Bush draws a crowd [USC Daily Trojan covers pro-Bush Iranian-American/Free Republic rally]

www.DaliyTrojan.com ^ | March 4, 2004 | SHRADDHA JAISWALI

[RonDog]

.

Bush draws a crowd

President Bush spoke at the Shrine Auditorium Wednesday. More than 100 showed up for the event.

	Elizabeth Leitzell | Daily Trojan
	Mixed Emotion. The Iranian American Republicans were among the demonstrators who welcomed President Bush to the Shrine Auditorium Wednesday afternoon; they said they support him because he opposes terrorism in Iran.

By SHRADDHA JAISWALI
Staff writer

President George W. Bush's visit to Southern California on Wednesday was marked by demonstrations from more than 130 supporters and opponents who packed onto the four corners of Jefferson Boulevard and Shrine Place in the early evening.

The demonstrators, both for and against the president, waved signs and shouted slogans at the drivers passing the Shrine Auditorium where Bush was scheduled to speak at 5:35 p.m.

With the clock ticking down to the November presidential election, Bush planned a three-day visit to California in hopes of raising funds for his re-election campaign.

The anti-Bush corner was home to about 80 people of all ages waving signs reading everything from a general "Stop Bush" to the more specific "End Occupation in Iraq" and "Immigrant Rights."

Many of the anti-Bush signs were provided by the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism organization, but they were joined by groups such as Code Pink, The Socialist Organization and Out Against War as well as by individuals simply wanting to be heard.

Those gathered at the corner shouting against Bush's policies felt it was necessary to protest even at a fundraising event to open the eyes of Californians.

"I hope to call attention to the fact that other people who think he should not be president will know they are not alone," said Eda Hallinan, a member of the women's peace group Code Pink.

"Bush is probably the worst president this country has ever had," she said. "I think that we are so much worse off now than when he first took office, in terms of the economy and our own security."

Along with the sea of anti-Bush posters, the protesters chanted their messages from a megaphone with sayings such as, "George Bush — we know you — your daddy was a killer too," and "Hands off Haiti."

But despite the loud anti-Bush sentiments, Bush supporters were not deterred from standing their ground. The largest group of Bush advocates at the four corners was a group of Iranians waving flags and shouting praises of the president's international policies.

"We're here to support President Bush because he's for democracy, not only in Iran, but around the world," said 59-year-old Reza Ershadi.

Fellow conservatives praised the Iranian effort to support Bush saying that they were dedicated and knew that Bush could help them.

"These guys have been here since 3 p.m.," said Ron Smith pointing to the Iranians. "Think about it, they've got family in Iran. They've got family right now in a brutal regime, and they're saying, 'well we appreciate what you did in Iraq, how about coming over here and helping us out in Iran.'"

The topics of demonstration on both sides ranged from the war in Iraq, the issues in Haiti, and same-sex marriage rights.

"People don't support a war in Iraq, but if you look at it, we've liberated an oppressed people," said Ryan Reid, a business administration student at USC. "Saddam Hussein, thank God we caught him. He's killed over a million of his own people since the 1980s, and these people obviously wanted to keep him in power. I think we did the right thing."

While the conservative groups supported and even welcomed Bush's occupation of Iraq and his goal to "stop terrorism," liberal groups remained pessimistic about his true motives.

"If you wait, Bush will take everything you have, and that's a guarantee. He will take your oil, he will take everything," said Lyzegte Blanco, a senior at Harbor College. "That's pretty much why we got Saddam Hussein out of office, because we wanted the oil. With Bush, there's always a hidden meaning."
Copyright 2004 by the Daily Trojan. All rights reserved.
This article was published in Vol. 151, No. 34 (Thursday, March 4, 2004), beginning on page 1 and ending on page 13.

[RonDog]

EXTRAORDINARY.

This short article is one of the most throrough and accurate reports of a political rally that I have ever read.

