Posted on 03/12/2003 11:00:16 PM PST by JohnHuang2
Sarah Sloan is a bespectacled young woman in her early 20s, who looks like a typical college student. When she is speaking to audiences whom she wants enlist in the movement that has become her life, she presents herself as one of the chief organizers for International ANSWER, the main group behind the anti-war protests. She speaks both at rallies and in high schools to oppose the war.
But there is much more to Sarah Sloan than this. International ANSWER, is a front for the Worker's World Party, a self-styled "Communist Party," whose mecca is North Korea. Sarah Sloan is a functionary of this party. This is how she can make statements that seem more appropriate to an al-Qaeda communiqué, than to a "peace" organizer: "This is our task: to abolish NATO. And moveover to abolish the Pentagon."
It is time for Americans to face an unpleasant reality - Sarah Sloan and others like her who are spear-heading the "anti-war" movement don't want a change in foreign policy; they want to put an end to America. Immediately after the mass murder of 9/11, the Workers' World Party and Sarah Sloan began organizing to prevent America from responding - calling for an ostrich-like 'peace' less than two weeks after the outrage. ww.internationalanswer.org/news/update/092301answerpr.html).
By November 2001, Sarah Sloan was in Japan, coordinating with other anti-American activists to protect the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
In addition to attacking America's ability to defend itself, Sarah – again like other orgranizers of the antiwar movement -- found time to support a convicted cop-killer, Mumia Abu-Jamal; attack the defenders of the Kosovars, and attempt to recruit teenagers at public schools. On October 29, 2002, for example, she was speaking at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. Hiding behind her public face as a peace organizer for International ANSWER, she was free to indoctrinate the students with her Communist perspectives. "Everyone in this room hates [President] Bush, right?" she asked her young audience. One among them, a Nathaniel Pancost, was troubled by her remarks. "These A.N.S.W.E.R. people, the leftist groups, speak at these things as if they were a rally. They shouldn't."
In the San Francisco Bay Area, as anti-American violence looms, radicals like Sarah Sloan have been making multiple attempts to recruit high-school teenagers - and not without some success. At a student strike at Stanford on March 5, 2003, where students were being directly recruited to perform illegal acts in direct-action 'affinity groups,' approximately twenty students from Palo Alto's Jordan Middle School cut class to attend, without the permission or supervision of the school.
In Berkeley's Willard Middle School, the administrators took greater measures to keep leftists from undermining their students' education, locking students onto the schoolgrounds to prevent them from political truancy. It proved harder to constrain the students of Oakland High School, who clambered over fences and locked gates to join protests. Throughout the Bay Area, hundreds of students left their classes to attend demonstrations at the behest of organizers like Sarah Sloan.
This is a worrying trend, for these protests, organized and controlled by the extreme Left, are growing increasingly violent. And when it comes to law-breaking and mayhem, there's nothing the Left likes better than a minor. When I was a communist in Toronto, on several occasions I heard teenagers, some barely in high school, make statements like "I can do what I want at this protest. What are they going to do? Arrest me? Put me on probation? I'm under 18!" These naieve statements, which underestimate both the danger of a conflict with the police and the punishment and shame that follow arrest, are planted and praised by older radicals. In 1999, a youth organizer for the Canada's Communist Party would tell me: "If you're going to do that sort of thing, best to do it when you're young." The same month in Toronto 'peace' protestors threw Molotov cocktails at the U.S. consulate and set it on fire. Two officers were sent to the hospital with injuries from thrown debris.
In the days leading up to the liberation of Iraq, we've yet to see such violence, but there are signs that it is coming. Organizing web sites like Direct Action to Stop the War have posted detailed plans to shut down key intersections and workplaces in San Francisco; anonymous comments in their Pravda-like news services hint at smoke bombs in the subways and riots in the streets. All this at a time when our nation is on high alert; all this at a time when terrorists, using the start of war as a pretext, may be planning to attack our nation. Parents might want to ask themselves some rather obvious questions:
- Is your teenager planning on attending these anti-war protests?
- Do you know what their teenager might be doing there?
- Is there anything you can do to keep your teenager safe?
High-school students are a prime target of the communist sects behind the peace movement. First, because they are young and impressionable, they are easily influenced by the 'cool'-acting professional organizers that pretend to be their friends, invite them to parties, and recruit them to their causes. Second, high school students have a large amount of energy and time. The caring support of their parents gives them the time, energy, and freedom to devote themselves to the authoritarian causes of the hard Left. Last, high school students are rarely tried as adults in criminal courts. Because of this, they make excellent foot soldiers when legal protest turns to vandalism and riot. And unfortunately, the Worker's World Party and similar Communist organizations have a long history of recruitment from American high school students. The jump from opposing war to advocating America's destruction seems extreme, but there are many sad examples of young people who have converted to their causes and had their futures ruined. A prime example - Sarah Sloan. An article from the year 2000 reveals she left school to 'live an activist's life,' three years before – in other words, when she was 17. Parents need to ask themselves another question: Is the public face of the organization that is after your children nothing more than a high-school drop-out herself? Will your children be encouraged to follow her lead?
If the anti-war demonstrations were only about a peaceful, reasoned criticism of foreign policy, there'd be little for parents (or others) to fear. Unfortunately, the people behind today's anti-war demonstrations have more sinister agendas. Teenage rebellion can be only a phase. But when impressionable young people fall in with unscrupulous radicals, the damage to their future may be permanent. America is under attack from within as well as from without. In the crisis that confronts us, we need better and more caring parents than Sarah Sloan's.
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