudin’s long career of communist revolutionary activities. One of the best sources on her and her fellow activist/terrorist compadres is Dr. Roger Canfield’s monumental research project, Comrades in Arms: How the Ameri-Cong Won the War in Vietnam Against the Common Enemy — America. This 1,500-page resource, the product of years of research through thousands of documents is available on a searchable CD-Rom from http://americong.com.
Among the many citations regarding Boudin, Dr. Canfield provides this:
July 9-15 1969, a reliably revolutionary SDS delegation (and a Latino delegation) of 34 persons traveled to Havana, “meeting and traveling around with the Vietnamese,” and were given “rings forged from salvaged metal stripped off American fighter aircraft.” They were Carlos Antonio Aponte … Kathie Boudin … Bernardine Dohrn …
Bernardine Dohrn, of course, is the same unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist-bomber who is now employed as a professor of law at Northwestern University in Chicago. She is the wife of unrepentant Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers, now a retired “distinguished” professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. When Kathy Boudin and Dave Gilbert were arrested, they gave guardianship of their infant son, Chesa, to Ayers and Dohrn, who had earlier surfaced from the underground and had received only light sentences, thanks to plea bargains and connections in high places.
Ayers and Dohrn are neighbors of Barack and Michelle Obama in Chicago’s Hyde Park, and Obama’s political career began in a fundraising meet-and-greet in the Ayers-Dohrn home.
Although during his 2008 presidential campaign Senator Obama denied any close connections with Ayers, a huge amount of evidence indicates they were indeed close friends and were activists together in the same political projects. Two authors, Jack Cashill (The Audacity of Deceit: Barack Obama’s War on American Values) and Christopher Anderson (Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage), have separately amassed persuasive evidence that Bill Ayers actually wrote much of Barack Obama’s best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father.
Dr. Canfield’s Comrades In Arms provides this vignette on Kathy Boudin’s role in the deadly accidental explosion of a bomb Boudin was helping to make in 1970:
A little after noon on Friday March 6, 1970 a homemade bomb — dynamite and steel nails — exploded destroying a townhouse, a four-story safe house, for the Weather Underground at 18 West 11th Street near Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, New York. The antipersonnel bomb loaded with sixteen-penny nails killed Ted Gold, Terry Robbins and Diana Oughton. The bomb was intended for a U.S. Army dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey where had it exploded, potentially hundreds of soldiers and their dates might have been killed or wounded. In the event, Diana Oughton, 28, possibly holding the bomb in her own hands, was decapitated in the explosion and identified by a fingerprint from a surviving fingertip of her right hand. Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin, survivors of the townhouse explosion, climbed, Wilkerson topless, Boudin naked, bloodied and bruised through a hole in the townhouse rubble to the side walk into the arms of two good Samaritans.
At the time of the explosion, Boudin was already on the run, jumping bail after arrest for her role in the 1969 “Days of Rage” riots and mayhem in Chicago. Dr. Canfield writes:
On October 8, 1969 the SDS Weathermen converged upon Chicago for “Days of Rage” smashing property and fighting police in the streets of Chicago. Months of preparation, promising a street fight, led not to the expected 20,000 revolutionaries, but to only several hundred street fighters…. Carrying large Viet Cong flags Kathy Boudin and Linda Sue Evans led the charge.
Canfield also notes:
Testimony agreed to by both the defense and the prosecution in the trial of FBI officials W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller showed that officers of Cuban intelligence met regularly with SDS/Weather Underground leadership—Bernardine Dohrn … Mark Rudd … Kathy Boudin … and Jennifer Dohrn. Cuba’s intelligence/secret police gave advice, logistical and monetary support and some instructions to the Weathermen. They were agents of a foreign power and rightful targets of surveillance.
Ayers, Dohrn, Boudin and their comrades received help not only from Fidel Castro’s secret police, the DGI, but also from other Soviet KGB surrogates, such as the East German and Czechoslovakian intelligence services. Mark Rudd, the Weather Underground terrorist referred to above, resurfaced in 1977, served a short jail sentence, then went on to be a mathematics instructor at Central New Mexico Community College. Now retired, he is actively traveling the country with fellow 1960s’ radicals to reestablish the newly refounded SDS (Students for a Democratic Society).
Tom Hayden, one of the original founders of SDS, is currently teaching a course at UCLA on the 1960s’ protest movement. He has taught previously at Harvard University, Occidental College, Pitzer College, and Scripps College.
Kathleen Cleaver, a former Black Panther Party activist, lived in Communist Cuba and North Korea before returning to the United States to study law. She is now a professor of law at Yale University.
Angela Davis, a former Black Panther Party activist and a leader of the Communist Party, USA, is now a retired professor from the University of California Santa Cruz, where she was director of the Feminist Studies Department. Like many of her 1960s’ comrades, she is still promoting the same radical politics, speaking regularly as a paid speaker at colleges and universities.
Photo above shows Columbia University campus
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