Fw: Terror Tale

Sent: Monday, April 22, 2013 2:25 PM
Subject: Terror Tale
 


Mindset of northeast liberal academia at its worst…
Tale of two terrorists
By JOHN M. MURTAGH
NY Post Op Ed April 18, 2013
Somewhere near Boston early Monday morning, he packed a bomb in a bag. It was by all accounts relatively crude — a pressure cooker, explosives, some wires, ball bearings and nails . . . nails which, hours later, doctors would struggle to remove from the flesh of bleeding victims.
His motive is unclear. His intent is not: It was to maximize injury, suffering, pain, trauma and, yes, death.
Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be caught, perhaps not.
Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be offered a teaching job at Columbia University.
Forty-three years ago last month, Kathy Boudin, now a professor at Columbia but then a member of the Weather Underground, escaped an explosion at a bomb factory operated in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The story is familiar to people of a certain age.
Three weeks earlier, Boudin’s Weathermen had firebombed a private home in Upper Manhattan with Molotov cocktails. Their target was my father, a New York state Supreme Court justice. The rest of the family, was presumably, an afterthought. I was 9 at the time, only a year older than the youngest victim in Boston.
One of Boudin’s colleagues, Cathy Wilkerson, related in her memoir that the Weathermen were disappointed with the minimal effects of the bombs at my home. They decided to use dynamite the next time and bought a large quantity along with fuses, metal pipes and, yes, nails. The group designated as its next target a dance at an Officer’s Club at Fort Dix, NJ.
Despite the misgivings of some, it is reported that Kathy Boudin urged the use of “anti-personnel bombs.” In other words, she wanted to kill people not just damage property. Before they could act, her fellows were killed in the townhouse explosion. The townhouse itself collapsed; Boudin fled.
She reappeared over a decade later driving the getaway car for the rag tag mix of Weathermen and Black Panthers who held up a Rockland County bank in 1981, murdering three in the process. Survivors of the ambush along the New York State Thruway recount how Boudin emerged from the driver’s door, arms raised in surrender, asking the police to lower their guns. When they did, her accomplices burst from the back of the van guns blazing.
As I said, people of a certain age remember this history. For those that don’t, Robert Redford is kindly about to release a movie recounting the Rockland robbery (albeit relocated to Michigan). By all accounts, the film lionizes the Weather Underground terrorists, Boudin and her accomplices.
Perhaps to bring it full circle, Professor Boudin can soon guest-lecture at a film class at Columbia when the Redford movie is screened.
Other than the passage of time, one can find no real distinction between the cowardly actions of last Monday’s Boston murderer and the terror carried out by Boudin and her accomplices. Yet today we live in a country where our leading educational institutions see fit to trust our children’s education to murderers and Hollywood sees fit to celebrate terrorists.
The Web site of Columbia’s School of Social Work sums up Boudin’s past thus: “Dr. Kathy Boudin has been an educator and counselor with experience in program development since 1964, working within communities with limited resources to solve social problems.”
“Since 1964” — that would include the bombing of my house, it would include the anti-personnel devices intended for Fort Dix and it would include the dead policeman on the side of the Thruway in 1981.
Maybe, if he is caught, Monday’s bomber can explain that, like Boudin, he was merely working within the community to solve social problems.
Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be caught, perhaps not. Perhaps, some day, Monday’s bomber will be offered tenure at Columbia University.
John M. Murtagh is Of Counsel to the White Plains law firm of Gaines, Gruner, Ponzini & Novick, LLP. He lives in Westchester.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Or perhaps the bombers will someday work as commentators for Fox News? Wouldn't be the first criminals and traitors to find gainful employment with that organization.

And if they had committed war crimes they would have be punished with a nice ranch in Texas and a sweet book deal.

ferschitz said...

Mr. Murtagh may have a legitmate complaint about the Weather Underground, since his home was actually attacked when he was a child.

However, Mr. Murtagh gins up a very stupid - esp for someone who is clearly intelligent & well-educated - straw man fallacy comparing the *alleged* (tsk tsk Attorney Murtagh) Boston Marathon bomber(s) to the Weather Underground.

I get it that Mr. Murtagh was very shaken & upset by what happened to him & family, but perhaps he should avail himself of PTSD therapy? I say that sincerely & genuinely bc otherwise, he seems to me to be rather obsessed on this topic and generally ranting about it in various way (do teh Googler & you'll see what I mean).

IMO, I certainly see no real comparison between the Boston Marathon bombing and the Weather Underground bombing of Mr. Murtagh's childhood home.

Murtagh's bellicosity and silly suggestions further weaken whatever potential good points he may have made in his article.

Finally, it's clear that Murtagh didn't bother to watch Redford's film The Company You Keep. That film was flawed but interesting. In no way, though, did present any sort of "justification" for what the Weather Underground may or may not have done. Rather, at least for me, it seemed more like a meditation, if you will, on some fictionalized (but based *loosely* on factual situations) events attributed to the Weather Underground... brought up to date with what some of those involved in the WU were doing today. It was interesting, but don't forget: it was fiction, not a documentary, nor an apologia for the Weather Underground.

Hence, I find Mr. Murtagh's screed rather tedious & pretty fact-free. Mr. Murtagh would do himself a real favor to get some decent therapy, so that he could actually *move on* with his life and find some peace and enjoyment. Ceaselessly diatribing about the Weather Underground is not serving him.

 
Creative Commons License
MyRightWingDad.net is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.