SADDAM HAILS ANTI-WAR DEMONSTRATIONS (PEACENIKS YOU HAVE A NEW FRIEND - GIVE SADDAM A KISS!)

Reuters ^ | 1/18/03

[areafiftyone]

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - President Saddam Hussein hailed worldwide anti-war demonstrations on Saturday and said the protests showed that Iraq had international support for standing up to the United States.

Saddam ordered his top officers to look after their soldiers to gain their confidence and make sure they were well-fed and kept warm as they prepared to sacrifice their blood to defend Iraq.

Tens of thousands of people took part in protests across the globe on Saturday to demand that Washington abandon likely plans to invade Iraq over alleged weapons of mass destruction.

"They are supporting you because they know that evildoers target Iraq to silence any dissenting voice to their evil and destructive policies," Saddam told senior military officers and his son Qusay, the commander of the elite Republican Guards.

A recording of the meeting was broadcast on Baghdad's state- run television.

"Iraq's cause has become clear...it simply is that Iraqis are in their country while others cross the seas to reach them and tell them 'we want to share with you your country or we want to be the masters and you the followers'," Saddam said.

"We don't need to exert ourselves to make Iraqis understand that their cause is just. They understand that their cause is just," he added.

The United States is massing tens of thousands of troops, hundreds of tanks and aircraft, and several battleships and aircraft carriers to the Gulf to be ready to launch an offensive if Iraq's fails to disarm. Baghdad denies it has any nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

The Iraqi strongman, who said on Friday that U.S. troops would be committing suicide if they tried to take Baghdad, said Iraqis would not be defeated despite the superiority in arms and technology of the American military machine.

"You, as military people, know that the battle will only be determined by armies on the ground, but despite this your enemy has the capability of harming when it uses long-distance weapons," Saddam said.

But he said Iraq would emerge victorious.

"When a people believe in the justice of its cause, it can stand fast in the face of evil, no matter what equipment or technology it has. This is the lesson that you are teaching the world now," Saddam said.

He ordered the officers to look after soldiers and keep them warm, "like you would check on your young children before going to bed and check their blankets while they are sleeping."

[Free_at_last_-2001]

These peaceniks don't know the damage they are doing. - yes they do!

[DB]

Everyone should have a mass murderer for a friend...

It so sophisticated and all...

Very European (if you ask me)…

[Inspectorette]

mystery-ak, thank you and your family for your service to our country.

I truly feel that despite thousands of jerks who are ignorant, immature college kids, and burned-out leftover hippies are making it look like people are against disarming Saddam Hussein and are not supporting our military, believe me, there are millions and millions of us who are squarely behind our President and our military.

It's just that these peaceniks don't have a real life - they spend most of their waking moments either protesting or planning protests. These are not people like us who just want to raise our families, go to our jobs, go to our churches. We pay our taxes and do the right thing.

These people think they are so morally superior. A lot of these groups are protesting other goofy agendas as well as war: radical environmentalism, animal rights, etc., etc., etc.

Please tell your son not to be discouraged - the liberal media doesn't like to show the vast majority of Americans who are supporting this effort. Thank goodness for Free Republic, talk radio, and Fox News (who just showed that 67% of Americans are in favor of disarming Saddam Hussein.)

[Arpege92]

To all anti war protesters....May America's door hit you in the A$$ as you leave for your new land in Iraq!!

Don't come back now ya'hear!!!

[wingnuts'nbolts]

The damage they are doing is mostly to themselves. Most Americans are not in sympathy with the wannabe communists.
It will not change the course of history. These maggots have always been around and always will be sucking up to our marxist congressmen and women. Ramsey Clark is out there in DC today smoozing with the Muslim's calling for the fall of the USA, shrieking for the impeachment of our President. That is treason! Sedition!

Our troops do not get their rewards from this group of rent a rioters, they get their reward from doing the right thing and the gratitude of the majority of grateful Americans. Most of these mob people are youngsters who in future years will have rethunk their actions and be ashamed. All of our liberal professors should be locked into detention camps until they expire. All parents should yank their kids out of these marxist institutions and make the little brats get a job. That will bring them up against reality.

[anniegetyourgun]

Don't get your hopes up. As soon as we liberate, the Left will organize to whine about 'nation building', the cost, the loss of Iraqi lives, blah, blah, blah.....

[Humidston]

Threw eggs at them

GOOD ON YOU, HOOSIER!

BTW, I'm a Hoosier too. 'Course it was 100 or so years ago, but who's counting?

[formercalifornian]

Orcs with smiley face masks.

[Humidston]

Thanks for the list, mewzilla. They're all pond scum! I'd say what I want for them, but don't want to be banned.

[hoosiermama]

From where? Born In Bloomington, raised in West Lafayette here. Degrees from "BS" university.

[baseballfanjm]

Ah, but where does A.N.S.W.E.R. get its money from? Inquiring minds want to know...

