John Perazzo / FrontPage Magazine.com – 2006-10-02 22:07:48

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24682

• Environmentalists Against War: This coalition of environmentalist organizations conducts anti-war workshops, presentations, and teach-ins condemning the US War in Iraq as an ill-advised venture motivated by American lust for oil. Characterizing the US government’s post-9/11 homeland security measures as assaults on immigrants and civil liberties, EAW seeks to help derail America’s “war against the planet and all its peoples.”

EAW co-founder Gar Smith recommends that to avoid future calamities such as those of 9/11, the U.S should “replace polluting jets with high-speed rail,” reasoning that “a train will never be hijacked and flown into a skyscraper.” He further advises that America “give up its position as the world’s reigning Superpower.”

• Ruckus Society: Condemning “the corporations that profit off of war,” this anarchist group with eco-terrorist origins has initiated a counter-recruitment campaign designed to “giv[e] youth the tools they need to stop the military invasion of their schools and their communities.”

• American Civil Liberties Union: Since 9/11, the ACLU has led a coalition of leftist groups urging city councils across the United States to pass resolutions creating “Civil Liberties Safe Zones”; that is, to be non-compliant with the provisions of the Patriot Act. In fact, it has opposed virtually every anti-terror initiative contemplated or enacted by the US government. It has also defended numerous individuals with close terrorist affiliations, including the aforementioned Lynne Stewart and onetime University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian, the former North American head of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

In August 2005, the publication G2 Bulletin reported that ACLU lawyers had been present during interrogations of captured al Qaeda and Taliban enemy combatants who were being detained in Guantanamo Bay; in the majority of cases, these attorneys advised the inmates that they were under no obligation to answer military interrogators’ questions. The ACLU’s affiliations with terrorists are not restricted solely to foreigners. For instance, the organization named unrepentant New Left terrorist Bernardine Dohrn to its Advisory Board. Dohrn, along with her husband Bill Ayers, was a 1960s anti-American militant and a leader of Weatherman — described by Ayers as “an American Red Army.” In the vanguard of the open borders lobby, the ACLU advocates the effective dissolution of America’s borders and the removal of restrictions on immigration into the United States.

• People For the American Way: Established in 1981 to counteract the allegedly growing influence of what its founder, Norman Lear, denounced as the “religious right,” PFAW was instrumental in assembling the aforementioned United For Peace and Justice antiwar coalition. Favoring amnesty and full civil rights for illegal aliens in the United States, in 2006 PFAW participated in the massive immigration rallies that were held in dozens of cities across the country. The organization called for “incentives for undocumented immigrants already working and residing in the US to register, pay a penalty and provide a clear pathway to eventually earning permanent residency; [and] provisions to encourage family reunification and safeguard access to education for children of undocumented immigrants.”

• Institute for Policy Studies (IPS): Throughout its history, this think tank has committed itself to the task of advancing leftist causes. It worked with agents of the Castro regime and championed environmentalist and anti-war positions in the 1960s and 1970s; it declared against the Reagan administration’s efforts to roll back communism in the 1980s; it joined the vanguard of what IPS hails as the “anti-corporate globalization movement” in the 1990s; and, most recently, it has furnished policy research assailing the US-led war in Iraq.

• TrueMajority: Co-founded by Ben Cohen (of ice cream fame), TrueMajority seeks to persuade the American government to abandon its allegedly militaristic ambitions, and to work instead “in cooperation with the world community” by anchoring its foreign policy “in the compassion for the poor that unites all the world’s religions, reduc[ing] the debts of impoverished countries, [and] shift[ing] foreign aid from buying weapons to feeding people.”

• Physicians for Social Responsibility: During the height of the Nuclear Freeze Movement, this pro-Castro organization lobbied for American nuclear disarmament. In a 2003 report, Martin Butcher, PSR’s lead security analyst, criticized the invasion of Iraq and condemned the notion of America taking unilateral military action at any time. Butcher argued that the US should seek multinational consensus before any military undertaking; ratify the Test Ban Treaty; reduce, with a view to eliminating, its nuclear arsenal; and abandon its first-strike nuclear capability.

• Union of Concerned Scientists: This organization typically minimizes the threats posed by foreign rogue regimes, and challenges
US assertions about the intentions and military capacities of those governments. In 1998, for instance, UCS (wrongly) assured the public that American analysts had exaggerated North Korea’s ability to produce nuclear weapons, and that the Pyongyang regime was still many years away from being able to develop such an arsenal.

UCS also calls for the “adoption of a US nuclear no-first-use policy”; “a US rejection of rapid-launch options, and a change in deployment practices to provide for the launch of US nuclear forces in hours or days rather than minutes”; “the elimination of all US ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, intended for use on the battlefield”; “verified unilateral reductions to a total of 1,000 strategic warheads … accompanied by warhead dismantlement”; an end to America’s quest to develop a missile defense system; and “a commitment to further reductions in the number of nuclear weapons, on a negotiated and verified multilateral basis.”

• International ANSWER: This organization (whose name is an acronym for “Act Now to Stop War and End Racism”) is run by Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, which is staffed by members of the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party. ANSWER views the United States as a racist, imperialist, sexist, homophobic nation and the world’s chief violator of human rights — guilty of unspeakable atrocities, past and present, foreign and domestic. Founded on September 14, 2001, ANSWER has held numerous mass anti-war rallies in cities across the United States.

• American Friends Service Committee: AFSC is “committed to the principles of nonviolence and justice” in the face of any and all external threats, confident that “the transforming power of love, human and divine” will ultimately cause aggressors to lay down their weapons and permit peaceful reconciliation to prevail. Following what it calls “the radical thrust of the early Christian witness,” AFSC members affirm that they “regard no person as our enemy.” The AFSC worldview is founded on the belief that evil does not exist within individuals, who are endowed only with goodness by their divine Creator; and that evil exists only outside of the individual, in societal institutions which often cause people to do terrible things that are inconsistent with their inherent goodness.

