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Kerry's "Sensitive War" General: Cora Weiss, Red Queen of Peace?
Self (w/ excerpt from Insight on the News) | November 1, 2004 | Self (excerpt from J Michael Waller)

Posted on 11/01/2004 12:25:44 AM PST by calcowgirl

On August 5, 2004, speaking to about 7,000 minority journalists at the "Unity 2004: Journalists of Color Conference", John Kerry reportedly said "I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror" than President Bush.

While briefly reported by USA Today, and The Atlanta Journal Constitution, it was largely ignored by the press at the time the comment was made. John Tierney's commentary in The New York Times "Political Points" did award Kerry the "Kumbaya Prize" for the week based on the comment. (Kumbaya Prize, Runner-Up: Teresa Heinz Kerry, for telling an audience in Missouri, ''The only way you solve problems is by holding hands and talking about it. And that's what we want to do in this campaign.'')

The following week in Dayton, Ohio, Vice President Cheney criticized Senator Kerry's comment by pointing out that America has not won any wars by being "sensitive."

The mainstream media then published headlines such as "GOP Assails Kerry's Call for 'Sensitive' War; Bush, Cheney Remarks Escalate Conflict With Democrats Over Combating Terrorism (Washington Post, Aug 13, 2004) and "Cheney Gets In a Jab on Terror as Kerry Throws a Punch on the Economy" (New York Times, Aug 13, 2004).

But, no one seemed to ask the meaning or real source of Kerry's "Sensitive War" comment.

The phrase is strikingly similar to that stated by Kerry's old anti-war associate, Cora Weiss.

The following excerpt is from an August 21, 2000 article by J. Michael Waller in Insight on the News about Ms. Weiss and the sources for funding proponents of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The CTBT was narrowly defeated in Congress in 1999, notwithstanding Kerry's appeal on the Senate floor to delay the vote in an effort to effect successful passage.

From her glass tower at 777 United Nations Plaza in New York City, Samuel Rubin Foundation President Cora Weiss sees things with a clear sense of purpose in protracted terms. Her father, Samuel Rubin, built his Faberge empire in the 1930s with clandestine help from Soviet-backed Communist groups, according to veteran journalist James L. Tyson. Such an ideologue was Rubin that he named his son Reed after U.S. Communist John Reed, whom the Soviets buried in the wall of the Kremlin. The elder Rubin founded and endowed the foundation where Weiss has been a fixture since at least the 1960s.

During the Vietnam War, Weiss funded not only agitprop against U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia but groups supporting Hanoi and the Viet Cong against U.S. troops. For decades she funded a range of hard-left groups from the Center for Constitutional Rights - which has litigated for the likes of CIA defector Philip Agee and Puerto Rican terrorists (Agee and one of the terrorists are living in Cuba) - to the Institute for Policy Studies. During the Cold War, though, most of the Samuel Rubin Foundation's grantees were considered even by liberals to be on the far left. Today, however, Weiss and her beneficiaries are more in the mainstream.

Not that they have shed their radicalism. They and others have changed the terms of debate. Unlike many Vietnik activists and Soviet apologists, Weiss never has broken with the hard left and, unlike even Jane Fonda, never has apologized for supporting the Communists. Today Weiss is a leader in a new effort among large defense- and security-- related foundations to coordinate their giving more effectively.

Not that they have shed their radicalism. They and others have changed the terms of debate. Unlike many Vietnik activists and Soviet apologists, Weiss never has broken with the hard left and, unlike even Jane Fonda, never has apologized for supporting the Communists. Today Weiss is a leader in a new effort among large defense- and security-- related foundations to coordinate their giving more effectively.

That effort began early last year. Amid concern that a handful of conservative senators were threatening to derail decades-old arms-control processes, the largest or most active foundations convened a Peace and Security Funders Group, or PSFG, in Cambridge, Mass. The initial steering committee consisted of Weiss and her family foundation along with the Ploughshares Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the John Merck Fund, the Hewlett Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The PSFG welcomed smaller traditional defense and security funders to join but has a bylaw permitting any member to be expelled without cause.

PSFG coordinator Wayne T. Jaquith has more than 30 years of movement activism under his belt. He and many grant-giving officials in foundations have worked together informally for decades. While the target then was "U.S. imperialism," many of the big funders are promoting an imperialism of their own. At one PSFG meeting a MacArthur Foundation foreign-policy official said, "On some things I am an unabashed imperialist - feminism is one of them." "Weiss, in an October 1999 funders meeting, said she wanted to create more "sensitive" armed forces, saying she detested "men in uniform with guns" and outlining a campaign for global gun control and a plan to make every U.N. peacekeeping soldier attend gender and cultural sensitivity training."

