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Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2003 17:07:36 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Maoists for Peace
Maoists for "Peace"
<http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=6392>
By John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 28, 2003
By now, most Americans have heard, somewhere along the way, at least a
passing reference to the Not In Our Name (NION) project a self-described
"peace" movement that has produced, most notably, two documents publicly
denouncing our country's post-9/11 policies, both foreign and domestic.
These documents have received a groundswell of support from many prominent
artists, academicians, and activists. Among the tens of thousands to
publicly endorse NION's objectives are Ed Asner, Oliver Stone, Ossie Davis,
Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, Ramsey Clark, Tom Hayden, Al
Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, Gloria Steinem, Medea Benjamin, Leslie
Cagan, and Noam Chomsky.
The NION "Pledge to Resist" condemns "the injustices done by our
government" in its pursuit of "endless war"; its supposedly greed-driven
"transfusions of blood for oil"; its determination to "erode [our]
freedoms"; and its eagerness to "invade countries, bomb civilians, kill
more children, [and annihilate] families on foreign soil." Mocking
President Bush's "axis of evil" reference, the pledge adds: "Not by our
hearts will we allow whole peoples or countries to be deemed evil." This,
of course, is a gross distortion of Bush's words, which clearly identified
the ruling regimes of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea and not those nations'
populations at large as "evil." If anything, Bush has repeatedly taken
pains to express his compassion for the millions of hapless victims living
in terror under those regimes.
A separate document, the NION "Statement of Conscience" condemns not only
the Bush administration's "stark new measures of repression," but also its
"unjust, immoral, illegitimate, [and] openly imperial policy towards the
world." According to NION, it is the American government and not that of
Iraq, North Korea, Iran, or any other nation that leads the way in posing
"grave dangers to the people of the world."
The NION project was initiated by a man named C. Clark Kissinger, a
longtime Maoist activist. Currently a member of the Revolutionary Communist
Party and a contributing writer for the socialist publication Revolutionary
Worker, Kissinger began his public activism in the early 1960s when he was
the national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded
by Tom Hayden. The leading radical organization of its day, SDS later split
into several groups, among which was the militant, revolutionary Weathermen.
Kissinger also worked closely with Fred Hampton and the Black Panther
Party, and openly supported Mao Tse-tung's notoriously oppressive Cultural
Revolution in China. Kissinger continues to enjoy strong support from the
Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM), which, by its own words, "upholds
the revolutionary communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism," and views
the Chinese Cultural Revolution as "the farthest advance of communism in
human history."
MIM frankly declares that it can only achieve its ends "by building public
opinion to seize power through armed struggle." Chief among its objectives
is to foment "revolution [in] North America, as the [US}military becomes
over-extended in the government's attempts to maintain world hegemony."
Such are the ideals of Mr. Kissinger and his benefactors. Such are the
"peace-loving" roots of the lofty-sounding Communist front group, Not In
Our Name.
Wherever there has been a cause aiming to harm or humiliate the United
States, Mr. Kissinger has been there. He was a strong supporter of the
Iranian revolution, and actually traveled to Iran in 1979. Four years
later, he was in West Germany demonstrating against US plans to station
cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. As history has shown that those
missile deployments were crucial to the eventual fall of the Soviet empire,
it is not at all surprising that Kissinger and his fellow
Communists-posing-as-peace-demonstrators opposed them so vehemently.
In 1987 Kissinger was an initiator of an organization called "Refuse and
Resist!" of whose National Council he remains a member. Like Kissinger,
R&R squarely opposes any political or legislative measures intended to make
the United States more secure. After 9/11, for instance, the Patriot
Act in an effort to impose some order on America's out-of-control
immigration abuses required that all male immigrants (aged sixteen or
older) from some twenty Arab or Muslim countries and North Korea register
with the INS. But R&R stridently objected, warning that the US, by such
"targeting of men from specific nationalities," was on its way to becoming
"a nation behind barbed wire." The registration of Middle Eastern men, R&R
claimed, was "quite possibly 'pre-registration' for internment" that would
one day lead hordes of unsuspecting victims "like sheep to the slaughter."
