How about this?
CODE PINK-O supplied the signs.
Posted on 08/24/2005 6:23:31 PM PDT by jdm
Edited on 08/24/2005 7:47:08 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
Very True. If in the area you can honk a horn, raise a thumb, get out and shake their hand if you can't stay. If you have the time, grab a flag and stand a few minutes or hours in support. It's an amazing feeling when you do stand up in defense of our soldiers because it's the right thing to do. Don't need to be Freepers or conservatives to do that.
Wouldn't it be nice if LIBERALS actually started doing that to counter Code Pink instead of only joining 'peace' marches and claiming to support the troops but not even standing in their defense when harassed by people that would spit on their service? I'd love to see Liberals that 'support the troops' take to the streets and counter Code Pink.
See comment 185.
I am so proud of you and the D.C chapter for standing up to the code pink crowd. Thanks for your efforts. :)
You know there really is ONE true comparison between Iraq and Vietnam.
and its the way the left has behaved. Giving aid and comfort to the enemy and now attacking the troops (you just had to know they wouldn't "support" them for much longer)
Whenever you think they can't go any lower always remember, there's no limit.
Medea Benjamin
CODEPINK: Women for Peace
Medea Benjamin is Founding Director of Global Exchange. For over twenty years, Medea has supported human rights and social justice struggles around the world.
Medea is a leading activist in the peace movement and helped bring together the groups forming the coalition United for Peace and Justice (see www.unitedforpeace.org ).
She is also the co-founder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace, a women's group that has been organizing creative actions against the war and occupation of Iraq. CODEPINK is pushing for a reorientation of budget priorities in the US to focus on heath care, education and housing, not war. Code Pink now has over 100 chapters throughout the United States (see www.codepinkalert.org ).
Medea has traveled several times to Iraq and helped establish the Occupation Watch International Center in Baghdad. The center monitors the military occupation forces and foreign corporations, hosts international delegations, and keeps the international community updated about the occupation forces' activities through its website, http://www.occupationwatch.org .
In early December 2003, Medea brought a delegation of military families to Iraq. (see report ). At the start of 2005, Medea returned to the region, again accompanying a delegation of US military families whose loved ones had been killed in Iraq. This delegation traveled to the Iraqi/Jordanian border to bring a shipment of humanitarian aid for distribution to the Iraqi people in Falluja and those most in need.
Ever since the tragic events of 9/11, Medea has been organizing against a violent response. In 2002, Medea accompanied four Americans who lost loved ones in the September 11th terrorist attacks on a trip to Afghanistan to meet people there who lost relatives during the US bombing of Afghanistan. Their extraordinary journey received such international attention that the US Government was pressured to discuss civilian casualties and to create a compensation fund for Afghan victims.
Medea's previous work has focused on improving the labor and environmental practices of US multinational corporations, and the policies of international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
In September 2003, Medea was in Cancun, Mexico challenging the policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and in November in Miami protesting the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and highlighting the coalescing of the global peace and economic justice movements.
For much of 2001, Medea focused on California's energy crisis, fighting the market manipulation by the big energy companies and rate hikes that cause hardship for low-income ratepayers and small businesses. She headed a powerful coalition of consumer, environmental, union and business leaders working for clean and affordable power under public control.
Medea was the Green Party candidate for US Senate from California in 2000. Her run for U.S. Senate succeeded in mobilizing thousands of Californians around platform issues such as living wage, schools-not-prisons, and universal healthcare.
During the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in December 1999, Medea's organization, Global Exchange, helped fix world attention on the need to place labor and environmental concerns over corporate profits.
While critical of unfair global trade policies, Medea has promoted "fair trade" alternatives that are beneficial to both producer and consumer. She helped form a national network of retailer and wholesalers in support of fair trade and was instrumental in pressuring coffee retailers such as Starbucks to start carrying fair trade coffee.
Medea is a key figure in the anti-sweatshop movement, having spearheaded campaigns against the giant sports shoe company Nike and clothing companies such as the GAP. In 1999 Medea helped expose the problem of indentured servitude among garment workers in the US territory of Saipan (the Marianas Islands), which led to a billion-dollar lawsuit against 17 US retailers.
