Chicago Che chic: Murderous Communist thug honored by mural at public school

This morning I took a minor detour into Chicago's Uptown neighborhood while driving home from my local running club's weekly run. I took this photo outside the Joan F. Arai Middle School at 900 W. Wilson Avenue.

The entire caption reads "Uplift Social Justice."

The signage in front of Arai lists it as an "Uplift" school, although I couldn't find out what that meant on the Chicago Public Schools web site.

So here we have our tax dollars at work honoring this "champion" of social justice, Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

Does the Arai school have any lessons on Guevara in it's curriculum? If so, I think it's a safe bet that it doesn't include anything like this--courtesy of the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.

Writing about Che:

"...whose legacy includes both ordering and conducting executions and founding forced labor camps. "Guevara . . . quickly gain[ed] a reputation for ruthlessness; a child in his guerrilla unit who had stolen a little food was immediately shot without trial," writes Pascal Fontaine in "The Black Book." Guevara also wrote in his diary about executing peasant Eutimio Guerra, a suspected informant, with a single .32-caliber shot to the head. Guevara, in his will, praised the "extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless, and cold killing machines." He tried to spread the havoc caused by the Cuban revolution in other countries from Africa to South America, rallying for "two, three, many Vietnams!"

Guevara oversaw executions at La Cabana prison; some of those executed were his former comrades who wouldn't relinquish their democratic beliefs. "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," he said. He didn't assuage his barbarity by being a brilliant statesman, either, helping drive the economy to ruin as head of Cuba's central bank and minister of industries. "Though claiming to despise money," writes Fontaine, "he lived in one of the rich, private areas of Havana." Guevara told a British reporter after the Cuban Missile Crisis that the nukes would have been fired if they were under Cuban control--which would have wasted all of those future American suburban revolutionary wannabes.

Joan F. Arai Middle School, Chicago. "Uplift Social Justice."

Principal Barbara F. Hayes can be reached at bhayes@cps.k12.il.us