Attorney General Ashcroft stated, quite correctly, "In this new war [on
terrorism], our enemy's platoons infiltrate our borders, quietly blending
in with visiting tourists, students, and workers. They move unnoticed
through our cities, neighborhoods, and public spaces. They wear no
uniforms. . . . Their tactics rely on evading recognition at the border and
escaping detection within the United States. Their terrorist mission is to
defeat America, destroy our values and kill innocent people."
Nothing, of course, could more precisely describe the actions of the very
people who hijacked four airliners on 9/11 and murdered 3,000 human beings.
Yet R&R characterized Ashcroft's words as nothing more than "a disgusting
call to hate and fear immigrants," having "nothing to do with stopping
terrorists, and everything to do with tightening police state controls over
everyone . . . [and] instilling terror in the hearts and minds of Arabs and
Muslims." The government's ultimate goal, brayed R&R, was the establishment
of "detention camps . . . all over the country."
Among R&R's numerous ongoing crusades is its effort to derail the new
Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), which requires
educational institutions to furnish the INS with information on its
international students who entered the US on academic visas. For each
student in that category, schools must provide his or her name, country of
origin, current address, field of study, visa status, and any known history
of disciplinary problems or criminal activity.
According to R&R, however, such measures are unreasonable: "SEVIS is a
system of racial profiling that singles out and criminalizes international
students in the US," and will only bring our country "one step closer to
being a police state." Moreover, says Kissinger's group, SEVIS "will be
used to intimidate, round-up, arrest, 'disappear' and deport targeted
groups . . . in the so-called 'War on Terrorism.' "
"There is no evidence," says R&R, "to support the government's claims that
SEVIS is necessary to fight terrorism." This is an egregious lie that
insults the intelligence of any thinking person.Consider a few sobering
facts. In her book Invasion, Michelle Malkin reports that September 11
hijacker Hani Hanjour and 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) bomber Eyad Ismoil
both entered the US legally on student visas, but thereafter disappeared
and never enrolled in any American school. They resurfaced only to carry
out their horrific acts of war.
Last May, federal prosecutors arrested nearly five-dozen Middle Eastern men
in a student-visa fraud ring. These men, Malkin explains, "illegally paid
substitutes to take English-language proficiency exams" that they had to
pass in order to meet their visa requirements. One of the captured suspects
had, in his possession, flight manuals, photos of the WTC vicinity, and
adate book with but a single entry: September 11.
There are currently more than a million foreigners holding student visas in
the US. Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Sudan sent a combined 10,000 students
to the US on academic visas between 1991 and 1996. In the first school year
of the new millennium, Saudi Arabia the homeland of three-fourths of the
9/11 hijackers sent more than 5,000 students to American universities.
Egypt sent another 2,300. Once here, these students traditionally faced
almost no accountability during the pre-SEVIS era. In December 2001, for
instance, an INS operation in San Diego was able to track down only ten of
fifty suspected visa violators from countries linked to terrorism, and only
one of those ten had his documents in order.
Even more alarming is a 1997 Washington Institute for Near East Policy
report stating that US weapons inspectors in Iraq had found documents
detailing an Iraqi government strategy to send students to study
nuclear-related subjects in American colleges, after which they would
return home to help Saddam build his arsenals of genocide. Among such known
Iraqi visa recipients was a prominent scientist in Baghdad's nuclear
weapons program who attended Michigan State University. Similarly, three
Iranians who helped develop Tehran's nuclear program also learned their
trade in this country, as did a Jordanian who attended Wichita State
University and later took part in the 1993 WTC bombing.
