An Illinois state legislator has introduced a bill that would prevent anyone who has been convicted of crimes related to terrorism from teaching courses at taxpayer-funded colleges and universities.
The author of the legislation — Illinois House Bill 150 — is Rep. Charlie Meier, a rural-district Republican, The State Journal-Register reports.
The bill comes on the heels of a bizarro trend of terrorist hiring by the three-school University of Illinois system.
In the latest instance, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — the semi-prestigious flagship school of the state’s college system — hired, then sacked, then re-hired James Kilgore, a felon convicted of murder and a former member of the infamous Symbionese Liberation Army. (RELATED: TERRORIST UNIVERSITY: The University of Illinois System Keeps Hiring Terrorists)
The Symbionese Liberation Army was the notorious terrorist organization that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. The group also attempted two bank robberies. Kilgore participated in a 1975 bank robbery during which bank customer Myrna Opsahl was murdered.
Opsahl, who bled to death on the floor of the bank, was a 42-year-old mother of four.
After a nearly three-decade life on the lam spent largely in South Africa under the alias John Pape, Kilgore was extradited in 2002 and served six years in prison in the U.S. for second-degree murder. While on the run, he got a Ph.D.
After serving his time, Kilgore reunited with his wife, Teresa Barnes, who had found a job as a history professor at the University of Illinois.
Kilgore also found a job at the school as a part-time adjunct instructor of global studies and urban planning. (He also quickly found things to protest vigorously, including a proposed $20 million jail.)
“He was convicted of terrorism against America and a second-degree murder charge,” Rep. Meier told the Journal-Register. “I think those are pretty strong convictions, and that’s what this bill’s about.”
Meier also noted that the University of Illinois system is losing millions in donations because it has re-hired the terrorist professor. (RELATED: PRIORITIES: Will University Of Illinois Employ Terrorist Murderer Or Take $4.5 Million Gift?)
“So once again our taxpayers are going to have to help cough up the millions that that university is not being given,” he observed.
A second state Republican legislator, Rep. Adam Brown, has signed on to co-sponsor House Bill 150.
“It’s disappointing that it had to come to this, that we have to spell out that terrorists shouldn’t be teaching our kids,” the University of Illinois alum told the Journal-Register. “But unfortunately that’s a reality we face.”
Kilgore chose not to comment in the local press.
In addition to the hiring of Kilgore in Urbana-Champaign, a second state school, the University of Illinois at Chicago, was the well-known professional home of unrepentant, never-convicted Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers from 1987 until his retirement in 2010.
Ayers, the wealthy son of a former CEO of Commonwealth Edison, was a cofounder and leader of the Weather Underground, a communist revolutionary group.
He was involved in Chicago’s” Days of Rage” riot in 1969, which cost taxpayers in Chicago and the state of Illinois about $183,000. That’s a little more than $1.13 million in today’s dollars. (RELATED: Bill Ayers Is Now A Feted ‘Visiting Scholar’ At Minnesota State University Moorhead)
The Weather Underground also conducted a series of bombings and attempted bombings of banks and the United States Capitol, the Pentagon and other government buildings. In 1970, three spectacularly incompetent colleagues of Ayers’ died in a Greenwich Village townhouse explosion trying to make a nail bomb. The bomb was allegedly going to be used at a dance for noncommissioned officers and their dates on an army base in Fort Dix, N.J.
From 1970 to 1973, Ayers’s wife, Northwestern University law professor and fellow Weather Undergrounder Bernardine Dohrn, threatened attacks on college graduation ceremonies across the country and expressed support for Charles Manson and his followers because “they killed those pigs.”
In 2010, the year he retired, Ayers was famously and unanimously denied emeritus status after a passionate speech by the University of Illinois system’s board chair Christopher G. Kennedy, who is the son of assassinated U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy.
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