Gold Star Mom Blasts Sen. Kerry’s Middle East Trip

A Gold Star Mother is urging American troops to snub Sen. John Kerry during his visit to Iraq. “I’m asking our men and women in Iraq to not allow themselves to be forced to pose with Kerry during his photo ops,” said Debra Bastian, who lost her son in Iraq in 2005.

“This man is a disgrace. He should be shunned by those serving in Iraq. He is not their friend. They [the soldiers] should not be forced to pose for pictures with Kerry the way they did when Sen. Hillary Clinton visited Iraq,” she said.

The Massachusets senator is in the Middle East reportedly to meet with the presidents of Iran and Syria. While visiting Egypt, he also took a number of swipes at President Bush and his Middle East policy.

While in Egypt, critics say Kerry pandered to hatred for Israel in order to score points with the Egyptians.

“Kerry hasn’t changed from his days as a anti-war protester who spouted lies against his fellow soldiers,” said the angry Bastian.

While Kerry’s office says he fulfilling his constitutional duty to actively participate in foreign policy, many in Washington believe his trip is meant to hurt the Bush Administration and to increase his sagging poll numbers in another bid for the Democrat Party presidential nomination. To some observers, Kerry Middle East trip is reminiscent of his trip to meet with North Vietnamese officials in Paris in the midst of the Vietnam War.

“Kerry knows he’s being ignored with all the buzz about [Sen. Barack] Obama and [Sen.] Hillary Clinton. The last poll showed him garning only 7 percent of likely Democrat voters,” said political analyst Mike Baker.

“Add Kerry’s propensity for denigrating his country during time of war and you have the John Kerry portrayed by the Swift Boat Vets for Truth during his failed presidential campaign,” he said.

“My son is a true war hero. Kerry claims he’s a war hero because of a broken fingernail for which he got a Purple Heart,” said Bastian.

Bastian and other Gold Star Mothers recently visited Iraq to show their support for US troops. However, the news media ignored their trip and none were interviewed by reporters.

“The American people are shown a skewed picture of the situation in Iraq day after day by the international news media. We felt it was time to allow the families of US troops who died in Iraq to come see the progress being made in Iraq and report it back to the American people,” said Melanie Morgan, Chairman of Move America Forward, an organization that helps and supports families of fallen soldiers.

The trip also occured following statements by Senator John Kerry, who suggested U.S. Troops serving in Iraq lack intelligence and are “stuck” there because of their limited abilities.

“I am spitting mad at John Kerry for insulting our troops. Duck and run was his specialty in Viet Nam,” said Gold Star Mother Deborah Argel.

National Review’s Michael Rubin said, “John Kerry is in Egypt, and is praising Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s wisdom. What Kerry is not doing is speaking up for imprisoned dissidents victimized by Mubarak’s crackdown.”

“What does he think Egyptians feel when they hear Kerry saying that Bush should have listened more to Mubarak, whose domestic popularity make Bush look like Mr. Universe? Kerry stood up for Mubarak’s 2002 support for Saddam,” said Rubin.

The Soros-Kerry Nexus
By Rachel Ehrenfeld and Shawn Macomber
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 19, 2004

While George Soros and John Kerry were vacationing in neighboring mansions in Sun Valley, Idaho, the two men chatted on the phone but avoided a personal meeting, “because,” as Soros told USA Today, “of how it would be interpreted.”

For Soros, who has put down at least $18 million to defeat Bush this year, keeping up appearances is essential. Coordination between the 527 groups Soros has been raining money down upon and the Kerry campaign, after all, is strictly verboten in the age of McCain-Feingold. Is it plausible the Dems’ billionaire benefactor and the candidate avoided talk of the election campaign strategy entirely? The facts on the ground suggest otherwise.

Soros major anti-Bush donations have gone to MoveOn.org, the group infamous for its over the top, hate-laden ads; and to former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta’s new think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP); and to America Coming Together, a get-out-the-Democratic vote operation headed by former AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal and Ellen Malcolm, president of the pro-abortion EMILY’s List.

