Marching Against War--and Jews

In Washington last weekend, tens of thousands of people gathered in the largest protest to date against the Iraq war. The tally has to be approximate: The National Park Service no longer provides estimates of attendees at rallies and demonstrations, and counts by the groups themselves are notoriously unreliable. But there is no denying that the 9/24 event was large and active. So it's worth asking: Who were these demonstrators? And what do they stand for?

Byron York of National Reviewdescribed one group of protesters, college students, who marched from a subway station to the Ellipse, near the White House. They chanted: "From Palestine to New Orleans, No more money for the war machine!" Then, as they got more excited, they changed their slogan to: "How are Israeli soldiers paid? Only through U.S. aid!"

York continued: "Someone in the group carried a sign advertising a Web site, nowarforisrael.com. The site's homepage carried the headline, "Meet just a few of your Jewish Supremacist Warmongers," above photos of William Kristol, Richard Perle, Ari Fleischer, Ariel Sharon, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams and Douglas Feith.

It was not just conservatives who noticed the protest's anti-Jewish focus. At dailykos.com, perhaps the most widely visited left-wing Web site in the United States, one blogger posted this comment:

"Watching clips of the Answer Anti-War Rally, all I see are things that I want nothing to do with. I am a staunch supporter of Israel, and its fundamental right to exist. I bet you that the majority of Americans who are against the war are too. Yet I watch this rally and see people basically supporting Hamas, etc., and the suicide killings of innocent Israelis in cafes, on buses, etc. If you want to break down the coalition of people against the war, turning this into a hate the Jews/Israel party is an easy way to do it."

One of the speakers at the rally was the British MP George Galloway, ejected from the Labour party in 2003 for his outspoken support for Saddam Hussein. In 1994, Galloway led a delegation to visit Saddam and opened the meeting with this greeting: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory until Jerusalem." In May, 2005, a U.S. Senate committee issued a report naming Galloway as the recipient of money diverted from the oil-for-food program by Saddam. In interviews, Galloway has described Israel as "this little Hitler state on the Mediterranean."

Another speaker was Lynne Stewart, the New York lawyer who represented Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind sheik convicted in the 1995 plot to blow up New York City landmarks including the United Nations and the Holland Tunnel. Stewart herself was convicted in February, 2005, of aiding terrorism by relaying orders from the sheik to his followers to commit new attacks. (She was able to attend the rally because she is out on bail pending sentencing.)

Also speaking was Michael Shehadeh, one of the famous "Los Angeles 8"--illegal residents of the United States whom the Immigration Service detained and sought to deport for their fundraising work on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the group that hijacked the Air France flight to Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. The group is still active: In 2002, Israeli intelligence barely foiled a PFLP plot to blow up a Tel Aviv skyscraper with a car bomb.

One would like to believe that characters like Galloway, Stewart and Shehadeh are fringe figures in the anti-war movement. It is troubling to imagine that one could find thousands of Americans willing to be represented in such a way. But if they are fringe characters, why are they speaking from the rostrum?

Yet it could also be said that by featuring such people, the anti-war movement in the United States is performing a true public service. It is revealing something that it is important for all of society to know. It is revealing that at the core of these so-called peace marches you will find a leadership that strongly supports acts of war targeted against Americans and Jews. You will see that the radical left and extremist Islam--while they may disagree ideologically--can find common cause, as the hard leftist Lynne Stewart found common cause with Sheik Rahman.

Galloway's least favorite stop on his current U.S. cross-country speaking tour must have been his appearance at Baruch College in New York to debate Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens, himself an escapee from the hard left, knows as much about its workings and its psychology as any living man. During the debate, Galloway repeated one of his favorite lines: "Some of you in this hall may believe that those airplanes on Sept. 11 came out of a clear blue sky. I believe they came out of a swamp of hatred created by us."

And Hitchens' reply to those words at Baruch should stand as the ultimate verdict on the true purposes of the strange coalition of hard leftists, jihadists and eternal anti-Semites who now claim to speak for "peace": "This is masochism. But it is masochism offered to you by sadists."