Once one sees that the big funders of defense and security policy are coordinated at the top, a lot of grants make more sense. "It's rather like the FBI discovering that the mob had a council," says a source inside the grants community.

The big funders felt invincible. Last year's Senate defeat of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, or CTBT, shocked the new funders group into overdrive. "I'm sitting here stunned at the defeat of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty - something many of us have worked on for 35 years," Jaquith wrote to funders-group members in advance of their October 1999 meeting in San Francisco.

Discussing the CTBT's defeat at the San Francisco gathering, Weiss told members, "We have to organize. This is how all the anti-Vietnam demonstrations got funded - at a table like this."

For more on Cora Weiss, see:

"Red Queen of 'Peace' " from FrontPageMagazine.com , December 11, 2002

"Kerry: No comment", from Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, October 03, 2004



TOPICS: Culture/Society; Extended News; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: armandhammer; cavanagh; communism; communistparty; corarubin; coraweiss; cpusa; ctbt; fonda; france; hammer; hanoi; hanoijane; hanoijohn; ifg; ips; janefonda; jaquith; johncavanagh; johnkerry; johnreed; kerry; kerrywot; kumbaya; moveonorg; napalminthemorning; nucleartestban; paris; peterweiss; peteweiss; psfg; redqueenofpeace; reedrubin; reedrubing; rubin; samrubin; samuelrubin; sensitivemilitary; sensitivewar; srf; vietnam; wot
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1 posted on 11/01/2004 12:25:45 AM PST by calcowgirl
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To: Fedora; Interesting Times; SierraWasp; stockpirate

ping!


2 posted on 11/01/2004 12:26:39 AM PST by calcowgirl
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To: calcowgirl
Bump! I mentioned a bit about Weiss and her husband Peter's connection to the VVAW here:

Hanoi John: Kerry and the Antiwar Movement’s Communist Connections

During the [Winter Soldier] hearings IPS associate Robert Jay Lifton spoke as the keynote speaker and served on one of the panels. Serving on other panels were Lifton’s coauthor Richard Falk of the Institute for Policy Studies, who had travelled to North Vietnam in 1969; Falk’s IPS associate Peter Weiss, a member of several Communist front groups who had participated in the Bertrand Russell Foundation’s International War Crimes Tribunal and had travelled to North Vietnam in November 1970, and whose wife Cora had collaborated with the North Vietnamese to exploit POW families through the group Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam (COLIFAM). . .Legal support for the [Dewey Canyon III] protestors was provided by Ramsey Clark, who had previously assisted the protestors who disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention and was now representing several other Communist front groups. (Clark and another VVAW lawyer, Peter Weiss, would soon join the National Lawyers Guild, the legal bulwark of the Communist Party, in defending the Communist terrorist group the Baader-Meinhof Gang.)

Subversion in the Senate: Kerry's Communist Constituency

Kerry's report on POWs and MIAs noted that POW negotiations between the US and Vietnam had been initiated in the 1960s and 1970s by antiwar groups, notably the Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam (COLIFAM), cochaired by David Dellinger and Cora Weiss. What Kerry's report failed to mention was that Weiss and COLIFAM had collaborated with the North Vietnamese and Kerry's own antiwar group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, in using POWs as hostages to extort POW families into pressuring the Nixon administration to end the war in return for promised POW releases. VVAW leader Barry Romo joined a COLIFAM delegation to Hanoi, and Weiss and other COLIFAM officers sat alongside VVAW leader Al Hubbard on the Coordinating Committee of the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice, a Communist front group directed by North Vietnam.

I'll be posting another item in the morning which will mention a link between Weiss and Teresa Heinz Kerry's Tides Foundation.

3 posted on 11/01/2004 12:35:59 AM PST by Fedora
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To: 68-69TonkinGulfYachtClub; backhoe; christie; Interesting Times; Liz; philman_36; piasa; Shermy; ...

Ping.


4 posted on 11/01/2004 12:38:41 AM PST by Fedora
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To: Fedora

Ping


5 posted on 11/01/2004 3:15:30 AM PST by USMCVet
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To: calcowgirl; Fedora
Here is one of last year's articles on one of the projects the Weiss crowd wants to kill :

Scientists Conduct Subcritical Nuclear Experiment in Nevada

6 posted on 11/01/2004 3:15:57 AM PST by piasa (Attitude Adjustments Offered Here Free of Charge)
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To: calcowgirl
SENSITIVE??


