Press Ignores Radical Groups Organizing

[Tigermike 3,039]

Thousands of demonstrators gathered near the White House to protest the Iraq war.

Radical left discredits war protests

By Robert J. Caldwell

October 2, 2005

Most Americans have never heard of International ANSWER or United For Peace and Justice, the organizers and joint sponsors of last weekend's anti-Iraq war protests in Washington and other cities. Indeed, it's a safe bet that many thousands of the protestors themselves knew next to nothing about IA or UFPJ.

Press coverage of these protests, the largest yet against U.S. policy in Iraq, might have – should have – told us something useful about the two groups that organized them. Instead, we got only journalistic pablum from the nation's supposedly elite newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The Times' dewey-eyed coverage described the ANSWER coalition as encompassing "a wide range of progressive political objectives." The Washington Post's cursory description of both groups was so deficient and misleading that it was bravely denounced by that newspaper's own media critic, Howard Kurtz.

Wrote Kurtz: "I wonder if the media would have resorted to such shorthand in covering a group as far to the right as ANSWER is to the left."

So, just what is International ANSWER and United For Peace and Justice? Not what you might think from reading the New York Times and the Washington Post.

ANSWER is an acronym for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. If that sounds reasonable enough (the ideologically savvy, however, will already smell the radical left), there is something else you should know. ANSWER's parent organization is the Worker's World Party, a hard-line communist faction that split off from the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, an acknowledged authority on the left, describes the WWP thusly in a recent online article for Slate: "...openly supports (North Korea's) Kim Jong-Il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and the 'resistance' in Afghanistan and Iraq."

In his Slate essay, aptly entitled "Anti-War, My Foot," Hitchens flays the WWP and its clone, ANSWER:

"To be against war and militarism...is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as 'anti-war' when in reality they are straight out pro-war, but on the other side."

ANSWER was founded immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. It's declared purpose – oppose America's war on terror, including the elimination of Osama bin Laden's terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. ANSWER depicts the United States and the Bush administration as the real terrorists threatening the world. The jihaddist killers deliberately slaughtering Iraqi civilians get a pass, if not an endorsement, from ANSWER's cadres and comrades.

Some on the liberal-left may denounced these unsettling truths as latter-day "red baiting." Not so. Two of the best reported early exposes of ANSWER were written by David Corn and Marc Cooper, left-leaning journalists who argued that the radical left was hijacking and discrediting the anti-war movement.

And what of ANSWER's coalition partner, United For Peace and Justice?

Like its partner, UFPJ is ostensibly anti-war, specifically anti-Iraq war and anti-war on terror. But its visceral motivations are clearly broader – anti-American, anti-Western, anti-capitalist and anti-Israel. UFPJ's co-chair and principal leader is Leslie Cagan, an avowed socialist and, for the past 35 years, a staunch defender of Castro's communist dictatorship in Cuba.

Like ANSWER, UFPJ opposed not only the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein but also ouster of the terrorist-harboring Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

United For Peace and Justice bills itself as a coalition of more than 800 local organizations. It was founded in 2002, reportedly to put a less militant, less radical face on the anti-Iraq war movement. Hitchens calls UFPJ an alliance between the "Old and New Left." Whatever its ideological pose, its hate-America, hate-Bush message betrays it as far out of the American mainstream.

It's on this point, precisely, that International ANSWER and United For Peace and Justice are hurting, not helping, the anti – Iraq war cause. So long as this so-called anti-war movement is dominated by the hard left, and personified by extremist flakes like Cindy Sheehan, it cannot appeal to the broad middle ground of American politics from which policy is made.

Not a single U.S. senator and only a handful of members in the House of Representatives favor an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq; the goal of both International ANSWER and United For Peace and Justice. Despite the estimated 100,000 protestors mobilized in Washington last weekend by ANSWER and UFPJ, the hate-America message doesn't sell beyond the marginal fringe.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20...1e2caldwel.html

[AURaptor 1,125]

Why aren't we seeing protestors organize to stop the fanatical muslim terrorist instead ?

This is clearly a case of bizzaro world meeting the real world.