The author covers BOTH sides very impartially, and even prominantly features the MAIN story, the Iranian-Americans and their passionate, morally inassailable support for President Bush.

There may yet be hope for America's universities!

[Lion in Winter]

They gave WAY too much coverage of the whiners and lying anti-Bush jerks.

[RonDog]

The author covers BOTH sides very impartially, and even prominantly features the MAIN story, the Iranian-Americans and their passionate, morally inassailable support for President Bush.

Ooops!

Make that: "unassailable."

[NutmegDevil]

One of my several Alma Maters -Go Trojans!

[OpusatFR]

That's nice.

Now if the President could get the media to cover him, it would be nice.

I always assume the media would cover the President, but apparently not President Bush.

[RonDog]

They gave WAY too much coverage of the whiners and lying anti-Bush jerks.

I understand.

But there WERE many more of THEM than there were of US.

There were only a few FR-related folks at this event. :(

Fortunately, we had a little help from our friends:

Iranian-Americans, USC CRs, L.A. FReepers join forces to greet President Bush at Shrine Auditorium
President Bush to Visit LOS ANGELES - Wednesday (3/3) - 5:45 p.m. at the Shrine Auditorium ^ | March 3, 2004 | RonDog
Posted on 03/03/2004 8:23:18 PM PST by RonDog

I just got back from an AMAZING rally to support President Bush at the Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles, right across the street from the University of Southern California.

Wow.

I thought that **I** was intense.

It is a good thing that these Iranian-American patriots are on OUR side. :o)

CLICK HERE for the rest of that thread

[Godfollow]

I'd say the author gave more lines to the anti Bush crowd than the pro, but ya, over all it sounded pretty fair.

[The Wizard]

it gave way to much coverage to the few demonstrators

[RonDog]

"These guys have been here since 3 p.m.," said Ron Smith pointing to the Iranians.

"Think about it, they've got family in Iran. They've got family right now in a brutal regime, and they're saying, 'well we appreciate what you did in Iraq, how about coming over here and helping us out in Iran.'" - USC Daily Trojan's SHRADDHA JAISWALI

That would be the "intense (but humble) Free Republic Network's Los Angeles Chapter leader," RonDog. :o)

L.A. Chapter PING!

[ALOHA RONNIE]

NEVER FORGET


DAILY TROJAN just one year ago:


'Demonstrators show support for possible war'

http://www.dailytrojan.com/article.do?issue=V148/N31&id=01-demon.31c.html


NEVER FORGET

[RonDog]

it gave way to much coverage to the few demonstrators

Perhaps.

But compare HER report to THIS rather typical media coverage, which does not even mention the MAIN STORY from last night's event: the intense Iranian-American supporters of President Bush.

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette :

Campaign 2004: Bush comes out swinging at campaign kickoff event

Thursday, March 04, 2004By Maeve Reston, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

LOS ANGELES -- President Bush wasted no time taking on his rival, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, in the first day of the general election campaign.

	Wally Skalij, pool photo via AP President Bush addresses the White House Conference on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in Los Angeles. Click photo for larger image.

At a fund-raiser in California last night, he painted the American voters' choice in November as a stark decision between a Democratic leader who would create uncertainty for America in turbulent times and one who could provide security.

Bush lost California to former Vice President Al Gore by nearly 1.3 million votes in 2000 and trails Kerry by some 13 percentage points in hypothetical match-up polls in California. But his visit to the Golden State -- less than 24 hours after Kerry won its Democratic primary in a landslide -- underscored the aggressive posture that his campaign has taken: the Bush team will campaign everywhere and plans to be competitive even in states like California, which has favored Democratic nominees in recent years.

At an evening fund-raiser at the Shrine Auditorium at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Bush said that by electing a Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, California voters had shown the nation that "no party can take this state for granted."

"The vice president and I are going to be spending some quality time in the state of California," Bush said. "With your help, we are going to make California part of a nationwide victory in November of '04."