7 posted on 11/01/2004 3:26:05 AM PST by binger
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To: calcowgirl

Cora Weiss, nee Cora Rubin, daughter of Samuel Rubin. She was a director of the Samuel Rubin Foundation from its inception. She was also instrumental in the funding decision to create the Institute for Policy Studies. Her husband, Peter Weiss, was the first IPS chairman of the board of directors. She and her husband Peter selected Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet as co-directors of the Institute for Policy Studies. She gained notoriety as a leader of the Vietnam War era anti-American coalitions who traveled to Paris and Hanoi for repeated meetings with communist leaders.

From Undueinfluence.com's website.

Institute for Policy Studies.

Description: IPS is America's premier radical left-wing think tank, funded by the heirs of the Faberge cosmetics fortune and staffed by capable researchers and analysts from dozens of disciplines. Entirely dedicated to opposing American policies -- if it's American policy, IPS is agin it.

IPS is active in the anti-Exxon Mobil campaigns, helping coordinate activism surrounding annual shareholder meetings. IPS Executive Director John Cavanagh is a key board member of the global anti-capitalist network, International Forum on Globalization.

In its own words: "Mission: DEVELOPING ALTERNATIVE STRATEGIES TO U.S. POLICIES. A 'think tank' for progressive research and action to create a more responsible society. At a time when other think tanks celebrate the virtues of unrestrained greed, unlimited wealth, and unregulated markets, IPS is striving to create a more responsible society - one built around the values of justice, nonviolence, sustainability, and decency. IPS, as I.F. Stone once said, is "an Institute for the rest of us."

Weiss and her ilk are unabashed communists and want nothing more than the destruction of the U.S.'s government structure.

8 posted on 11/01/2004 3:34:38 AM PST by raybbr
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To: calcowgirl
The face of the enemy:


9 posted on 11/01/2004 3:37:31 AM PST by 7thson (I think it takes a big dog to weigh a hundred pounds!)
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To: calcowgirl

And I thought this article was about some Claudia Kennedy clones that Kerry wanted to move into flag rank - wait, maybe it does infer that!


10 posted on 11/01/2004 3:49:23 AM PST by Fred Hayek
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Comment #11 Removed by Moderator

To: piasa; calcowgirl
Interesting link, thanks!

I just posted an article which mentions a bit about the ubiquitous Mrs. Weiss here:

Part 5: John Kerry vs. the War on Terror: Candidate Kerry's Subversive Campaign

MoveOn.org also receives money funneled from the Tides Foundation, a charity linked to Kerry's wife Teresa Heinz Kerry. Tides finances numerous left--wing groups, and in turn receives funding from two key financiers of the Institute for Policy Studies, the Stern Family Fund and the Samuel Rubin Foundation. The latter is linked to old VVAW allies Peter Weiss and Cora Rubin Weiss, and is named after Cora's father, Fabergé, Inc. millionaire Samuel Rubin. Rubin was a friend and business associate of Armand Hammer, who was a key financial conduit for Soviet funding of the US Communist Party from the 1920s on.

12 posted on 11/01/2004 7:36:01 AM PST by Fedora
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To: USMCVet

Thanks for the ping!


13 posted on 11/01/2004 7:54:49 AM PST by Fedora
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To: calcowgirl

Nice find. It shows clearly how the old hardline left has moved into the cultural indoctrination business, with "diversity" and "sensitivity" training to attack the emphasis on merit and achievement that makes capitalism work.


14 posted on 11/01/2004 8:21:01 AM PST by Interesting Times (ABCNNBCBS -- yesterday's news.)
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To: Fedora

This is fascinating PING!


15 posted on 11/01/2004 8:34:14 AM PST by The Right Stuff
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To: Peach; cyncooper; Howlin; Miss Marple; 68-69TonkinGulfYatchClub

fyi


16 posted on 11/01/2004 9:40:25 AM PST by piasa (Attitude Adjustments Offered Here Free of Charge)
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To: doug from upland

ping


17 posted on 11/01/2004 9:44:40 AM PST by piasa (Attitude Adjustments Offered Here Free of Charge)
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To: The Right Stuff

BTT.


18 posted on 11/01/2004 9:51:28 AM PST by Fedora
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To: piasa
Here is one of last year's articles on one of the projects the Weiss crowd wants to kill :

And Kerry, if elected, will lead the crowd. :-(
Thanks for the link... very interesting.

19 posted on 11/01/2004 12:41:32 PM PST by calcowgirl
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To: raybbr
Weiss and her ilk are unabashed communists and want nothing more than the destruction of the U.S.'s government structure.

That about sums it up. And they have Kerry to help them.

20 posted on 11/01/2004 12:43:24 PM PST by calcowgirl
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