[sixties-l] Maoists for Peace (fwd)

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Date: Thu Mar 27 2003 - 02:05:23 EST

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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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