In remarks that were a clear outline of his 2004 campaign, Bush drew heavily on his experience leading the nation in the war against terrorism, capturing Iraq leader Saddam Hussein and freeing Afghanistan from the rule of the Taliban. He cast himself as a decisive leader who showed the world through Saddam's capture that America "means what it says." And he said America was "proud to lead the armies of liberation." Because his administration acted, he said, "the world is more free and America is more secure."

Bush also said his "historic tax relief" had made the nation the fastest-growing economy of any nation in the world. And Bush immediately took on Kerry, saying the Democrat had not shown how he would lead the nation against terror and that he would burden voters with higher taxes and less independence to make their own decisions. He also cast Kerry as a flip-flopper.

"He's spent two decades in Congress and he's built up quite a record," Bush said. "In fact, Sen. Kerry's been in Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every issue.

"The voters will have a very clear choice this year," Bush said. "Between keeping the tax relief that is moving this country forward or putting the burden of higher taxes back on the American people. It's a choice between an America that leads the world with strength and confidence or an America that is uncertain in the face of danger. I'm ready for this campaign."

He also bashed the Democrats' message as empty and without solutions either for restoring jobs or carrying out the war on terror.

"My opponent hasn't offered much in the way of strategies to win the war," Bush said. "So far all we hear from that side is a lot of old bitterness and partisan anger. Anger is not an agenda for the future of America."

There is deep hostility against Bush among Democrats in Los Angeles, including an active sector determined to embark on an "Impeach Bush" movement because of the president's contention that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Dozens of them protested outside the fund-raiser with signs saying "Bush Lied" or "Censure Him."

But the president was warmly received not just by his financial backers, but by community leaders from all over the country at a conference yesterday afternoon for the White House Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at the city's Convention Center.

During a winding speech punctuated by "Amens" from the crowd, Bush told his listeners he had come to the "City of Angels" to honor the people "doing God's work" and pledged to help them navigate the complicated pathways of the federal government to get more money for their faith-based community work -- a contentious initiative that he has said is one of the priorities for his administration.

"Let me put your minds at ease," Bush said to his listeners. "We're talking about healing our nation, we're not talking politics. We're all here doing everything in our power to save lives. ... I'm here to thank you for hearing that call. Actually, I shouldn't be thanking you, I should be thanking a higher power," he said.

All of the Democratic candidates, including Kerry, have expressed reservations about programs they believe blur the line between church and state and they have struggled to find ways to reach out to talk about faith in a way that is palatable to their party's base. Bush addressed the controversy in his speech, noting that he was forced to issue an executive order to move his initiative forward after it was held up in the U.S. Senate.

"There's been a big debate about this, of course, because we want to make sure there's a separation of church and state," Bush said. "But if you have an ... objective and you've got people of faith that can achieve that objective, doesn't it make sense for the government to not fear faith, but to welcome faith?"

Outside the convention center a handful of Democratic protesters said it was ironic that Bush was attending the faith-based initiative conference without stopping by a job fair that was taking place next door.

---

(Maeve Reston can be reached at mreston@post-gazette.com.)

[alaskanfan]

"John Kerry has been in Washington long enough to take both sides of every issue.".......Dubya

[MEG33]

Thank you for being there and representing us!

[RonDog]

I had some of my signs from last Sunday's OSCAR FReep at this event, including: "Return of the KING... BUSH 2004!"

(Click on THIS image for a LARGER image.)

Greats of old, decorum reign at the Oscars
[FReep report: BIG crowd, no RATs, no Moore. Pix later.]
Left to right: ALOHA RONNIE, Cinnamon Girl, FIT-AIM-ACT-1,
Larry Sands, TED HAYES, Jenny (?), RonDog, Ted's friend (?)

Photo credit: Jena Bright, Bright Photography.
Photo hosting courtesy of daviddennis

[happygrl]

Beautiful pics and Good Work!

Thank you West Coast FReepers!