Kissinger and his Communist allies know quite well that there is ample
evidence "to support the government's claims that SEVIS is necessary to
fight terrorism." Their disingenuous rhetoric cannot erase the fact that
under the embarrassingly inefficient system that preceded SEVIS, student
visa approval notices were actually issued for dead hijackers Mohamad Atta
and Marwan Al Shehhi fully six months after they had helped carry out
their mass murders on 9/11.
Kissinger and his R&R cronies have literally nothing good to say about
American life and culture. "Domestically," they crow, "we see subway
vigilantes made media heroes and a record of sympathy for white supremacy
become the passport to high judicial office. . . . Against women there is
escalating violence, with compulsory child bearing and domestic servitude
elevated as ideals. . . . Xenophobic attacks are made on anything foreign,
combined with calls for the compulsory use of English." Putting aside the
untruths contained in such assertions, it is notable that R&R utters not a
word about the bigotry, oppression of women, and xenophobia that has been
elevated to a virtual art form throughout the Middle East. Only America
incurs the wrath of Mr. Kissinger's group.
"The problem in this country," says Kissinger, can be traced to one root
cause: "the oppressive system of capitalism that exploits people all over
the world, that destroys our planet, that oppresses minority people, that
sends people to the death chambers in droves. That is a problem that has to
be done away with." Is there a solution? "Yes," says Kissinger. "Revolution
is the solution. And the Revolutionary Worker has put out a call to people
to join with them in formulating a new program for revolution in this
country, a blueprint to go forward."
Like so many in the contemporary "peace" movement, R&R is also expending
considerable energy to "stop the legal lynching of Mumia Abu-Jamal," the
man currently serving a prison term for having murdered a Philadelphia
police officer. Describing him benignly as "an African-American journalist
on death row," Kissinger attributes Mumia's conviction to America's
"political program of criminalizing black youth, using prisons and death
chambers to 'solve' the problems of poverty and social breakdown, and the
use of police powers to suppress radical or revolutionary opposition."
According to Kissinger, Mumia, whose "voice is heard among the most
oppressed," has been targeted solely "because of his uncompromising
resistance to this whole agenda." In short, Mumia is victim, hero, cult
celebrity, and voice of social conscience all rolled into one. By contrast,
the bereaved wife of the officer he murdered is merely someone whose
expressions of grief Kissinger claims to be "getting pretty tired of."
In 1992, Kissinger and R&R openly supported what they called "the Los
Angeles Rebellion," which normal human beings recall as the worst riots in
American history having left 58 people dead, some 2,300 injured, and 5,300
buildings burned. Kissinger expressed deep sympathy for the "prisoners" of
that "rebellion," those looters and assailants who were arrested for being
what R&R would call noble revolutionaries standing up to an oppressive state.
Kissinger's volcanic hatred of America occasionally takes his orations into
the realm of vulgarity and slander. On August 1, 2000, for instance, he
addressed protesters outside the Republican National Convention in
Philadelphia. Dubbing the event "the Executioner's Ball," he called the
attending Republicans "the greatest collection of mass murderers that has
been assembled in this country in decades" in part because Florida and
Texas, headed by Governors Jeb and George Bush, accounted for a hefty
percentage of all death-row executions in the US.
Those at the convention, said Kissinger, were there to "decide who will be
the imperial ruler of this country for the next four years. F--- their
election!" Their ultimate goal, he asserted, was to secure a "coronation
for that scumbag George W. Bush. . . . a smirking frat rat son of a former
head of the CIA who went on to become a speculator oil man, and from there
went on to be a blood-stained executioner, and now wants to be the ruler of
the world. This serial killer has now killed 135 people" (a reference to
the Texas death penalty).
The next time you hear a Not In Our Name spokesperson piously bleating for
"peace," remember the man and the organization underpinning the NION
movement, and remember the things for which they stand.
----------------
John Perazzo is the author of The Myths That Divide Us: How Lies Have
Poisoned American Race Relations. For more information on his book, click
here. E-mail him at wsbooks25@hotmail.com
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