Bill Ayers' Violent Past: "Passionate Participation" or Terrorism?

I don't always agree with the authors of the "Core Knowledge" blog (especially when it comes to their cheerleading about the No Child Left Behind Act and their push for nationalizing the curriculum), but there's an excellent post today from Robert Pondiscio regarding unrepentant terrorist/"education reformer" Bill Ayers. Here's an excerpt:

"The Support Bill Ayers document would have us believe that Ayers is being silenced as a means to 'intimidate free thinking and stifle critical dialogue.' Forgive me for saying so, but what is violence if not an attempt to intimidate and stifle viewpoints with which you disagree? It would be a lot easier to move past what the document dismisses as 'history' if Ayers might at some point allow that his particular brand of 'passionate participation' was ill-advised....

Ayers, for his part, has never come close to such an admission. 'I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough,' he told the New York Times in an interview that was sitting on millions of breakfast tables on the morning of September 11, 2001. This lack of introspection on Ayers’ part makes the education establishment’s embrace of him troubling on so many levels."

What I can’t understand is how such a large number of elites in this country can be so morally relativistic that they can’t acknowledge that terrorism is never justified. Even if they’re sympathetic to the goals of the attackers, why can’t they just admit that the means are despicable? Some things really ARE black-or-white, with no shades of gray.