[TheSpottedOwl]

This short article is one of the most throrough and accurate reports of a political rally that I have ever read.

I agree. This was very well written.

[RonDog]

Watch for our NEXT encounter with these bozos, from www.answerla.org:

Los Angeles March and Rally
Saturday March 20, 12 noon
Hollywood & Vine

This will be part of worldwide protests that day

The Los Angeles march will assemble at Hollywood & Vine at noon and march about 1 1/2 miles to the Army recruiting station at Sunset and La Brea for the rally. There will be speakers at Hollywood & Vine as well as at the main rally.

There is ample parking on side streets as well as parking lots, which have reduced rates on weekends. There are subway stops at both Hollywood and Vine and at Hollywood and Highland. There are several restaurants and coffee shops near the rally site. Map

Confirmed speakers as of 2/18. Ron Kovic. We will be listing more speakers shortly.

[Valin]

"People don't support a war in Iraq, but if you look at it, we've liberated an oppressed people," said Ryan Reid, a business administration student at USC. "Saddam Hussein, thank God we caught him. He's killed over a million of his own people since the 1980s, and these people obviously wanted to keep him in power. I think we did the right thing."

Toronto Globe and Mail

Saddam's chambers of horrors
By MARGARET WENTE
Saturday, November 23, 2002


Abu Ghraib, 30 kilometres west of Baghdad, is Iraq's biggest prison. Until recently, it held perhaps 50,000 people, perhaps more. No one knows for sure. No one knows how many people were taken there through the years and never came out.
For a generation, Abu Ghraib was the centrepiece of Saddam Hussein's reign of torture and death. Yahya al-Jaiyashy is one of the survivors.

Mr. Jaiyashy is an animated, bearded man of 49 whose words can scarcely keep up with the torrent of his memories. Today he lives in Toronto with his second wife, Sahar. This week, he sat down with me to relate his story. With him were his wife, a lovely Iraqi woman in her mid-30s, and a friend, Haithem al-Hassan, who helped me with Mr. Jaiyashy's mixture of Arabic and rapid English.
"Nineteen seventy-seven was the first time I went to jail," he says. "I was not tortured that much."
He was in his mid-20s then, from an intellectual family that lived in a town south of Baghdad. He had been a student of Islamic history, language and religion in the holy city of Najaf, but was forced to quit his studies after he refused to join the ruling Ba'ath party. His ambition was to write books that would show how Islam could open itself up to modernism.

In Saddam's Iraq, this was a dangerous occupation, especially for a Shiite. Shia Muslims are the majority in Iraq, but Saddam and his inner circle are Sunni. Many Shiites were under suspicion as enemies of the state.
"My father was scared for me," says Mr. Jaiyashy. " 'You know how dangerous this regime is,' he told me. 'You know how many people they kill.' "

Mr. Jaiyashy continued his studies on his own. But, eventually, he was picked up, along with a dozen acquaintances who had been involved in political activity against the regime. They were sent to Abu Ghraib. The others did not get off as lightly as he did. One was killed by immersion into a vat of acid. Ten others, he recalls, were put into a room and torn apart by wild dogs. Several prominent religious leaders were also executed. One was a university dean, someone Mr. Jaiyashy remembers as "a great man." They drove a nail through his skull.

For three decades, the most vicious war Saddam has waged has been the one against his own people. Iraq's most devastating weapon of mass destruction is Saddam himself. And the most powerful case for regime change is their suffering.
Sometimes, it is almost impossible to believe the accounts of people who survived Saddam's chamber of horrors. They seem like twisted nightmares, or perhaps crude propaganda. But there are too many survivors who have escaped Iraq, too many credible witnesses. And Mr. Jaiyashy's story, horrible as it is, is not unusual.

