"I'll call right now my interrogator that tortured me and my friends a gook," [McCain] said in 2000. "You can quote me."
Excellent discussion of the Obama and Ayers portrayal here, along with documentation of McCain's close friendships with fascists like G. Gordon Liddy and members of the Aryan Nation, AND how Sarah Palin defeated former Governor of Alaska John Stein through an anti-Jewish whispering campaign. (Stein is not even Jewish.)
http://ww4report.com/node/6116
I'll just print, here, a section from Bill Weinberg's comments on the Weather Underground, comments that I think are very helpful:
In a front-page story in the New York Times on the Obama-Ayers controversy Oct. 4 the paper recalls:
"In an article that by chance was published on Sept. 11, 2001, The New York Times wrote about Mr. Ayers and his just-published memoir, Fugitive Days, opening with a quotation from the author: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."
"Three days after the Qaeda attacks, Mr. Ayers wrote a reply posted on his Web site to clarify his quoted remarks, saying the meaning had been distorted.
"My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy," he wrote. But he added that the Weathermen had "showed remarkable restraint" given the nature of the American bombing campaign in Vietnam that they were trying to stop."
The Times delineates the casualties the Weather Underground were responsible for:
"Most of the bombs the Weathermen were blamed for had been placed to do only property damage, a fact Mr. Ayers emphasizes in his memoir. But a 1970 pipe bomb in San Francisco attributed to the group killed one police officer and severely hurt another. An accidental 1970 explosion in a Greenwich Village town house basement killed three radicals; survivors later said they had been making nail bombs to detonate at a military dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. And in 1981, in an armed robbery of a Brinks armored truck in Nanuet, N.Y., that involved Weather Underground members including Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, two police officers and a Brinks guard were killed."
The Weathermen undertook their campaign of bombings in response to the US saturation bombardment of Vietnamwhich claimed probably hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, wreaked untold ecological damage, and so shocked the world that the Geneva Conventions were amended in its aftermath to outlaw the practice. However adventurist and counter-productive the Weather bombings were (and they pale in comparison to the deadly violence of the radical-right armed underground of the '80s and '90s), they were an effort to resist US government actions which are today legally recognized as criminal.
But while Obama is tarred as a terrorist-lover for his acquaintance with Bill Ayers, McCain is unapologetic for the 23 bombing missions he flew in Vietnam. (Newsweek, July 21) On the contrary, this experience is portrayed as a patriotic duty and touted as qualifying him for the Oval Office.
The racism behind the genocidal US campaign in Southeast Asia is alive and well in John McCainas his own words reveal. According to press portrayals, such as the above Newsweek story, many in Vietnam are actually rooting for McCainincluding Tran Trong Duyet, head of the guard unit at Hoa Lo prison where McCain was held as a POW (the "Hanoi Hilton"), who denies the senator's claims that he was tortured there. McCain isn't so forgiving. "I'll call right now my interrogator that tortured me and my friends a gook," he said in 2000. "You can quote me." (<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/us/politics/20captor.html?ref=us>NYT, Sept. 20)
Katie Hong wrote in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 2, 2000:
"...Sen. John McCain told reporters, "I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live." Although McCain said he was referring only to his prison guards, there are many reasons why his use of the word "gook" is offensive and alarming.
"It is offensive because by using a racial epithet that has historically been used to demean all Asians to describe his captors, McCain failed to make a distinction between his torturers and an entire racial group.
"It is alarming because a major candidate for president publicly used a racial epithet, refused to apologize for doing so and remains a legitimate contender.
"Contrary to McCain's attempt to narrowly define "gook" to mean only his "sadistic" captors, this term has historically been used to describe all Asians. McCain said that "gook" was the most "polite" term he could find to describe his captors, but because it is simply a pejorative term for Asians, he insulted his captors simply by calling them "Asians"a clearly disturbing message. To the Asian American community, the term is akin to the racist word "n-word." "
Yet even the Obama campaign is too intimidated to make an issue of this.
Meanwhile, a Support Bill Ayers website has accrued over 500 signatures in protest of the campaign of vilification:
"We write to support our colleague Professor William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who is currently under determined and sustained political attack. Ayers is a nationally known scholar, member of the Faculty Senate at UIC, Vice President-elect of the American Educational Research Association, and sought after as a speaker and visiting scholar by other universities because of his exemplary scholarship, teaching, and service."
Whose activities in the 1960s were worseBill Ayers' or John McCain's? And why is nobody asking this?