After several fact-finding visits to China, Medea co-sponsored with the International Labor Rights Fund an initiative to improve the labor and environmental practices of US multinationals in China. The ensuring Human Rights Principles for US Businesses in China have been endorsed by major companies such as Cisco, Intel, Reebok, Levi Strauss and Mattel.
In 1999, San Francisco Magazine named Medea to their "Power List" as one of the "60 Players Who Rule the Bay Area." She serves on the board or advisory council of numerous organizations, including the United National Development Program, the Interhemispheric Resource Center, the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness and Green Empowerment.
Medea helped build US support for the movement to oust General Suharto in Indonesia and for the right of self-determination for the people of East Timor. She supported the Peace Process between the Zapatista rebels and the Mexican government, fought to lift the embargoes against Cuba and Iraq, and was active in cutting US military aid to repressive regimes in Central America. She has been an election observer and led fact-finding delegations to dozens of countries.
In June of 2005, Medea was one of 1,000 women picked to be part of the project "1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005." The project has picked 1,000 exceptional women from around the globe to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize collectively, as a representation of the many anonymous women who work for peace, justice, human rights, security and education worldwide.
She is author of eight books, including "Bridging the Global Gap, The Peace Corps and More," and the award-winning book "Don't Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart." She helped produce various TV documentaries such as the anti-sweatshop video Sweating for a T-Shirt. This spring saw the release of Code Pink's new book, Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism, which she co-edited with Jodie Evans. The book is a diverse collection of essays from the peace movement's freshest, most dynamic voices, including Barbara Ehrenreich, Eve Ensler, Arianna Huffington, Alice Walker, Helen Thomas, Camilo Mejia and Jody Williams. She is currently embarked on a hundred-city book tour.
Medea received a Masters degree in Public Health from Columbia University and a Masters degree in Economics from the New School for Social Research. She worked for ten years as an economist and nutritionist in Latin America and Africa for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, the Swedish International Development Agency, and the Institute for Food and Development Policy.
Smart Voter Full Biography for Medea Susan Benjamin
Candidate for
United States Senator
This information is provided by the candidate
Profile of Medea Benjamin, Co-Director of Global Exchange and Green Party Candidate for U.S. Senate from California
Medea Benjamin is Founding Director of the San Francisco-based human rights organization Global Exchange. Her books, reports and articles have examined global issues of hunger and unequal development. Ms. Benjamin worked for ten years as an economist and nutritionist in Latin America and Africa for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, and the Swedish International Development Agency to develop more sustainable models of development. She was also a senior analyst with the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) in California.
Hmmm...thanks Cindy. The mass media is finally noticing and mindlessly reporting Code Pink's DASTARDLY emotional torture of wounded veterans, all because Cindy is is a glory whore who's stalking the president. Here's to hoping this is the beginning of the end of the 24/7 Cindython.
How about this?
CODE PINK-O supplied the signs.
This is beyond the pale. Or the pail, for that matter.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/medtour/elizabeths.html
In Washington, it's St. Elizabeths -- "Established in 1855 as the Government Hospital for the Insane..."
Oh..my goodness, look at Chemical Weapons Barbie...
looks like she took a bath in the "cellulite tank"...I guess that is what is considered "chemical weapons" in libland!!! LOL
(LoL. I had to laugh at your tagline)
The media can't avoid this news and what is going on
One way or another .. the country WILL learn what scum Code Pink is
The Anti-American: Medea Benjamin
By John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 15, 2002
There is scarcely a calamity, an injustice, or an act of outright barbarism occurring anywhere on earth, that Leftists cannot somehow trace to the doorstep of the United States. In their view, all attacks against our country are understandable, if not laudable, retaliatory strikes against an aggressive, arrogant nation that has too often tried to bully the rest of the world. Conversely, any American response – be it with military or law-enforcement measures – is seen as a form of aggression that will only provoke further anti-Americanism and thereby perpetuate "the cycle of violence."
