Reader suggests guilt by association

To the Editor:
Howard Hall, in a Sept. 30, 2008, letter, attempted to establish the following argument: Bill Ayers is a terrorist; Obama can be associated with Bill Ayers; therefore, Obama is a terrorist.
His letter is an example of the fallacy, “guilt by association.” A person who associates with an undesirable person does not necessarily adopt the undesirable traits.
Further problems with the argument follow:
Ayers is not a “terrorist associate” of Obama, as Mr. Hall claims. Dr. Ayers is distinguished professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Since 1989, he has published and edited 19 books on education, parenting, his life and racism. He helped Mayor Daley reform the Chicago school program.
Although Ayers committed acts of violence in protesting the Vietnam War from 1968 to the early 1970s, he is not now a terrorist, but has worked within accepted structures of society since 1980.
In 1968, Obama was 8 years old and so was not an “associate” of Ayers during his violent period. Mr. Hall, without noticing the problem, tells us that the friendship between Obama and Ayers began in 1986. In 1986, Ayers was not planting bombs, but was finishing his doctorate at Columbia University.
Mr. Hall says that Ayers has never expressed regrets for his actions. This is not quite true. Ayers said he was “embarrassed” about his group’s (Weatherman) “arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we, and we alone, knew the way. The rigidity and the narcissism.”
Mr. Hall also wants us to believe that Ayers and Obama were “partners” in a sinister organization called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the CAC. Ayers helped start this large organization and was one of three people who wrote a grant proposal that in 1995 won $49.2 million in grants for public school reform in Chicago. Obama was president of the board of directors when Ayers was on the board in 1995-2001.
This board did not carry out subversive activities, as Mr. Hall would have us think, but provided grants to schools and raised matching private funds for the schools.
The Bill Ayers that Obama has associated with is a professional educator who has grown well beyond the violence he practiced around 1970.
(Information in this letter is from Wikipedia, “Bill Ayers” and “Obama-Ayers Controversy.” Much more information can be found there, carefully documented and available for further use or misuse.)
Joe Hall
Shawnee