Thus AFSC “seek[s] to understand and address the root causes of poverty, injustice, and war … [and] to confront, nonviolently, powerful institutions of violence, evil, oppression, and injustice.” According to AFSC, the primary agent of evil on earth is the United States. A pamphlet recently distributed by AFSC says that the “solution” to international strife is “to disarm America and have it withdraw economically and militarily from the globe.”

In March 2005 AFSC complained that “the US denies immigrant workers the most fundamental labor rights,” and called for the protection of “the rights and dignity of all people, regardless of legal immigration status.” AFSC has posted on its website a detailed list of strategies for illegal aliens to use in the event that they are interrogated, detained, or arrested by immigration authorities or police.

• Institute for Public Accuracy: On September 12, 2001 (the day after 9/11), IPA issued a press release condemning the “US policy of causing massive civilian suffering in Iraq,” and calling not for military retaliation but rather for “deeper compassion and understanding.” In late 2002, this organization sponsored a visit to Baghdad by actor Sean Penn, which amounted to a public relations coup for Saddam Hussein.

Near the end of his tour, Penn announced, “If there is a war or continued sanctions against Iraq, the blood of Americans and Iraqis will be on our hands.” Exploting Penn’s naivete, the Iraqi News Agency falsely reported that Penn had “confirmed that Iraq is completely clear of weapons of mass destruction.” Berkeley professor Norman Solomon, president of the IPA and Penn’s handler for the occasion, opined that Penn’s mission “could inspire many Americans from various walks of life to explore how they can impede the momentum toward war, whether in Baghdad or at home in the United States.”

• Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization: In the 1980s, this organization opposed President Reagan’s effort to check the spread of communism in Central America. Openly supporting the communists, IFCO stated that it “viewed the Sandinista revolution and the insurrection in El Salvador as powerful models for the struggle within the US against US militarism, racism, and economic exploitation, and saw the importance of drawing parallels and linkages between the Nicaraguan struggle and the struggle of black and Latino communities for social justice in the US” IFCO has similarly opposed all American military ventures since then.

• Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom: Demanding an immediate withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, WILPF asserts that “this illegal war” has destabilized “the entire Middle East region” and destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, “politically and physically.” “The Bush administration created the so-called ‘War on Terrorism’ to instill fear as the premise for US foreign policy,” says WILPF. “Basic human rights are being curtailed in the US and abroad to propagate this lie. The administration uses the USA Patriot Act … to justify its actions. We call upon Congress to rescind the Patriot Act and to investigate all imprisonments caused by this fear-mongering.”

• National Council of Churches: A staunch supporter of Communist Cuba, NCC was a signatory to a November 1, 2001 document characterizing the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a legal matter to be addressed by criminal-justice procedures rather than military reprisals. Ascribing the hijackers’ motives to alleged social injustices against which they were protesting, this document explained that “security and justice are mutually reinforcing goals that ultimately depend upon the promotion of all human rights for all people,” and called on the United States “to promote fundamental rights around the world.” NCC further claims that the Patriot Act, instituted shortly after 9/11, tramples on the civil liberties of Americans. “We believe it is time for us to stop and think about where we should draw the line in our search for security,” said NCC in 2004. “… Only a self-obsessed society pursues security at all costs.”

• National Council of La Raza: This open-borders organization (whose name means “The Race”) charges that the Patriot Act “fails to respect our time-honored liberties” and “contains a multitude of new and sweeping law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering powers … that would severely dilute, if not undermine, many basic constitutional rights.” La Raza has also given its organizational endorsement to the Community Resolution to Protect Civil Liberties campaign, which tries to influence city councils nationwide to pass resolutions creating “Civil Liberties Safe Zones”; that is, to be non-compliant with the provisions of the Patriot Act. Moreover, La Raza is a sponsoring organization of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride Coalition, which seeks to secure ever-expanding rights and civil liberties protections for illegal aliens.

• Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund: The most influential Hispanic advocacy group in the United States, MALDEF is an open-borders organization advocating that all immigrants, legal and illegal, should be entitled to all the rights and privileges afforded to US citizens. Trumpeting the value of illegal immigrants who currently reside in the US, MALDEF states that America’s “failed immigration policy … has resulted in a complete lack of legal recognition of millions of immigrants who are the backbone of the US economy.” Exhorting Congress “to consider legalization of the 8-9 million undocumented persons living and working here in the US,” MALDEF charges that Americans who oppose unrestricted immigration are motivated largely by “racism and xenophobia.”

• Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund: Calling itself “the premier Latino organization fighting for the rights of day laborers throughout the Northeast,” PRLDEF supports “immigration reform” that “will contain a path for legalization and citizenship for the millions of undocumented living in the United States.” A prime objective of PRLDEF is to help develop Latino attorneys who — by forging alliances with civil rights organizations, civil liberties organizations, and government agencies — can influence public opinion and the crafting of legislation pertaining to illegal aliens’ rights. Toward this end, in June 2005 PRLDEF launched its LAWbound initiative aimed at “increasing the number of Latinos who successfully stay on the path to law school.”

• Arms Control Association: Highly critical of the war in Iraq, ACA has accused the Bush administration of “misleading” the American public concerning Saddam Hussein’s capacity and intent to develop weapons of mass destruction.

ACA also opposes America’s development of a missile defense system, stating that “the unproven defense offers no reliable, useful shield against the threat it is designed to counter and is worthless in protecting Americans from more real dangers posed by terrorists and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.” Moreover, ACA exhorts the US to take a “softer” stance on Iran’s uranium enrichment programs.