A leading proponent of this view is the outspoken Medea Benjamin, who in 1988 founded the activist organization Global Exchange, and in 2000 was the Green Party candidate for US Senate in California. In her view, America’s war on terror is, itself, a form of terrorism. Late last year Ms. Benjamin took a group of Americans, each of whom had lost loved ones in the 9-11 attacks, to Afghanistan to meet people whose relatives had perished in the US bombing campaign there. She returned from that trip weighted down with photographs and heart-rending tales of Afghan children who had been injured, killed, or orphaned by the war. "We must insist that governments stop taking innocent lives in the name of seeking justice for the loss of other innocent lives," she said.
This remarkable characterization of the US military effort implies, of course, that the Bush Administration defines justice, at least in part, as the retributive taking of innocent lives – rather than as an effort to bring down deadly terrorist networks like al-Qaeda. Benjamin’s other planted axiom is that merely because some innocent Afghans were killed by American bombs, the events that brought about their deaths were morally equivalent to the attacks of 9-11. Strangely, however, she has not a word to say about the Taliban’s culpability in forcing the war by refusing to hand over bin Laden and his henchmen – as President Bush demanded – during the weeks preceding the American air strikes.
Instead, Ms. Benjamin asserts that Bush "has responded to the violent attack of 9-11 with the notion of perpetual war . . . a war in Afghanistan that included dropping over 20,000 bombs, many of which missed their targets and led to the killing and maiming of thousands of civilians." Global Exchange, she explains, "hired a survey team in Afghanistan that documented over 800 civilian deaths and many more wounded." Yet she does not acknowledge that this number is remarkably small, given the massive firepower dropped upon this nation of 26 million people. Had the US been truly careless or malicious, casualties could easily have numbered in the millions.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that some non-military targets were bombed by mistake, and Leftists like Ms. Benjamin can allow no American error to go un-condemned – no matter how noble our nation’s intentions might have been. Thus Global Exchange has pressed the US government to create a fund that would pay $10,000 apiece to Afghan victims who need medical care, help in rebuilding their homes, and compensation for the loss of a caretaker or breadwinner.
Naturally, Benjamin makes no demand that Americans who lost loved ones on 9-11 receive reciprocal restitution from ousted Taliban leaders – or even from Saudi Arabia, the land from which fifteen of the nineteen 9-11 hijackers hailed. Nor has she issued any call for other Arab nations to help Afghanistan. As always, America is expected not only to climb unaided out of its own dark pit of tragedy, but to rescue everyone else as well. In the condescending paternalism typical of the Left, nothing is expected – or even asked – of other nations. Even though much of Afghanistan had been rendered a virtual wasteland by twenty-three years of war that had killed and maimed untold numbers of innocents, Benjamin holds only America’s military campaign accountable for the unintended damage it inflicted.
Like any good Leftist, Ms. Benjamin predictably advises us to examine "the root causes of resentment against the United States in the Arab world – from our dependence on Middle Eastern oil to our biased policy towards Israel." Presumably it is unjust for our country to show "bias" favoring the Middle East’s lone friendly democracy, a nation that has repeatedly been assaulted by neighboring armies and legions of suicide bombers. Presumably we ought to demonstrate equal affection for nations and peoples that wish to see "infidels" like us obliterated.
The bombings, says Ms. Benjamin, have "made Afghans so upset that some [have] talked about waging a jihad, or holy war, against the United States." "If the Muslim world sees the United States as willing to bomb but not feed people," she adds, "it will deepen the suspicion and mistrust already felt by millions . . . that the United States doesn’t care about the lives of the Muslim people." Never does she mention that since the 9-11 attacks, Americans have led the world in sending money, food, clothing, and medicine to needy Afghans. Charities, churches, concerned organizations, and private corporations from coast to coast have raised enormous sums to help those people living in the very land that harbored the masterminds of the 9-11 attacks. What other nation on earth has ever demonstrated such generosity in the wake of such an atrocity?
Moreover, the US government has already pledged hundreds of millions of dollars for this fiscal year alone to help Afghans rebuild their schools, develop an adequate health-care system, vaccinate their children against measles, rehabilitate landmine victims, improve sanitation facilities, repatriate Afghan refugees, modernize agriculture, and restore roads and bridges.
