The Politics Of Slander

I just linked this article by Bill Berkowitz in my previous post. It is very important. Go read it.

A few excerpts:

The right wing smear machine is at again.

Cybercast News Service issued its report stating that, "Code Pink Women for Peace, one of the groups backing anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan's vigil outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford Texas, organizes the protests at Walter Reed as well."

According to CNSNews.com, supporters of Bush's War on Iraq "call the protests, which have been ignored by the establishment media, 'shameless' and have taken to conducting counter-demonstrations at Walter Reed."

"The [anti-war protesters] should not be demonstrating at a hospital. A hospital is not a suitable location for an anti-war demonstration," Bill Floyd of the D.C. chapter of FreeRepublic.com told CNSNew.com. "I believe they are tormenting our wounded soldiers and they should just leave them alone," Floyd added.

CNS.com also pointed out that, "Code Pink, the group organizing the anti-war demonstrations in front of the Walter Reed hospital, has a controversial leader and affiliations...Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin has expressed support for the Communist Viet Cong in Vietnam and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas."

According to the website of Code Pink, their weekly vigils at Walter Reed Hospital -- which began in March -- actually bring together peace activists, soldiers, military families and neighbors," and are aimed at "remind[ing the public] that physically and psychologically wounded soldiers are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan every night."

Seriously wounded soldiers arrive at the hospital "under the cover of darkness," and Code Pink maintains that it believes that "the nighttime arrivals are scheduled on purpose so as to prevent the public from knowing about the numbers of soldiers wounded and the severity of their injuries."

Shades of COINTELPRO.

"These are not protests, they are vigils calling for more support for the veterans. We always do them with military families and we get extremely positive responses from the families of the wounded soldiers. In my first DC vigil, the wife of a wounded soldier took me inside to meet her husband," Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of Code Pink, told MediaTransparency.

"In the past few weeks, however, new people have shown up and have tried to change the tone and be more confrontational. We asked them to remove signs that we found objectionable. While we aren't certain as to who these people are, we think they may be related to the FreeRepublic people who are demonstrating across the street."

"They are trying to create a confrontation and make us look as if we are not supporting the soldiers. It is a smear tactic and is totally untrue. We are only there to say that these soldiers deserve the best possible treatment when they come home."

It's time to get serious about red baiting now that support for the war is dwindling.

On Tuesday, August 30, 2005 the Washington, DC-based Heritage Foundation, the premier think tank of the conservative movement, will turn its sights toward the anti-war movement in an event entitled, “The Politics of Peace: What's Behind the Anti-War Movement?”

The main speaker at the event is John J. Tierney, whose book, The Politics of Peace, was published this year by the Capital Research Center. According to the Heritage Foundation’s promotional materials, the book is an examination of the “current anti-war protest” against the Iraq War, and the Bush Administration “reveals a pedigree going back at least to the Vietnam era and beyond to the ‘progressive’ and protest politics of earlier decades.” Tierney argues that, “The leaders of the ‘anti-war’ movement today are leftists in ideology,” and they “almost all oppose capitalism and believe in socialism.” In addition, “many are Communists.”

In the Introduction to the book, Tierney argues that "The irony of the modern 'peace' movement is that it has very little to do with peace -- either as a moral concept or as a political ideal ... The leaders of anti-war groups are modern-day Leninists ... street revolutionaries [attempting] to use reactions to the war on Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein as a way to foment radical political change at home."

Read the rest.