That little red bucket they were passing around.

[WarSlut]

May America's door hit you in the A$$ as you leave for your new land in Iraq!!

Since Iraq's going to be liberated in a matter of months, can we ship them off to the North Korean gulags they're so fond of, instead?

[Orion78]

Looks like a bunch of Liberals, Socialists, Communists and Lunatics...

---

Monica Moorehead - Workers World Party
Freedom Socialist Party
Manfred Eber - Chairperson, Communist Party of Austria, Tirol, Innsbruck, Austria
H. Charfo - Head of the Department of International Relations, Central Committee, Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, Praha, Czech Republic
Patrik Köbele - Chairman, German Communist Party, Ruhr-Westfalen, Germany
Patricio Echegary - General Secretary, Partido Comunista de la Argentina, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Maher Kouraytem - The Lebanese Communist Party, Beirut, Lebanon
Oklahoma Socialist Cooperative, Oklahoma
Chris "The Anarchist" Ryan - community organizer and activist, Columbus, Ohio
Victoria D. Gaines - psychiatric escapee and activist, Hagertown, Maryland
Steven Schroeder - Instructor in Philosophy and Liberal Studies, Roosevelt University*, Chicago, Illinois
Ross Stuart Marat - Bedfordshire Socialist Alliance*, Luton, England

[Once-Ler]

The fact is our forces will be trying very hard to minimize the civilians that Saddam feels quite comfortable gassing to death. Why can't these protesters see who they are supporting?

I hope America is watching 'rats like Sharpton and McKinney bad mouth The US and UK and sing praises to a mass murder named Saddam.

[EternalVigilance]

The Sewer Backed Up Into the Street Today

Peaceniks, Greens
Abortion proponents
Hollywood Communists
Blatant Islamists

Washed-up folk singers
Yesterday's fools
Odorous hippies
Idiot tools

Anarchists and haters
Of every stripe
Mouthing piles
Of treasonous tripe

Farakhan's minions
Arafat friends
Hating Jews
It never ends

North Koreans cheer
Sadaam delights
No matter the threat
They will not fight!

But if the Mullahs
Got their way
They'd beg our soldiers
To save the day

Quietly, of course
In a craven whine
Too cowardly themselves
To put it on the line

EV

[Yardstick]

Oh, I'll agree they'll complain and nitpick and continue to act like Leftists. I don't expect them to admit that the air has been let out of their balloon, or even to realize that it has -- at least not the real ideological true believers. But things will be different, and not in a way that's helpful to them.

They've been able to peddle their baloney for decades because there hasn't been a test case with all the factors in place to test the truth of their charges... but here we have it. This Iraq war could be pivotal, a real paradigm shifter, because it has the potential to demonstrate the mendacity of the Left's anti-war screeching like no other conflict I can think of.

Also, unlike Afghanistan, Iraq is an actual civilization. In terms of nation building, there's something there to work with. I just drop this in because you mentioned nation building...

Anyway, like I said earlier, this thought just sort of came to me this afternooon, so I'm not claiming it as gospel truth yet. It seems like a good angle, though, and I'm going to keep it in the front of my mind as I watch things unfold.

[Steel Wolf]

If those candy a$$ punks that are called the Republican guard are an indication, I suggest that we re-name the Republican party.

Why bother? In a few weeks, we'll just rename the Republican Guard.

[balls]

Personally I think their anti-war protests were a dud. Not much coverage as last time and they look like they don't have much excitement going for them. I hope it snows on them tomorrow!

They reason they didn't get much coverage is that there wasn't much to cover. It was overrun by dumb black Muslims. What a pathetic stupid bunch of Hussein sympathisers they are. The crowd thinned out toward the end of the day and it became very evident that even the liberal whites lost interest in their silly rantings. The march of the strangling hangers-on was hilarious!

[balls]

make that "stragling" hangers-on

[geopyg]

Behind the Placards - The odd and troubling origins of today’s anti-war movementby David Corn

FREE MUMIA. FREE THE CUBAN 5. FREE JAMIL AL-AMIN (that’s H. Rap Brown, the former Black Panther convicted in March of killing a sheriff’s deputy in 2000). And free Leonard Peltier. Also, defeat Zionism. And, while we’re at it, let’s bring the capitalist system to a halt.

When tens of thousands of people gathered near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial for an anti-war rally and march in Washington last Saturday, the demands hurled by the speakers extended far beyond the call for no war against Iraq. In a telling sign of the organizers’ priorities, the cause of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the taxi driver/radical journalist sentenced to death two decades ago for killing a policeman, drew greater attention than the idea that revived and unfettered weapons inspections should occur in Iraq before George W. Bush launches a war.

