Some Urge Restraint, Introspection (GAG ALERT)

NEW YORK (AP) - When Americans flew Old Glory last week, Joanne Sheehan reached for her dove-of-peace banner. Given U.S. resolve to retaliate militarily against Tuesday's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the East Coast anti-war activist saw the banner as a purer symbol of peace.

Sheehan, who chairs the London-based War Resisters International, said the United States cannot wipe out terrorism by bombing it away: It's both impractical and morally appalling.

``Our response should not be to kill more innocent people,'' she said. ``Calls from the Bush administration would do just that.''

Pleas for restraint and justice by other, nonviolent means such as diplomacy or an international war crimes trial, are echoed by pacifist demonstrators and world leaders - Pope John Paul II, former South African president Nelson Mandela, and Cuban President Fidel Castro among them.

It is a minority view: Recent polls show most Americans believe the United States should retaliate, even if innocent people die in the process.

Those in the U.S. who are against retaliation are even urging national introspection into why the country was targeted for terrorism.

``It's not good and evil, us and them, it's more complex than that,'' said Larry Leaman-Miller, Colorado director of the Quaker group, American Friends Service Committee.

Years of U.S. economic and military domination, and U.S. foreign policy have hurt and exploited people, and left them feeling helpless to respond except by terrorism, Leaman-Miller said.

Additionally, Arab resentment has been building over U.N. sanctions and bombing in Iraq, military support for Israel, and U.S. refusal to criticize the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, he said.

Filmmaker and social critic Michael Moore, in an e-mail circulated widely last week, wrote of thousands of children orphaned around the world with ``our taxpayer-funded terrorism'' in Chile, Vietnam, Gaza, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

In an essay in The New Yorker magazine, American writer Susan Sontag criticizes U.S. public officials and media commentators for trying to ``infantilize'' the public in the wake of the attacks.

``Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?'' Sontag wrote in the Sept. 24 issue of the magazine, due out Monday.

In small ways around the country last week, some U.S. citizens pressed for nonviolent solutions to the cause of the nation's heartache.

In Brooklyn, a sign urged residents to lobby Congress for a peaceful resolution.

At a prayer service in Plainfield, N.J., Presbyterian minister Bob Hillenbrand warned of the high cost of inflicting yet more violence, a tack anathema to all faith traditions, he said.

Dave Robinson, national director for Pax Christi, USA, a Catholic peace movement that began after World War II, said once the nation has stopped grieving, it must look within itself.

``This is a time when America can be a light to the world,'' Robinson said. ``It's a moment for conversion from a sea of weapons and escalating violence ... letting God's way show us the direction, not our basest fears and emotional reactions.''

On Sunday, about 1,200 people marched through downtown Portland, Ore., singing Vietnam-era peace songs.

``The peace movement is alive and well today,'' said Chris Ferlazzo, a member of the Portland Peaceful Response group that organized the march and a rally that preceded it.

``It's a senseless crime, but more violence won't help and we're concerned more innocent people will die,'' he said.

In the San Francisco Bay area, the homebase for the lone Congresswoman who voted against the U.S. taking military action, about a thousand people gathered Sunday in Precita Park.

``We feel a special responsibility in the Bay area to be a sane rational voice saying this drumbeat of war is dangerous,'' said Medea Benjamin, a former U.S. Senatorial candidate who helped organize the event.

The Bay area? ---[Excerpt] Rep. Lee's district is perhaps the most radicial in the country. Last year the 9% of the vote that Ralph Nader's won there almost equaled George W. Bush's 12% showing. Oakland's Mayor Jerry Brown, a political independent, says his biggest policy challenge often is dealing with people for whom the excesses of the late 1960s are still today's reality. But I suspect that even in Berkeley, there are constituents of Rep. Lee for whom her latest departure from sanity is too much. America has been attacked, and while pacifism has an honorable tradition in this country, what Ms. Lee seems to use as a cloak for her belief that when it comes to the use of American power, her country can never do right. [End Excerpt] --Who is Barbara Lee? --By John Fund

