Posted on 08/18/2005 5:55:44 AM PDT by SJackson
LAST NIGHT THERE WERE 1,500 CANDLELIGHT VIGILS FOR CINDY SHEEHAN AND ONE BURNING CROSS. Sheehan has become the poster girl for the antiwar Left, because her status as a grieving mother renders the 48-year-old Vacaville, California, native more sympathetic than Medea Benjamin, Ramsey Clark, or Michael Moore (whose website hosts Sheehan’s blog). However, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and racist extremists have also begun gathering around the Gold Star Families for Peace founder.
Leading the parade is none other than "former" Klansman David Duke. Duke recently authored the article, "Why Cindy Sheehan is Right!" in which the "fiery" politician criticizes an article written by little ol’ me. The convicted fraud writes, "A recent article on David Horowitz’s FrontPage [Magazine] and repeated by many pro-Israel zealots dares to compare her with that incorrigible American, me." It is true in my article I stated Sheehan’s over-the-top rhetoric "echoes the line being taken by David Duke and his ilk at their most recent recruiting website, NoWarForIsrael.com" – a point Duke concedes. On his August 14 web broadcast, the alleged plastic surgery aficionado read an e-mail Cindy Sheehan sent to the producer of Ted Koppel’s "Nightline," in which she wrote:
my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC [Project for a New American Century] Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel.
After reading these words, Duke exclaimed, "Boy, it sounds exactly like the things I’ve been writing, doesn’t it?" Other commentators agreed.
Cindy Sheehan now dismisses the e-mail in question, although she does not renounce its contents. In Tuesday’s blog, she wrote, "Another ‘big deal’ today was the lie that I had said that Casey died for Israel. I never said that, I never wrote that." Instead, she says, the phony e-mail was yet another neo-con conspiracy! Blowing the lid off this cover-up, she writes:
I wrote the letter because I was upset at the way Ted treated me when I appeared at a "Nightline" Town Hall meeting in January right after the inauguration. I felt that Ted had totally disrespected me. I wrote the letter to Ted [sic.; his name is Tom] Bettag and cc’d a copy to the person who gave me Ted’s address. I believe he changed the e-mail and sent it out to capitalize on my new found [sic.] notoriety by promoting his own agenda.
Ah yes, that infamous conservative mainstream media bias. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Cindy Sheehan to come forward with an exculpatory "original" e-mail, though. As the blog Sweetness and Light pointed out, Sheehan’s e-mail to "Nightline" was posted online by a man named Tony Tesh in mid-March, months before anyone had ever heard of her. This was months before she developed her "new found notoriety" among such as Duke
This would also be in keeping with a long history of her past statements. One person has reported Sheehan thundered during one of her speeches:
Iraq wasn't going to attack America or nuke America. But Iraq was a threat – to Israel. That was the real threat and had been for 15 years. But for the U.S. government, this was the threat that couldn't speak its name. Europe doesn't care much about that threat. And the U.S. government didn't think they should lean too much on it, because going to war to protect Israel wouldn't be popular.
If accurate, this would be as damning as the "lie" Ted Koppel’s producer allegedly interpolated into her e-mail…and it would win her more friends among the racist fringe.
Thanks to the internet, Sheehan’s popularity among the armband brigades is spreading like fire creeping up a moonlit cross. On the web’s premier hate website, Stormfront.org, Duke supporter James Kelso (whose screen name is "Charles A. Lindbergh") posted a link to a video message from Cindy Sheehan entitled, "Mr. President, you lied to us."
Cindy is also popular at the American Nationalist Union. ANU is run by Don Wassall, former national chairman of the Populist Party, a racist third party organized in 1984 by Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby; in 1988, the party nominated David Duke for president. ANU’s Nationalist News section links to four articles supporting Cindy Sheehan, including a delightful link to an article on Justin Raimondo’s Hate America Right website Antiwar.com about Christopher Hitchens: "Drink-Soaked Trotskyite Popinjay Slimes Antiwar Mom "
Duke is not the only figure on the White Wing to embrace Sheehan. The explicitly Nazi National Socialist Movement backs her, as well. NSM "Commander" Jeff Schoep entitled one recent radio broadcast "NSM SUPPORTS CINDY SHEEHAN," then devoted a second broadcast to Sheehan the next day.