Few of the dozens of speakers, if any, bothered suggesting a policy option regarding Saddam Hussein other than a simplistic leave-Iraq-alone. If public-opinion polls are correct, 33 percent to 40 percent of the public opposes an Iraq war; even more are against a unilateral action. This means the burgeoning anti-war movement has a large recruiting pool, yet the demo was not intended to persuade doubters. Nor did it speak to Americans who oppose the war but who don’t consider the United States a force of unequaled imperialist evil and who don’t yearn to smash global capitalism.

This was no accident, for the demonstration was essentially organized by the Workers World Party, a small political sect that years ago split from the Socialist Workers Party to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The party advocates socialist revolution and abolishing private property. It is a fan of Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba, and it hails North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il for preserving his country’s “socialist system,” which, according to the party’s newspaper, has kept North Korea “from falling under the sway of the transnational banks and corporations that dictate to most of the world.” The WWP has campaigned against the war-crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. A recent Workers World editorial declared, “Iraq has done absolutely nothing wrong.”

Officially, the organizer of the Washington demonstration was International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). But ANSWER is run by WWP activists, to such an extent that it seems fair to dub it a WWP front. Several key ANSWER officials — including spokesperson Brian Becker — are WWP members. Many local offices for ANSWER’s protest were housed in WWP offices. Earlier this year, when ANSWER conducted a press briefing, at least five of the 13 speakers were WWP activists. They were each identified, though, in other ways, including as members of the International Action Center.

WWP shaped the demonstration’s content by loading the speakers’ list with its own people. None, though, were identified as belonging to the WWP. Larry Holmes, who emceed much of the rally from a stage dominated by ANSWER posters, was introduced as a representative of the ANSWER Steering Committee and the International Action Center. The audience was not told that he is also a member of the secretariat of the Workers World Party. When Leslie Feinberg spoke and accused Bush of concocting a war to cover up “the capitalist economic crisis,” she informed the crowd that she is “a Jewish revolutionary” dedicated to the “fight against Zionism.”

When I asked her what groups she worked with, she replied that she was a “lesbian-gay-bi-transgender movement activist.” Yet a May issue of Workers World describes Feinberg as a “lesbian and transgendered communist and a managing editor of Workers World.”

The WWP’s Sara Flounders, who urged the crowd to resist “colonial subjugation,” was presented as an IAC rep. Shortly after she spoke, Holmes introduced one of the event’s big-name speakers: Ramsey Clark. He declared that the Bush administration aims to “end the idea of individual freedom.”Most of the protesters, I assume, were oblivious to the WWP’s role in the event. They merely wanted to gather with other foes of the war and express their collective opposition. They waved signs (“We need an Axis of Sanity,” “Draft Perle,” “Collateral Damage = Civilian Deaths,” “F@#% Bush”). They cheered on rappers who sang, “No blood for oil.” They laughed when Medea Benjamin, the head of Global Exchange, said, “We need to stop the testosterone-poisoning of our globe.” They filled red ANSWER donation buckets with coins and bills.

But how might they have reacted if Holmes and his comrades had asked them to stand with Saddam, Milosevic and Kim? Or to oppose further inspections in Iraq?The WWP does have the shock troops and talent needed to construct a quasi mass demonstration. But the bodies have to come from elsewhere. So WWPers create fronts and trim their message, and anti-war Americans, who presumably don’t share WWP sentiments, have an opportunity to assemble and register their stand against the war. At the same time, WWP activists, hiding their true colors, gain a forum where thousands of people listen to their exhortations.

Is this a good deal — or a dangerous one? Who’s using whom?is not what I came for.” And an organizer for a non-revolutionary peace group that participated in the event remarked, “The rhetoric here is not useful if we want to expand.” After all, how does urging the release of Cubans accused of committing espionage in the United States — a pet project of the WWP — help draw more people into the anti-war movement? (In a similar reds-take-control situation, the “Not in My Name” campaign — which pushes an anti-war statement signed by scores of prominent and celebrity lefties, including Jane Fonda, Martin Luther King III, Marisa Tomei, Kurt Vonnegut and Oliver Stone — has been directed, in part, by C. Clark Kissinger, a longtime Maoist activist and member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.)Let’s be real: A Washington demonstration involving tens of thousands of people will not yield much political impact — especially when held while Congress is out of town and the relevant legislation has already been rubber-stamped. (The organizers claimed 200,000 showed, but that seemed a pumped-up guesstimate, perhaps three or four times the real number.) The anti-war movement won’t have a chance of applying pressure on the political system unless it becomes much larger and able to squeeze elected officials at home and in Washington.

To reach that stage, the new peace movement will need the involvement of labor unions and churches. That’s where the troops are — in the pews, in the union halls. How probable is it, though, that mainstream churches and unions will join a coalition led by the we-love-North-Korea set? Moreover, is it appropriate for groups and churches that care about human rights and worker rights abroad and at home to make common cause with those who champion socialist tyrants?

Jonathan H. Miller contributed to this report.