Me#1You#10
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Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 6503
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 Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 6:59 pm Post subject: "By their friends shall ye know them" |
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Just how "comfortable" do "anti-war", anti-US "progressives" feel about being associated with avowed communists? Apparently PRETTY comfortable. Gotta LOVE the NY Sun as it continues to shine the spotlight on the radical left... (emphasis mine)
| Quote: | 'Progressive' Groups Plot New Protests
BY RODERICK BOYD - Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 22, 2005
ST. LOUIS, Mo. - The second national assembly of the nation's largest anti-war coalition, United for Peace and Justice, turned a cold and rainy St. Louis into Moscow on the Mississippi over the weekend.
More than 400 progressives, representing the spectrum of left-wing political thought, met to carve out an agenda for coordinating protests against American foreign policy. The groups represented here ranged from hard-core Marxists to several organizations that asserted the attacks of September 11, 2001, were the result of a cunning collaboration between Israeli intelligence and the CIA to further American imperial ambitions.
United for Peace and Justice, or UFPJ, is an umbrella group that seeks to unite about 900 disparate organizations - from Academics for Peace to the Young Communist League USA - to focus on protesting every aspect of American foreign policy. Member groups sent delegates to St. Louis to vote on the size and nature of the year's foreign policy protests.
While the focus of the assembly was on international issues, attendees voiced a good deal of outrage over most aspects of American domestic policy as well.
The consensus reached at this year's conference, according to a spokesman, Bill Dobbs, is that UFPJ will expand its protest activity against the Iraq war and Israeli military operations in the Palestinian territories to include potential American military and covert action against Iran and Syria. Mr. Dobbs said many protests would also seek to heighten awareness of the costs of American military operations to local communities.
Whether UFPJ will be able to garner mainstream support and chip away at congressional support for the war and President Bush's foreign policy is another question entirely. Despite a series of large global anti-war rallies sponsored by UPFJ in 2003, the national elections of 2002 and 2004 made clear that the anti-war platform - to say nothing of socialism itself - remains a difficult sell to the American public.
<snip>
The UPFJ has maintained its connection to communism. A member of the Communist Party USA, Judith LeBlanc, spoke in St. Louis last weekend and serves on UPFJ's board of administrators.
Those at the conference did not seem particularly concerned by the presence of a communist on the group's board, or even aware that many Americans would perceive it as a problem. A member of the War Resisters League and an organizer for the Socialist Party USA, Thomas Good of Staten Island, said the communism that many UFPJ members advocate is simply "a purer form of socialism, dedicated to combating American imperialism."
NY Sun - cont'd |
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