Posted on 08/31/2005 6:52:17 PM PDT by OESY
Dana Milbank and Alan Cooperman do a pretty good job of making John J. Tierney look like an alarmist nut based on their report of his presentation at the Heritage Foundation yesterday. His upcoming book apparently researches the funding and momentum behind the burgeoning anti-war protest industry and finds a lot of evidence that it primarily consists of unreconstructed communists. The Washington Post report of the event has Tierney painting a pretty broad brush on this score, however, and starts out by using what it believes to be a killer emotional rebuttal:
Cindy Sheehan: anti-American communist? That was the accusation coming yesterday from the Heritage Foundation, which hosted author John J. Tierney Jr. for a forum titled "The Politics of Peace: What's Behind the Anti-War Movement?" ...
Tierney, of the Institute of World Politics, identified five groups: ANSWER, Not in Our Name, Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice, and MoveOn.org. He said these groups "come from the Workers World Party" and are an "umbrella" for smaller groups, such as the "Communist Party of Kansas City" and the "Socialist Revolutionary Movement of the Upper Mississippi." Of the last two, he said, "I'm just making these up."
Tierney singled out Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq and who camped out at President Bush's ranch this month to protest the war. "I've never heard of a woman protesting a war in front of a leader's home in my life," he said. "I've never heard of anything quite so outrageous."
The problem that comes with some people who get something right about their political opponents is a tendency to go too far, and Tierney falls into this trap. I have no doubt that Milbank and Cooperman give us the most egregious quotes possible in this piece, but the one above demonstrates a high level of cluelessness. Truly Tierney cannot have been serious when he said this, or he exposes himself as little more than a rube. Considering the permanent moonbat display across the walkway from the White House, where our "leader" lives, the notion of protests at his residence should not surprise anyone. That protest zone hardly qualifies as a men-only zone, either. If Tierney objects to the protests following George Bush to Crawford, then the responsibility for that goes to Bush for moving his base of operations to his ranch while Congress is out of session.
Overshooting the target allows for criticisms to stick. Tierney names a lot of organizations in his speech as reported by the Post, which doesn't report on whether the author brought any evidence of communist infiltration or backing within all of them. That scattergun approach leaves Tierney open to charges of McCarthyism -- seeing Red wherever he looks -- and diminishes his credibility even further.
Which is a shame, because he gets it exactly right with at least one of these groups: International ANSWER. One need look no further than their own website to find out the people who direct ANSWER's political direction to understand what fuels their passion, and it isn't an abiding love of democracy. In the About Us section, ANSWER lists its "steering committee", the organizations that comprise its leadership:
* IFCO/Pastors for Peace * Free Palestine Alliance - U.S. * Haiti Support Network * Partnership for Civil Justice - LDEF * Nicaragua Network * Alliance for Just and Lasting Peace in the Phillippines * Korea Truth Commission * Muslim Student Association - National * Kensington Welfare Rights Union * Mexico Solidarity Network * Party for Socialism and Liberation * Middle East Children's Alliance
Edward Immler at FrontPage wrote an extensive expose of ANSWER in September 2002 which demonstrated the connections between the group and Stalinists such as the Workers World Party and the International Action Center. On this count, Tierney is on solid ground, and to the extent that ANSWER alone fuels these rallies, then he can show a solid link to communist participation in anti-war protests.
And while Cindy Sheehan may be anti-American, based on her public statements such as "America is all about killing" and her assertion that the country is not worth defending with one's life, that doesn't make her a Communist by default. Moreoever, it hardly helps to overly demonize Sheehan past what can easily be said about her based on her own words.
With polls showing a growing discontent with the direction of the war, one still has to presume that America has not suddenly turned Communist. Plenty of blame can go towards the media for this weakening of support, as they relentlessly cover explosions and deaths but report little of the rebuilding efforts seen by our troops and the few embeds still left in Iraq. Readers find little context in daily tallies of combat deaths (which after two years still doesn't come close to the one-day loss on 9/11) without understanding that nation-building takes long, hard work, but if successful will lead to many more lives saved, not just American but Iraqi as well. The White House shoulders some of this blame as well. It needs to communicate these issues better.
Regardless of the blame, Tierney and others like him need to remain precise and careful about their charges. Hyperbole only destroys the credibility and gives material assistance to the lunatics at the fringe, which need real exposure that includes solid evidence that speaks for itself.
Posted by Captain Ed
Who funds International ANSWER?
(I've been trying to find out for years.....)
Both the UnAmerican Activities Committee and Florida's Johns Comittee said America was permeated with Commies and Queers.
Looks like there were far more of those things than were known by either group.
If you research a leftist website via the internet, you will, most likely, find support/money from the US Communist party. I think this article is a smokescreen.
"No there aren't that many card carrying Communist's anymore, history has sent that term to the scrap heap. However like all things left and post modern the communist simply morphs into a more tolerable socialist until that word becomes taboo then it becomes progressive and so on. I tend to link communist with the general "no enemies to the left" leftist revolution that has not died and in fact is more dangerous than ever. While Cindy may or may not know or understand the objectives of her main supporters she never the less is keeping some pretty "red" company."