Allies in War--By David Horowitz-[Excerpt]-- A visit to a well-traveled website "for the progressive community" - Common Dreams - reveals how profoundly America has been rejected and how passionately its bloodthirsty enemies have been embraced by significant sections of our population, even as we enter a life and death struggle with an enemy that wants to exterminate us:

"Not only have we caused these events with our monstrous foreign policies but also with our complete disregard of our environment causing mortal damage to the Earth (Earth is a living being) and other species that co-exist with us." - Susan Yost, Cumberland VA

"My heart went out to all the people there as I sat watching, waiting … and then sadness filled me, sadness that the foreign policy of this country has come back to haunt us; sadness that our government has been so arrogant that a lesson like this occurred;…It is US policies of terror in other countries that have brought this down on us." Matthew A Peckham, Eugene OR

"Our corporate entities not only run this country but have decimated many other small countries in ways we cannot even fathom….This is a wake up call, America. It is time to change our ways." -Rich Cianflone, Colorado

"We are reaping what we have sown. We will now have the dreaded opportunity to live in the same fear that our financial policies and military assistance have inflicted on others." - Harold Parkey, Fort Worth, Texas

"For fifty-six years Washington has successfully conducted mass murders…." - William Mandel, Oakland, California (Mandel is a lifelong Communist and taxpayer funded Public Radio commentator.)

"The United States conducts itself as a terrorist organization throughout the world." - Lance Del Goebel, Manhattan, Illinois

"U.S. foreign policy has come home to roost today … we are reaping what we have sown."-Glynn Ash [End Excerpt]

Excerpted from Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left: Hillary Clinton and the Third Way--(By David Horowitz)-- Like many New Left leaders whom the young Mrs. Clinton once followed (and who are her comrades today), I regarded myself in the 1960s as a socialist and a revolutionary. No matter what slogans we chanted, or ideals we proclaimed our agendas always extended beyond (and well beyond) the immediate issues of "civil rights" and "peace."

New Left progressives-including Hillary Clinton and her comrade, Acting Deputy Attorney General Bill Lann Lee-were involved in supporting, or protecting or making excuses for violent anti-American radicals abroad like the Vietcong and anti-American criminals at home like the Black Panthers.* We did this then-just as progressives still do now-in the name of "social justice" and a dialectical world-view that made this deception appear ethical and the fantasy seem possible.

As a student of the left, Jamie Glazov, has observed in an article about the middle-class defenders of recently captured Seventies terrorist Kathy Soliah: "if you can successfully camouflage your own pathology and hatred with a concern for the 'poor' and the 'downtrodden,' then there will always be a 'progressive' milieu to support and defend you."* Huey Newton, George Jackson, Bernadine Dohrn, Sylvia Baraldini, Rubin Carter, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rigoberta Menchu and innumerable others have all discovered this principle in the course of their criminal careers.

There is a superficial sense, of course, in which we were civil rights and peace activists-and that is certainly the way I would have described myself at the time, particularly if I were speaking to a non-left audience. It is certainly the way Mrs. Clinton and my former comrades in the left refer to themselves and their pasts in similar contexts today.

But they are lying. (And when they defend racial preferences now-a principle they denounced as "racist" then-even they must know it).

The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity-often without even realizing that they are. Because they also lie to themselves. It is the political lie that gives their cause its life.

Why, for example, if you were one of them, would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role in humanity's vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that you were certain would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth that they could not "understand" and that would hold them back?

If others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as a "vanguard." You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite, whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the promised horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the vanguard of the saints.

That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a social redeemer. To feel anointed. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism.

That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in their wake. That is why they don't care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than all the injustices they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their "mistakes." That is why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.

If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?

What you were really against was not war at all, but American "imperialism" and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America's democracy, which you knew to be a "sham" because it was controlled by money in the end. That's why you wanted to "Bring the Troops Home," as your slogan said. Because if America's troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer. [End Exceprt]

What does Jesse Jackson have to say about terrorists?

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