All of the aforementioned issues, of course, long predated the American military campaign in Afghanistan; in essence, our nation has volunteered to clean up the abominable mess that others – many of them Muslims – made for the Afghan population. Added to this, our political leaders have stated ad nauseam that our war is not against Islam, but against terrorism. This message has been repeated countless thousands of times in both the print and electronic media. Yet still, as Ms. Benjamin points out, many Islamic nations perceive the US as being anti-Muslim. There comes a point where we must simply acknowledge that we can do nothing more; we can deliver our message in many different forms, but we cannot comprehend it for those who are unwilling or unable to comprehend it for themselves.
Ms. Benjamin further decries our government’s current preparation for possible war with Iraq. She organized last month’s "peace" demonstration in San Francisco, and was a featured speaker at its sister rally in Washington, DC. "While other nations are desperately trying to come to a deal with Iraq to resume weapons inspections," she says, "the US government opposes any moves that reduce its justification to wage war." She says not a word about the farcical twelve-year history of the inspections process, fraught with Iraqi lies, evasions, defiance, and noncompliance.
"We are . . . determined," Benjamin adds, "to stop the US government from unilaterally dictating to other people – be they Palestinian, Iraqi or Venezuelan – who their leaders should be. This is for the people themselves to decide." This is intellectual dishonesty of the highest order, for surely she understands that the people of Iraq – where political dissent is met with torture, imprisonment, or death – do not choose their own leaders. Benjamin is an intelligent woman who knows better than to believe that Saddam’s recent electoral victory, in which he captured fully 100 percent of the vote, was anything but a sham.
Ms. Benjamin often expresses her desire to build "a world that rejects ethnic and religious divisions, celebrates diversity . . . [and] focuses on building a global community." Carried away by her own flowery prose, she is unwilling to acknowledge that the effort to rid the world of such divisions and to celebrate diversity are uniquely Western concepts – more highly developed by America than by any other nation in world history. By the same token, she is silent about the fact that Muslim lands have shown no similar impulse, plagued as they are by a spirit of cultural and religious intolerance.
Not even the deplorable human rights abuses that occur throughout the Middle East are, in Ms. Benjamin’s mind, any worse than what takes place in America. "When most Americans hear of human rights abuses," she states, "they likely think of atrocities in some far-off country in a forgotten corner of the globe. . . . [But] abuses against individuals’ basic rights also occur regularly here in the United States, and our money-saturated political system hardly deserves the title ‘democracy.’ "
Many of the causes that Ms. Benjamin espouses are Communist in nature. The Washington "peace" rally at which she spoke last month, for instance, was organized by the Workers World Party, a Communist organization proudly dedicated to "fight[ing] against capitalism" in America’s "racist, sexist society." In years past, she staunchly opposed US military aid to those fighting against Communist forces in Central America. More recently, she has worked to take California’s energy production out of the hands of private companies and place it under public control. She favors the creation of a government-sponsored universal health care system funded by taxpayer dollars. She exhorts the US government to lift its trade embargo against Cuba – a nation she notably lauds as a place where people have managed to "thrive despite the odds" against them.
Earlier this year Ms. Benjamin, along with scores of other notable American Leftists, signed a declaration titled "Not in Our Name." This document asserts that the US war on terror poses "grave dangers to the people of the world"; that "war and repression . . . has been loosed on the world by the Bush Administration . . . [in] a spirit of revenge." Again we encounter the ever-recurring theme of the Left: all problems are America’s fault. Benjamin and her fellow signatories angrily denounce the Administration’s "simplistic" characterization of the war on terror as a battle of "good vs. evil." In their view, there is no good or evil. Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill are merely variations on a theme, neither one better than the other.
Thanks for the ping.
As a Vietnam Vet, I was simply stating a fact. If these activities ever happened in front of me, I will respond physically. Never again, is my sworn duty to our soldiers.
Why is it that Freepers support using physical force in the Iraq war, but are afraid to apply those same lessons here in America? Have we become so brain-washed by the Libs, that we are afraid to defend what we know is right, even if we may be arrested?
Are you agreeing with the Libs that physical force should never be use, no matter what is happening?
Curious minds would like to know...
Remember, I am not advocating that physical force should be used. I am simply stating the personal oath that I made after Vietnam, and 20 years with the Army.
NEVER AGAIN!
Thank you. It turns my stomach to have such creatures as them in our country.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.