Saddam personally enjoyed inflicting torture in the early years of his career, and he has modelled his police state after that of his hero, Stalin. According to Kenneth Pollack, a leading U.S. expert on Iraq, the regime employs as many as half a million people in its various intelligence, security and police organizations. Hundreds of thousands of others serve as informants. Neighbour is encouraged to inform on neighbour, children on their parents. Saddam has made Iraq into a self-policing totalitarian state, where everyone is afraid of everybody else.
"Being in Iraq is like creeping around inside someone else's migraine," says veteran BBC correspondent John Sweeney. "The fear is so omnipresent, you could almost eat it."
To Stalin's methods of arbitrary arrests and forced confessions, Saddam has added an element of sadism: the torture of children to extract information from their parents.

In northern Iraq -- the only place in the country where people can speak relatively freely -- Mr. Sweeney interviewed several people who had direct experience of child torture. He also met one of the victims -- a four-year-old girl, the daughter of a man who had worked for Saddam's psychopathic son Uday. When the man fell under suspicion, he fled to the Kurdish safe haven in the north. The police came for his wife and tortured her to reveal his whereabouts; when she didn't break, they took his daughter and crushed her feet. She was 2 then. Today, she wears metal braces on her legs, and can only hobble.

"This is a regime that will gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents," writes Mr. Pollack in his new book, The Threatening Storm. "This is a regime that will hold a nursing baby at arm's length from its mother and allow the child to starve to death to force the mother to confess. This is a regime that will burn a person's limbs off to force him to confess or comply. This is a regime that will slowly lower its victims into huge vats of acid. . . .
"This is a regime that practises systematic rape against the female victims. This is a regime that will drag in a man's wife, daughter or other female relative and repeatedly rape her in front of him." And if he has fled the country, it will send him the video.

After nearly two years in prison, Mr. Jaiyashy was released and sent to do military service in the north. Then the security police decided to round up the followers of one of the executed clerics. In 1980, Mr. Jaiyashy was arrested again, along with 20 friends, and taken to a military prison. He was interrogated about criticisms he was supposed to have made of the regime, and urged to sign a confession. During one session, his wrists were tied to a ceiling fan. Then they turned on the fan. Then they added weights onto his body and did it again. Then somebody climbed on him to add more weight. "It was 20 minutes, but it seemed like 20 years," he recalls.
He was beaten with a water hose filled with stones. When he passed out, he was shocked back into consciousness with an electric cable. They hung him by his legs, pulled out a fingernail with pliers, and drove an electric drill through his foot.

Mr. Jaiyashy took off his right shoe and sock to show me his foot. It is grotesquely mutilated, with a huge swelling over the arch. There is an Amnesty International report on human-rights abuses in Iraq with a photo of a mutilated foot that looks identical to his. The baby finger on his left hand is also mutilated.
He didn't sign the confession. He knew that, if he did, they would eventually kill him.
They put him in solitary confinement, in a cell measuring two metres by two and a half, without windows or light. Every few weeks, they would bring him the confession again, but he refused to sign. He stayed there for a year.

In 1981, he was sent to trial, where he persuaded a sympathetic judge not to impose the death sentence. He got 10 years instead, and was sent back to Abu Ghraib. "They put me in a cell with 50 people. It was three and a half by three and a half metres. Some stood, some sat. They took turns."
There was a small window in the cell, with a view of a tree. It was the only living thing the prisoners could see. The tree was cut down. There were informants in the cells and, every morning, guards would come and take someone and beat him till he died. "This is your breakfast!" they would say.
Mr. Jaiyashy spent the next six years in that cell. His parents were told he was dead.

Abu Ghraib contained many intellectuals and professional people. Among them was the scientist Hussein Shahristani, a University of Toronto alumnus who became a leading nuclear scientist in Iraq. He was imprisoned after he refused to work on Saddam's nuclear program. He spent 10 years in Abu Ghraib, most of them in solitary confinement, until he escaped in 1991.

Saddam has reduced his people to abject poverty. He wiped out families, villages, cities and cultures, and drove four million people into exile. He killed between 100,000 and 200,000 Kurds. He killed as many as 300,000 Shiites in the uprising after the Persian Gulf war. He killed or displaced 200,000 of the 250,000 marsh Arabs who had created a unique, centuries-old culture in the south. He drained the marshes, an environmental treasure, and turned them into a desert.

