Greg Yardley has an excellent piece at Front Page Magazine on the recent parole of Kathy Boudin, murderer, Weather Underground member, and icon of the Left. Boudin actively tried, (and apparently succeeded) to appeal to the sympathies of two black parole board commissioners with her claim that:
she participated in the robbery because she felt guilty for being white. She told the commissioners she believed the crime would help 'oppressed' black people and advance the cause of 'civil rights'.
Boudin's claim, that the Black Liberation Army helped blacks, isn't remotely believable to anyone who knows the origins and history of the organization. The Black Liberation Army was a militant split-off of the Black Panther Party, criminal organization with a political panache; their members had already engaged in a series of ordinary (but violent) crimes, engaged in fratricidal combat with other Panthers and murdered two police officers. Several others had been shot. In their decade of existence, they had done nothing for the cause of civil rights. Their actual goal, shared with a fellow terrorist organization called the Republic of New Afrika, was the establishment of a Communist black separatist (i.e., racist) state in the American south. Kathy Boudin was veteran radical and terrorist, a fugitive for the past eleven years. She knew what the Black Liberation Army had done and what they stood for, and embraced it. Her claim, that she thought the Black Liberation Army would distribute the money to poor neighborhoods, cannot be taken seriously.
By the way, Yardley is himself a "recovering" Communist, and has started a new blog called commiewatch that tracks the protests, publications and related antics of the loony far left. Check him out. If you find the blog name a bit silly or anachronistic, (or if you believe that the Communists among us no longer bear "watching"), that's all the more reason to check out Yardley's content. These people are amazing.