Major Media Cover Up Communist Role in Antiwar Rally     1/22/2003
By Peter LaBarbera

Anti-American Speeches Dominated Event

Commentary

If you read The Washington Post or The New York Times, you might conclude that a massive antiwar rally held last weekend on the national mall comprised kindly grandparents, schoolteachers and honor students wanting nothing else but “peace.”

That’s because The Post and The Times and various other media failed to inform citizens of the hard-core Marxist organizations and Communist front groups who organized the rally. And most “mainstream” media failed to report the anti-American rants that emanated from the speakers on the national Mall on Saturday.

Incredibly, The Post included only a single nine-word quote from a rally speaker in its 1,500-word article about the event. For an excellent summary of the media’s propagandistic treatment of the event, see this article on the Media Research Center’s Web site.

CSPAN’s unedited coverage provided a true glimpse of the radicalism, although, as writer Cliff Kincaid notes, the cable network failed to alert its listeners to the Communist role:

C-SPAN ran live coverage of the rally and re-aired the event several times during the day and night. But it misled viewers into thinking that a group called International ANSWER was behind it. In fact, International ANSWER and its predecessor, the International Action Center, were started by the communist Workers World Party, of which [rally organizers Brian] Becker and [Larry] Holmes are leading members. Holmes appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal program before the rally to promote it. But C-SPAN ignored the patriotic counter-demonstration and failed to feature anyone who could rip the mask off the communist-inspired event. C-SPAN became an American version of Al Jazeera, the Arab television network which serves as a vehicle for extreme anti-American propaganda. This is an outrage.

The antiwar rally was endorsed by hundreds of leftists, such as former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton from the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit, Marxist historian Howard Zinn, and comedian Dick Gregory. You can see the full list on International ANSWER’s Web site.

“F*<%$&@! USA”

I knew the rally was about much more than “peace” shortly after turning on CSPAN radio’s live coverage of it while I was out driving and doing errands, with my 9- and 11- year-old sons in the back seat. A speaker from Korea was in the midst of a diatribe when I thought I heard him yell out the F-word, right before “USA” (evidently CSPAN doesn’t bleep out expletives).

Sure enough, Kincaid reports: “The event featured vicious anti-American speeches, including an Imam who said, ‘It's revolution time,’ attacks on American ‘imperialism,’ and a Korean who said a song called ‘F***ing USA’ was gaining popularity in South Korea.”

Although I didn’t catch his name, I presume the speaker was representing the Korea Truth Commission (KTC), which is part of the official steering committee for International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism).

To get an idea of the brand of “truth” espoused by the KTC, here’s the group’s account of its “Fact-finding Delegation” last year “to Investigate U.S. War Crime Against Civilians During the Korean War”:

For Koreans, the Korean War was a continuation of their long struggle for national liberation. … For the United States capitalist government, the Korean War was a war to consolidate its economic hold over Asia and to prevent revolution from spreading on the continent. …

In June 1950, the war broke out. The United States fought the Korean People’s Army and Partisan guerrillas who were resisting U.S. occupation. At the same time, U.S. troops and Korean forces under U.S. command carried out brutal repression of the civilian population. These civilians were the very people the U.S. claimed it was defending during the war — and who they still claim to have been defending to this very day. And today we can still hear the U.S. government make these same claims in their war in Afghanistan, where it has killed at least 4,000 civilians and oversaw the execution of thousands of prisoners of war.

America is ‘evil’

The Marxist newspaper Workers World (organ of the Workers World Party) in its coverage of the rally quotes Yoomi Jeong, deputy secretary general of the Korea Truth Commission, as follows:

The people around the world recognize that the real axis of evil is in fact the USA. I think it is very important for the people here to stand up for justice and peace. This is our moral obligation to the humanity that is affected by U.S. imperialism.