In a recent Frontline documentary, a woman who fled Iraq recounted how she and others had been forced to witness the public beheadings of 15 women who had been rounded up for prostitution and other crimes against the state. One of the women was a doctor who had been misreported as speaking against the regime. "They put her head in a trash can," she said.

In 1987, Mr. Jaiyashy and a thousand other inmates were transferred to an outdoor prison camp. There, they were allowed a visit with their relatives, so long as they said nothing of their lives in prison. Mr. Jaiyashy's parents came, hoping he might still be alive. He remembers the day all the families came. "There was so much crying. We called it the crying day."

In 1989, he was finally released from prison. Then came the gulf war and, after that, the uprising, which he joined. It was quickly crushed. He fled with 150,000 refugees toward the Saudi border. But the Saudis didn't want them. "They are Wahhabis," he says. "They consider the Shia as infidels." The United Nations set up a refugee camp, where Mr. Jaiyashy spent the next six years. He began to paint and write again.
Finally, he was accepted as an immigrant to Canada. He arrived in Toronto in 1996, and is now a Canadian citizen.

Mr. Jaiyashy has a deep sense of gratitude toward his adoptive country. Canada, he says, has given him back his freedom and his dignity. He paints prolifically, and has taken courses at the art college, and is the author of three plays about the Saddam regime. He makes his living stocking shelves in a fabric store. "I'm a porter," he says. "No problem. I'm happy."

But Saddam's spies are everywhere. After one of his plays was produced here, his father was imprisoned. His first wife and three children are still in Iraq. He hasn't seen them since his youngest, now 12, was a baby. He talks with them on the phone from time to time, but it is very dangerous. One of his brothers is in Jordan, another still in Iraq.
Sahar, his second wife, is soft-spoken. She covers her head and dresses modestly, without makeup. Her face is unlined. She arrived in Canada with her two daughters the same year as Mr. Jaiyashy; they were introduced by friends.

She, too, has a story. I learned only the smallest part of it. "I was a widow," she told me. "My husband was a doctor in Iraq. He wanted to continue his education and have a specialty. But they didn't allow him. He deserted the military service to continue his education on his own. They beat him till he died."
Today, her daughters are in high school and she teaches at a daycare centre. Her new husband pushed her to study hard here. "ESL, ESL," she says affectionately.
Like many Iraqis, they are conflicted about the prospect of war. They want Saddam gone. But they do not want more harm inflicted on their country. "I want Saddam gone -- only him," says Mr. Jaiyashy.

A few weeks ago, Saddam threw open the doors of Abu Ghraib and freed the prisoners there. Many families rejoiced, and many others, who did not find their loved ones, mounted a brief, unheard-of protest against the regime. The prison is a ghost camp now. Nothing is left but piles of human excrement that cake the razor wire.

Saddam's Iraq is a rebuke to anyone who may doubt that absolute evil dwells among us. No one has put it better than Mr. Sweeney, the BBC reporter. "When I hear the word Iraq, I hear a tortured child screaming."

[RonDog]

See also:

A.N.S.W.E.R. plans "Global Day of Action" on March 20, 2004 -
in NY, LA, SF, DC, Boston, Chicago
www.internationalanswer.org ^ | International A.N.S.W.E.R.
Posted on 02/23/2004 8:51:06 PM PST by RonDog

MARCH 20, 2004
GLOBAL DAY OF ACTION

BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
END COLONIAL OCCUPATION
from IRAQ to PALESTINE and EVERYWHERE!

PERMITS SECURED for MARCH 20 DEMONSTRATION in NYC

CLICK HERE for the rest of this thread

[onyx]

You two just keep getting "hotter looking" all the time.

Ole Ted was really dressed for the FReep. God bless him. :)