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Jewish World Review Jan. 23, 2003 / 20 Shevat, 5763
James Lileks
People who'd volunteer for the Iraqi army if they saw Saddam wearing a "Free Mumia" button
True. Rally organizer ANSWER is a front for the Workers World Party.
Their websites reveal them not only as Marxist-Leninists, but utter
suck-ups to tyrants everywhere. Slobo? They love him. North Korea? They
blame the US for famine, and want you, the taxpayer, to pay reparations
to every victim of regime. These are the people who made the rallies
happen - and their taint is now attached to everyone who marched
beneath their banner.
Does this mean that all the protesters are Stalinists? No.
Stalinist
dupes, perhaps, but there's a difference. There are many good reasons
to oppose the war: you're a pacifist, you think we should concentrate
on terror cells instead of their sponsoring states, you're French and
don't look forward to everyone learning that your company sold car
batteries and leg clamps to Saddam's "Persuasion Brigade." You
fret
about the cost. You worry that the government has no plans for a
post-Saddam political landscape. You worry that the war will
destabilize the region. You worry that it won't. Reasonable people
can
hold principled objections. It seems odd we even have to point that
out.
The reason it must be pointed out, however, is to remind these
well-intentioned souls that their movement is becoming inextricably
linked with people who'd volunteer for the Iraqi army if they saw
Saddam wearing a "Free Mumia" button. That's the strain that has
infected the "peace" movement - deluded, unfocused, addled by rage,
and
ferociously bitter because the frowsy mass of modern Americans won't
join their moral betters and start hating America with their heart,
brain, spleen, and larynx. This isn't the blame-America-first crowd.
It's the destroy-America-first crowd.
ANSWER is the peace movement's Trent Lott. You want to assure
the
nation you're not all shrieking anarchists who think heaving a
garbage
can through a Starbucks window is a blow for world peace? Find a mike.
Speak up.
The Democratic party, in short, has a problem with the antiwar
crowd.
For every hawkish Lieberman there seem to be two equivocating Daschles,
a quisling Bonior and a blowhard Sharpton. When liberal celebs stammer
out a litany of shopworn bleats about the Administration's attempt to
turn America into a theocratic prison state, people can't help but
notice that these buskers and mummers seem unmoved by the horrors of
actual prison states. (Saddam commissioned a copy of the Qu'ran
written in his own blood - but Ashcroft is the real religious nut,
don't you know.) They preen like people of conscience speaking truth
to
power, but everyone knows they'll pay no price. If Martin Sheen had
insisted that Bush was not only worse than Hitler but liked to spend
his idle hours squashing ducklings and pretending they were Iraqi
babies, he'd not only still be on prime time TV, he'd have a
People
magazine profile: "America's 'Other President' still feisty,
unbowed."
Who wants to join these dismal souls? They might make you stand
up and
shout, but so does a bowl of hot soup in your lap. They're amusing
fools; harmless, really, inasmuch as nothing they did will stop the
war. Clueless, too - the very fact that Saddam saluted their efforts
should have given them pause, but it didn't. They see themselves,
as
one reporter noted, as the heirs of Paul Wellstone, unsullied by
politics, just pure-hearted people making a stand for peace. But
Wellstone supported Clinton's war on Iraq in 1998. Wellstone
supported a war to oust Milosovitch, a murdering thug ANSWER defends on
their website. You want to ask his acolytes: Would Paul have attended
the rally? If so, what does that say about him? If not, what does that
say about you?
One more question. If you cannot publicly repudiate people in
your
ranks who prefer up Arafat, Saddam, Slobo and Kim Jong Il to Condi Rice
and Colin Powell, why should we trust you with national security?
Sorry, sorry. There we go again, stifling dissent. Apologies,
comrades. Ten Hail Lenins in penance.
01/16/03:One of those head vs. heart things
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