Amuse yourself one night. Do some research on Hitlery; you'll find out about her ties to the Socialists, etc.
Socialism truely is an incurable, insidious and fatal disease.
It was founded by the world class Yahoo Ramsey Clark. I do not know whence comes their funds but it is probably the usual suspects.
***....It is because America is a democracy and the people endorse it, that the left's anti-American, but "progressive" agendas can only be achieved by deceiving the people. This is the cross the left has to bear: The better world is only achievable by lying to the very people they propose to redeem.
Despite the homage contemporary leftists pay to post-modernist conceits, despite their belated and half-hearted display of critical sentiment towards Communist regimes, they are very much the ideological heirs of Stalinist progressives, who supported the greatest mass murders in human history, but who remember themselves as civil libertarian opponents of McCarthy and victims of a political witch-hunt. (Only the dialectically gifted can even begin to follow the logic involved.)
To appreciate the continuity of communism in the mentality of the left, consider how many recent Hollywood promotions of the industry Reds and how many academic apologies for Stalinist crimes (in fact, the vast majority of recent academic texts on the subject) have been premised on the Machiavellian calculations and Hegelian sophistries I have just described.
Naturally, today's leftists are smart enough to distance themselves from Soviet Communism. But the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev was already a critic of Stalin forty years ago. Did his concessions make him less of a Communist? Or more?
On the other hand, conservative misunderstanding of the left is only in part a product of the left's own deceits. It also reflects conservatives' inability to understand the religious nature of the progressive faith and the power of its redemptive idea. For instance, I'm often asked by conservatives about the continuing role and influence of the Communist Party, since they observe quite correctly the pervasive presence of so many familiar totalitarian ideas in our academic and political culture. Though still around and sometimes influential in the left, the Communist Party has been a minor player for nearly fifty years. How can there be a communist left (small "c" of course) without a Communist Party?
The short answer is that it was not the Communist Party that made the left, but the (small 'c') communist Idea. It is the idea, as old as the Tower of Babel, that humanity can build a highway to Heaven. It is the idea of returning to an Earthly Paradise, a garden of social harmony and justice. It is the idea that inspires Jewish radicals and liberals of a tikkun olam, a healing of the cosmic order. It is the Enlightenment illusion of the perfectibility of man. And it is the siren song of the serpent in Eden: "Eat of this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you shall be as God."
The intoxicating vision of a social redemption achieved by Them-this is what creates the left, and makes the believers so self-righteous.
And it did so long before Karl Marx. It is the vision of this redemption that continues to inspire and animate them despite the still-fresh ruins of their Communist dreams.
It is this same idea that is found in the Social Gospel which impressed the youthful Hillary Clinton at the United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. She later encountered the same idea in the New Left at Yale and in the Venceremos Brigade in Communist Cuba, and in the writings of the New Leftist who introduced her to the "politics of meaning" even after she had become America's First Lady. It is the idea that drives her comrades in the Children's Defense Fund, the National Organization for Women, the Al Sharpton House of Justice and the other progressive causes which for that reason still look to her as a political leader.
For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal-"social justice"-is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself. ...***
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a39611fde5615.htm
There is really no torment sufficient to punish the monsters I listed for their hideous crimes against human life and liberty.
/ Skynet
Thanks for this important post. (I thought I recognized David Horowitz' insightful style.)
He knows the beast.
The problem is that most Americans don't have the time to sift through the underlying history of common and Constitutional law, which is probably why it's relatively easy to castigate brilliant scholars like Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, who are two of the most eloquent spokesmen for originalism, but are routinely (successfully) demonized by dimwits like Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy, who know absolutely nothing about this nation's bedrock legal document.
Horowitz probably has greater insight into the seditious left's attempts to undermine our resolve on the domestic front than any other contemporary polemicist/pundit.
He wrote a very incisive essay-entitled "The Passion of the Jews"-years ago for Ramparts, when he was still a proud member of the new left.
It dealt specifically with the seeming conflation, among Jews, of Utopian notions of compassion and humanitarianism and contemporary strains of socialist political dogma.
Even though it focused almost exclusively upon the struggle within the Jewish community to reconcile essential Talmudic law and religious truths with modern notions of egalitarianism and equality, the idea of "tikkun olam," expressed in the continuing drive to save humanity through utopian socialist schemes, is not unique to one faith.
Yup. It took a long time to put that article together. Your comments thereon would be welcome. I am still composing a piece to respond to one of its later posts. It ain't dead yet.
Want more? This thread contains an interesting speculation on my part that links together the forces you mention.
It dealt specifically with the seeming conflation, among Jews, of Utopian notions of compassion and humanitarianism and contemporary strains of socialist political dogma.
There's nothin' quite so inequitably profitable as being the enforcer of "equality, compassion, and humanitarianism."
BTW, to me, the term "Talmudic law" is an oxymoron. The Commandments are the Law; the Talmud is human interpretation of that Law to the point of virtual meaninglessness, simply because if one writes statutes to cover everything they inevitably conflict. My kids are writing a term paper on the fall of the Roman Republic. One of the key steps was to adopt Athenian Law, and then the patricians went about interpreting that law as a way to bend the game in their favor.
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