House Democrats Team With Radical Leftists to Criticize Iraq War
Human Events Patrick McNamara July 13, 2006
Anti-war House members teamed up with activist group Code Pink today to denounce the Bush Administration and call for the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.
“We are proud to join them in expressing our shame and disgust at the Bush Administration’s dishonest, immoral policy,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D.-Calif.).
The congresswoman also said that it is the presence of U.S. forces that is causing the violence and insurrection in Iraq.
Woolsey was joined by other outspoken lawmakers such as Representatives Barbara Lee (D.-Calif.), Maxine Waters (D.-Calif.), Dennis Kucinich (D.-Ohio) and Cynthia McKinney (D.-Ga.) who said, “Those of us who opposed this war from the beginning were right.”
Acting as an emcee of sorts for the press conference was long-time left-wing activist Medea Benjamin, representing Code Pink. The group, whose news release describes it as a “women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement,” was there to plug its ongoing hunger strike. Benjamin said nearly 4,000 people have joined the fast in some form.
Woolsey said she joined the hunger strike (for the day) yesterday, because she “wanted to highlight this grave injustice of the Iraq occupation.” She and other speakers likened their own fasts to those of Mahatma Gandhi, Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr.
Saturday 15 Jul 2006 | JBL | Politics, Secularism/Culture war |
The fact that somebody would write an article suggesting that critics of the Iraq war are unpatriotic increases my perception of an American conservative movement becoming more fascist and authoritarian every day. Our founding Fathers believed that criticizing our government when it behaves irresponsibly was the essense of Patriotism.
What country are we living in when we can no longer criticize the poor performance of our government without being criticized as unpatriotic? is this Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union?
As I wrotes before:
Dean how does a hunger strike help American troops accomplish the mission they’ve been given?
FDR’s kind of country?
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Dean, no one is saying you can’t disagree with or protest the Iraqi War. But for some reason, objectors think they should be able to criticize the war with impunity. Frankly, that isn’t how freedom of speech works.
You are free to speak your mind, and those who disagree are free to speak theirs. You may not be adored for it, but you’re still free to say it.
And from my experience, there is only one group of a certain political persuasion that passes quasi-legal thought crime into law.
Dean -
Why do Dems insist on beating themselves. President Bush has been so blasted wrong on everything, all that is necessary is to quote him back to himself to make him look dumb.
From the State of the Union address in 2006:
Wow. It makes me choke up just reading it again. Far from ending terrorism, elections in the PA and Lebanon brought terrorists to power officially. Far from respecting human rights and struggling for peace, the terrorists promptly went nuts shilling for Iran and killing Israelis. The Israelis promptly responded with massive force and now we have a bunch of dead children, women, and elderly on both sides with ruined infrastructure and no hope.
Why can’t the Dems manage to point out the fact that Iraq won’t be any different. The Iraqis after all of the blood and treasure the U.S. pours into the place, will end up with a Hezbollah/Hamas/Iranian style regime that will pump money into groups that hate us.
I’d bet my life on that. Anyone betting the other way is a sucker. But, that is the Republican stance. “Sure,” the true Bushie says, “Other Arabs when they got the chance to vote went for Islamofascists. But the Iraqis are different! They’re more secular/more reasonable. They’ll found a Democracy which will eschew Arab nationalism or religious fundamentalism and they will keep it, by Allah!”
Right. And pigs are in flight training.
President George W. Bush - wrong on everything. Except the need, curiously, to confront Iran which is the linchpin of evil in the region. Problem is, he decided to confront everybody else first, leaving us with few good options.
Dean -
Did you catch the interview with David Brog on National Review Online. This is classic, he is Jewish and now works for evangelical TV preacher John Hagee. Here are some highlights:
I find this fascinating reading. I’ll probably go out and buy his latest book. It is interesting that he, a Jew, has laid out everything so clearly.
Evangelicals in the United States form a political and religious 5th Column. They have subordinated the Great Commission to their support for Israel. They have subordinated U.S. interests to that of a foreign state. They have rejected traditional Christian doctrine, and have embraced a Dual Covenant philosophy that completely rejects traditional Christian doctrine with a view the the Bible commands ‘philo-semitism.’
They also engage in a heft dose of collective guilt over something, the Holocaust, which Americans have no responsibility. Collective guilt for the sins of others used to a liberal trait, but the Evangelicals have made it their own.
Fine, there are anti-Semitic Arab Christians. But guess what? They aren’t dangerous. They have no power. The Evangelicals, on the other hand, are inside the power structure working hand-in-hand with other American Zionists for the purposes of promoting the subservience of the U.S. to the agenda of a foreign power.
The Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches are the only major churches that still adhere to traditional Christian dogma. That means they are the only anti-dote to this, yet even here, I see Orthodox posters on this site beat up our own Church over anti-Semitism. That isn’t the real problem, not in the U.S. The opposite is true here, and we either need to wake up and see this or we are going to regret it.