The racist website Altermedia.info jumped on the bandwagon early, posting multiple articles hailing Cindy Sheehan. One article, written under the pen name "Charles Coughlin," dubbed the menopausal valley girl "The Rosa Parks of the Peace Movement," an awkward metaphor considering the source. Another article, authored by "James Buchanan" (another great Democrat), hinted the "Neo-Cons" had solicited the services of the redneck who fired shots into the air within earshot of Sheehan and her leftist Big Top.
Another article written by the late Fr. Coughlin’s acolyte, "Woman Loses Son in Iraq; Neocons Treat her Like Dirt," also made its way on Stormfront.org’s discussion forum, inspiring 14 pages of commentary. The very first respondent, neo-Nazi "Reichmann88," [1] wrote:
This lady sounds like a potential WN ["WN" is short for "White Nationalist" – BJ]. I'll bet she has no clue about Israel's involvement in her sons death. Sad indeed!! May God Bless Her!
Reichmann need not worry; it appears Sheehan "knew."
Another Stormfront contributor commented, "If there are any Texas WN units nearby Mrs. Cindy Sheehan they should reach out to hear [sic.]." When another message claimed Sheehan "probably would spit in your face if you approached her with WN," forum member "Messiah" assured:
I've known Cindy for over a year now, and no, she wouldn't spit in anyone's face for what they said....while she's not a WN, she’s a decent person who resents deeply what Bush has done with his lies in creating this war, and using the US for Israel's interests. I feel like she does about these Neo Con/Israel created wars.
And evidently she reciprocates the sentiments of this racist scumbag.
The racist adulation continues. As of this morning, the Vanguard News Network linked to Sheehan’s "Nightline" e-mail and classified her as someone "putting America before Israel." (This is located above a link to Antiwar.com.) The racist news site Whitewire.com also comments favorably on Sheehan. (The only link on Whitewire.com that is not to a white supremacist website goes to Al-Jazeera.)
National Vanguard, an off-shoot of the recently splintered neo-Nazi organization National Alliance, posted some of Cindy Sheehan’s writings on its website, a reality anticipated by a reader of our blog, Moonbat Central. Also noted approvingly the Republican Jewish Coalition opposes Sheehan (which proves she’s OK). When one NV reader objected to his fellow white supremacists, the editors wrote:
All of us understand Mrs. Sheehan's limitations. We hope she overcomes them. Whatever mistakes she has made or will make, and whatever defects in her understanding, however, her story is a moving testament to the horrible injustice and irreparable harm done to our people by the Jewish supremacists. And it is also a story of pluck and courage and the great good that one person can do.
Far from distancing herself from these hatemongers, she has praised some of their work. In a podcast held live from Camp Crawford hosted by Howard Dean’s former campaign Joe Trippi, Sheehan praised the work of "journalist" Greg Szymanski, who has covered Sheehan for the UFO website ArcticBeacon.com and the American Free Press. At the time of the call, the Drudge Report had uncovered Sheehan’s conflicting statements about her first meeting with President Bush. In the call, Sheehan lauded Szymanski’s journalistic integrity, stating, "Your account, that you wrote, is a true one." Szymanski wrote two accounts of her meeting with the president, as well as numerous articles for the American Free Press – including one questioning whether the Bush administration was involved in 9/11. AFP is the newest incarnation of THE SPOTLIGHT newspaper, which the Anti-Defamation League classifies as "the most widely read publication on the fringe Right." Both were published by Liberty Lobby, an organization with ties to neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism that is "presently the most influential right-wing extremist propaganda organization in the United States." Sheehan is appreciative of at least some of their journalists’ "true" work. One must say, at a minimum, her love for radical nutjobs does not discriminate.
Racists and the Left: The Other Unholy Alliance
Cindy Sheehan’s newfound, seemingly mutual love for anti-Semitic, racist, and neo-Nazi extremists draws attention to one overlooked fact: the racial extremist movement has been moving steadily Left in recent years. The rhetoric on many of these websites is indistinguishable from that prevalent on leftist anti-Bush websites. For instance, David Duke writes of Cindy Sheehan:
It was criminal to send her son to die for a lie.
There were no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, no uranium from Niger, no links with Al Qaeda, no imminent threat to the American people. Every reason the American people were given for going to war has turned out to be a lie.