ACT steadfastly denies it is violating federal law by coordinating with the Kerry campaign, but brags on its website that it is currently, “laying the groundwork to defeat George W. Bush and elect Democrats.” Maybe the group is thinking of some Democrat other than John Kerry? Perhaps, but then the fact that former ACT staffer Rodney Shelton is now Kerry’s Arkansas state director seems a bit odd. Isolated incident? Nope. Kerry’s former campaign manager Jim Jordan is now on staff at ACT. And techno-whiz Zach Exley left the upper echelons of MoveOn.org to work for Kerry.

“It's inevitable that Exley is going to be using MoveOn folks and information for the Kerry campaign. The guy was their opposition research guy,” a Bush campaign staffer told the Washington Prowler. “The RNC has been saying all along that these guys have been working together, so now the guy responsible for all those anti-Bush ads on TV and the Web is essentially doing the same thing for the Kerry camp? Soros probably has an office in Kerry campaign headquarters by now.”

Harold Ickes, the widely acknowledged driving force behind Americans Coming Together and the Media Fund, is also a member of the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee. Ickes recently admitted to Business Week that “he occasionally tells the Kerry camp what he's up to.” That magazine also noted that ACT and The Media Fund were briefing journalists just down the hall from the DNC Finance Committee's hospitality suite at Boston's Four Seasons Hotel during the Democratic National Convention. These are activities that Soros’s vast resources clearly made possible.

So was Soros being facetious when he signed off on a 2000 Open Society Institute report that claimed one of the group’s major goals was to get, “states to experiment with various approaches to reduce the pressure of money on elections and legislation, ranging from improved disclosure to full public financing of campaigns”? His 1995 book Soros on Soros contains a clue as to what he may be thinking: “I do not accept the rules imposed by others...I am a law-abiding citizen, but I recognize that there are regimes that need to be opposed rather than accepted. And in periods of regime change, the normal rules don’t apply.” Clearly, Soros considers himself as someone who is able to determine when the “normal rules” should and shouldn’t apply.

Democrats, hungry for a 2004 win, don’t much care whether George Soros is following the “normal rules” these days or not. One “Democratic operative” told U.S. News & World Report, “[Republicans] don’t accept the legitimacy of political opposition. These people will do anything to gain and hold power. So I’m not exactly feeling full of ethical scruples as we fight for survival.”

Aside from desperately attempting to make John Kerry president, what other cause has George Soros bankrolled? One joint venture between the Tides Foundation, one of potential first lady Teresa Heinz-Kerry’s favorite charities, and Soros’s Open Society Institute is the Democratic Justice Fund, which FrontPage Magazine’s Ben Johnson has noted, “seeks to ease restrictions on Muslim immigration to the United States, particularly from countries designated by the State Department as ‘terrorist nations.’”

Long term, if Soros has his way, the United States won’t even remain territorially intact. He funds both the National Council of La Raza and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, two groups that want to essentially eliminate America’s borders. In a much hailed 1997 speech to the National Council of La Raza, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo said that he “proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders and that Mexican migrants are an important – a very important – part of this.” As FrontPage Magazine reported earlier this year, OSI has likewise contributed $65,000 to the Malcolm X Grassroots movement, which wants to establish an all-black homeland in the Southeastern United States, from South Carolina to Louisiana. It would be communist, of course.

In September 2003 Soros was invited to speak at one of the State Department’s Open Forums, where he laid out his hyper-internationalist aspirations for American society, including his proposed “modification of the concept of sovereignty” which is needed because “sovereignty is basically somewhat anachronistic.”

Someone ought to ask John Kerry where he stands on all of this. We deserve to know what these two fabulously wealthy power brokers have been planning for us over these vacation phone calls.

Rachel Ehrenfeld is author of "Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financed–and How to Stop It" (Bonus Books, 2004); Shawn Macomber is a staff writer at The American Spectator and runs the website, www.ReturnofthePrimitive.com.

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