Note 5. Interview from National Review Online:
The psychological explanation probably has some sociological validity, but it only answers the question of why some Evangelicals are motivated to cast their lot with Israel. It doesn’t answer any larger question about how and why the Holocaust occurred.
Pope Benedict is the first religious leader I’ve heard that, in my view of things, explains the Holocaust. The elimination of the Jews was an effort to remove the memory of the God of Abraham from the face of the earth. Christianity was compromised in many areas, and the next step was to uproot the trunk.
Now it is true that some Evangelicals, as is their custom, respond to the deeper things in a highly subjective and emotionalized way. It is not true however, that because the do, the Holocaust has no greater repercussion than this emotive outpouring. (I would include Stalin’s Gulags here as well.) The Holocaust (and Gulags) represent the fracturing of Christian culture; the remergence on the one hand of the pagan Teutonic myth (abeit industrialized), and the implementation of the Marxist myth of a technological utopia on the other.
This cultural weakening has opened the door to Muslim expansion. And while some of the criticism of Bush is deserved in my view, the opposite notion that somehow the US can avoid conflict with the Muslim world strikes me as naive. We can argue about the best way this threat is to be met, but we don’t live in a pre-Wilsonian world any more.
Evangelical ignorance of history and the tendency to subjectivize all religious matters don’t sum up the real nature of what is fast becoming a global conflict. Criticism of Zionist Evangelicals, while deserved in cases, doesn’t provide any clear directive on how to engage that conflict.
So yes, while America shares no collective guilt over the holocaust (although we did, on occassion, refuse Jewish refugees thereby signing their death warrant), the fact remains we cannot escape the cultural ramifications of what the Holocaust and Gulags represent. We are in this conflict whether we like it or not.
Father -
Hayek explained the Holocaust in terms of national socialism attacking Jews for their perceived place as capitalists par excellence. In other words, it was class warfare with an ethnic component.
This is plausible, as is the theory put forward that the goal of the Holocaust was to implicate the entire German nation in a crime so monstrous that no one could dare bolt the NAZI regime knowing the punishment that would have to await.
Then again, the NAZIs were also out to destroy the Slavs. Was that an attempt to destroy the God of Abraham? According to the racial theories of the NAZIs, my own wife was fit for nothing but the gas chamber.
How does the idea of killing Slavs fit into the ‘destroying the God of Abraham’ theory?
Probably, all of these ideas put together play some part in explaining the Holocaust. You have to remember, of course, that Stalin’s Ukrainian famine and the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in China claimed way more lives than the Holocaust.
Yet, interestingly, all of those victims of Socialist engineering gone amuck a simply forgotten, tossed aside by history. The NAZIs were pagan socialists who worshipped the state. The fracturing of Christian consciousness certainly did play a role in their rise, but I don’t think that the Theology of the Catholic Church is responsible for the anti-Semitic component anymore than it was responsible for the anti-Slav.
That would be, in my mind, the same as saying that the injunction to give to the poor caused the Bolsheviks to seize the means of production and kill the rich. But, the wholesale blaming by Evangelicals of traditional Christian Theology for the Holocaust has led to the emergence of a defective Christian Theology that represents a fundamentally deformed faith. This is a Trojan Horse which threatens the entire uniqueness of the Christian faith, and leads towards a Dual Covenant Theory which is inherently dangerous.
I have no problem meeting the Muslim threat, properly put in its context. The primary threat represented by Muslims is their push into Western societies in which their voting strength and cultural unity can allow them to do what Muslims have been doing for 1,400 - invading advanced societies and forming a parasitical class which eventually kills the host and leaves it a lifeless husk.
This tendency of Islam is not going to be reversed by Democratic voting, anymore than the West’s cultural slide will be reversed by Democratic voting. The solution is Christ.
Now as far as the Muslim nutcases in the Middle East such as Iran, I have no problem confronting them. But, I insist on confronting only those global situations which impact U.S. interests, and all solutions should be crafted specifically to benefit us. If it helps Israel at the same time, that’s all well and good, but the fact that so many Evangelicals owe their primary allegiance to Israel is treason. You can call it whatever else you like, but holding the interests of the United States hostage to a foreign power is exactly that, whether you are serving the Soviets or the Israelis is of no consequence.
Glen: Pat Buchanan goes as far as to accuse the Bush adminitration of “subcontracting U.S. policy out to Tel Aviv, thus making Israel the custodian of our reputation and interests in the Middle East.”
In a blistering condemnation, Pat Buchanan writes:
Where Are Bush’s Critics Now?strong>
Dean -
See my other post in which I put part of an email from my friend Ashor in Beirut. Ironic, isn’t it? Assyrians who fled to Lebanon for safety are now getting bombed.
By they way, isn’t it a strange world when liberals agree with Pat Buchanan?
I’m not criticizing it, I love Pat and always have. (Except on protectionism.) I just find it amazing that liberals are coming to appreciate his views.