As Bill Clinton might have said, if you didn’t know that sentence originated with Duke, "you might think Hillary Clinton was giving that speech." Duke goes further, quoting leftist hero, former Ambassdor Joseph C. Wilson III:
A more cynical reading of the agenda of certain Bush advisers could conclude that the Balkanization of Iraq was always an acceptable outcome, because Israel would then find itself surrounded by small Arab countries worried about each other instead of forming a solid block against Israel.
Thus, it should have surprised no one when Duke endorsed John Kerry for President last fall, yet somehow it did not make national headlines.
Again, the move to the Left is not confined to David Duke. White Aryan Resistance nutcase Tom Metzger portrayed himself as a tendy, California environmentalist, liberal, and atheist years ago. The slick tactics are now trickling down through the racist movement. In one of the laudatory pro-Sheehan pieces on Altermedia, "Charles Coughlin" writes, "It is the job of all patriotic Americans to attack politicians who abuse the military sending soldiers off to fight wars for Israel and Halliburton." (Emphasis added.) National Vanguard has lionized London’s far-Left mayor "Red" Ken Livingstone. National Alliance has suggested soldiers pass out white supremacist literature, an infraction of military rules, in order to get sent home; this echoes the plans of Medea Benjamin and Leslie Cagan’s Baghdad-based International Occupation Watch to accomplish the same goal by having soldiers declare themselves conscientious objectors.
Examining the rhetoric of Cindy Sheehan alone would make this anti-Jew/anti-Bush alliance understandable. She has screeched, "You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you’ll end terrorism." She challenged President Bush to tell her "the truth": "You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana, imperialism in the Middle East." She has also called the Iraq war "blatant genocide." Her "Neo-Con" conspiracy theories perfectly match those of the Nazis; they well understand "neo-con" means Jewish, or as Duke calls them, "Jewish Supremacists."
National Alliance has been the source of similar-sounding rhetoric. NA declared, "That term ‘vital U.S. interests’ must kill thousands of people every year…our government has such an enormous infection of Jewish influence, that there is virtually no place on the planet safe from ‘vital U.S. interests.’" Like the Left, the neo-Nazi group – whose founder’s book The Turner Diaries had inspired Timothy McVeigh – claims America commits "terrorism" all around the world in the form of covert operations.
Why have the Nazis adored and adopted Cindy Sheehan? Ultimately, Cindy Sheehan reminds on, appropriately enough, of a character from "The Twilight Zone." In the memorable episode "He's Alive," Dennis Hopper portrays a young neo-Nazi leader who gets deadly advice from an ominous adviser. When it becomes clear the shadowy figure who has been guiding and supporting his work is the ghost of Adolf Hitler, Hopper asks, "Why me?" Hitler responds that it was Hopper who had chosen him, repeating his rhetoric and slogans. Today, it is Cindy Sheehan and the whole of the Left repeating the Nazis’ conspiratorial ravings, as the Democratic Party draws her person and her poisonous rhetoric into an ever-closer embrace.
ENDNTOES:
1. "88" is a popular shorthand among neo-Nazis. The number "8" corresponds to the letter "H," and "HH" is short for "Heil Hitler." Journalist Andy Oakley produced a book entitled 88. Years before the internet, toothless rednecks were already dumbing down the language.
The Boston Globe reported before the fact that "thousands" would attend the Cindy Vigil in Natick last night but today's front page shows about a dozen.
If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.
If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.
With Crowley running for congress, it's time for the republican opponent to step up to the plate.
Fat chance of that happening. It would require the Republican to say something that might offend the sensibilities of the NYT/WaPo editorial boards, and we just can't have that. It would be mean-spirited, you know.
I hope Ted has a big driveway and patient neighbors.
Why is this NOT surprising. The whole anti-war scumbags are America-Israel, democracy hating racist, anti-semite, anti-Christian trash. I bet the MSM won't bother to mention her ties to the Neo-Nazi's and Klan. Only her ties to code pink, Fatty moore et al.
I am not even sure Extreme Makeover could fix this one...
United they hate.
Cindy has to be out of her mind; how else could she get behind Lynne Stewart, defender of the ones who bombed the WTC the first time??? It goes beyond anti-war. When will
anyone from MSM ask her about attending the rally for Lynne Stewart??
Tragically, there are still a blinkered, benighted few even hereabouts who still struggle daily to maintain the desperate charade otherwise.
OUTSTANDING posting, SJ!
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