You get the idea: if it wasn’t for the evil, imperialistic United States, South Koreans today would be enjoying the democracy, prosperity and solidarity of their brethren in the North. Of course, the reality is that North Korea is ruled by perhaps the world’s cruelest dictatorship. Its application of Stalinist economics has led to mass starvation of its own citizens, who survive thanks to Western handouts. All dissent is crushed. Meanwhile, North Korea's Communist despot, Kim Jong-il, shamelessly tries to bribe the international community into giving the country more aid money by threatening to complete a nuclear weapons program.

Anti-Israel

International ANSWER, like many of the “peace” rally endorsers, is also rigidly anti-Israel. Typical is an “Alert” on its Web site declaring that the coalition “has launched The Commission of Inquiry into U.S.-backed Israel War Crimes against the Palestinian People, a national grassroots research project to document the crimes of the occupation and present a narrative of the Palestinian struggle that can serve as a counterbalance to the corporate media distortions of the conflict.”

I couldn’t find any essays on the Web site condemning the Palestinian suicide bombers who have killed scores of Israeli civilians.

Other groups on International ANSWER’s steering committee include:

· The Nicaragua Network, a pro-Marxist organization that supports the Sandinista Front party in Nicaragua, which recently lost its third straight election after ruling as a budding Communist dictatorship in the 1980s;

· The Free Palestine Alliance, a group that calls Israeli President Ariel Sharon a “war criminal” and has railed against the “U.S.-funded Israeli war of liquidating Palestine and its people”; and

· The Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization/Pastors for Peace, a pro-Cuban, pro-Fidel Castro outfit that purports “to advance the struggles of oppressed people for justice and self-determination.”

Hating America

Speaker after speaker at the antiwar rally hurled vitriol at America and the Bush administration. Former leftist David Horowitz reports that one speaker at the rally, Damu Smith of Black Voices for Peace, referred to "Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld” and then said, "that's the Axis of Evil."

How’s that for “peace”?

Horowitz notes that two leading black Democrats in Congress, “the potential head of the Ways and Means Committee, Charles Rangel [New York], and the potential head of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers [Michigan],” participated in the rally (Rangel did not attend but had his statement read there). Horowitz warns in the online magazine Jewish World Review:

Americans who care about their country and its future should think about the following. This anti-American pro-terrorist movement is now larger than the anti-Vietnam pro-Communist "peace" movement was until the very end of the '60s. Yet there is no draft. Before the draft the anti-Vietnam movement was very, very small. Its demonstrations were numbered in the hundreds of participants, not even the thousands. The first big manifestation of the anti-American left was the Stop the Draft March in Oakland in 1965, which was four years after America's involvement in Vietnam got serious.

The second thing Americans should think about is the fact that this anti-American support movement for America's enemies has deep roots in the Democratic Party. I am a firm believer in the two-party system. I find it extremely worrying, therefore, that one party can no longer be trusted with the nation's security. This problem will not be easily fixed. But it won't be fixed at all unless attention is drawn to it, and we cannot do that unless we stop the charade of calling this a "peace" movement and recognize instead that it is an anti-American movement to divide this country in the face of its enemies and give aid and comfort to those who would destroy us.

Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin coined a term for naďve Westerners who supported Soviet and Communist goals without understanding or admitting that that’s what they were doing: “useful idiots.”

The mall was packed with useful idiots Saturday, and the media did a pretty idiotic job of reporting what was really a very aggressive rally — against the United States and its ally, Israel.

Printer Friendly Version

Recent Articles

Homosexuals Say They’ll Ignore No-Protest Order in Jerusalem

The Top Ten Da Vinci Code Distortions

Baseball’s Latest Scandal: Going After the Church

'A Superhero for Choice'

ACLU Seeks Mandatory Homosexual Sensitivity Training

Virgins Not Allowed!

Christian Activist Marcavage to Appeal Rejection of Lawsuit against Temple University

CWA’s Knight to Speak on Suburban Washington Sex-Ed Curriculum

New Genetics Study Undermines Gay Gene Theory

Apology Not Enough for ABC’s ‘Monday Nude Football’ Skit