CALL TO DEMONSTRATE AT THE NEW REPUBLIC’S DC OFFICES
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 11 AT 5:00 PM

The New Republic magazine has decided to publish a
piece of “journalism” that fantasizes about torturing
and murdering antiwar activists. In this article,
which appears in the current TNR print edition,
"writer-researcher" T.A. Frank, fantasizes about the
killing and torture of Arundhati Roy and Stan Goff,
two of the international antiwar movement's most
well-known figures. He indulges in this fantasy while
sitting in on a January 20th
counter-inaugural/anti-war panel featuring Goff,
exonerated death row prisoner Shujah Graham, and
International Socialist Review co-editor Sherry Wolf.
[See full article by Frank below].

Frank's violent rant cannot be defended as a work of
satire. Nor is there an acceptable rationale for The
New Republic's decision to publish such a piece, which
closes with the author's bloodthirsty wish to "take a
bunker-buster to Arundhati Roy." At a political moment
when the Bush administration and the corporate media
are trying their best to vilify all dissent, Frank's
outrageous tract represents a crude but insidious
attempt to intimidate the movements against war and
for global justice. Such a provocation should be
answered clearly and firmly: our voices will not be
silenced.

We are calling for a demonstration Friday February 11
at 5:00 PM at the New Republic’s DC Offices at 1331 H
Street. There we will DEMAND A FORMAL APOLOGY from the
editors. Call 202/667-0049 for more information. [Also
see Alexander Cockburn’s piece in the new issue of the
Nation where he encourages people to attend this
demonstration – see below].

You can also write The New Republic at letters-AT-tnr.com
and/or contact them by phone at (202) 508-4444 to let
the magazine know what you think. Lastly, please feel
free to forward this email to friends and associates
whom you think might share this concern.

Yours in peace and justice, (in alphabetical order –
list ongoing)

Anthony Arnove – Editor/North American Rep: Arundhati
Roy

Medea Benjamin – Global Exchange

Patrick Bond – Author Fanon’s Warning

Kevin Danaher – Global Exchange

D.A.W.N. - The DC Anti War Network

Shujah Graham – Campaign to End the Death
Penalty/Exonerated Death Row Prisoner

The International Socialist Organization (Washington
DC)

M.G.J. - The Moblization for Global Justice

Jeffrey St. Clair – Co-Editor Counterpunch

Sherry Wolf – Editorial Board; International Socialist
Review

----------------------------------------------------------------
Left Out
by TA Frank
Post date 01.21.05 ?

I wasn't supposed to be here. I was supposed to be at
a ball, a genuine
inaugural ball with tuxedos and
presidential-seal-emblazoned square napkins
and succulent miniature crab cakes. Regrettably, we're
a liberal magazine and,
consequently, many of us are less than perfectly
organized (although, at
TNR, some of us prefer to think of ourselves as
neo-disorganized)--and, well, I
failed to honor certain press-credentialing deadlines.
Now, instead, I would
be covering "counter-inaugural events." As a result,
last night I was sitting
in a low-budget church on G Street in downtown
Washington listening to speakers
at an International Socialist Organization-sponsored
gathering by the name of
"Town Hall: Empire and Resistance."

Needless to say, this wasn't much fun. I could have
thrown a stone as far as
my strength allowed and still have been certain of not
hitting a crab cake. On
the other hand, everyone else seemed to be having a
good time. The hundred or so
people there frequently applauded and hollered, and,
as expected, phrases like
"exposing Bush for what he is--a cold-blooded killer"
were particular hits.
I didn't even think there was much to report on. After
all, who cares what the
ideological fringe of the losing side has to say? But
the more I heard, the more
I became convinced that I had discovered something
truly threatening: This band
of socialists was the most effective recruiting tool
for the Republican Party I'd ever encountered.

To begin with, there were the posters on the wall:
MONEY FOR JOBS AND EDUCATION, NOT FOR WAR AND
OCCUPATION. Let's leave aside that the meter is
somehow dissatisfying (nine syllables followed by
eight--no flow at all). The main
point is, if the shallowness of this statement bothers
you, to what party do you
look for comfort? To the Democrats, many of whom
condemn building firehouses in
Baghdad and closing firehouses at home? Or do you say
to yourself, in that
moment, "I don't much care for Newt Gingrich--nor does
anyone else--but I
bet he hates that goddamn poster as much as I do"? I
know where I was leaning.

Then there was the pooh-poohing of elections--any
elections. Former soldier
Stan Goff (supposedly of the Delta Force, Rangers, and
Special Forces) spoke at
length about the evils of capitalism and declared, "We
ain't never resolved
nothing through an election." This drew loud,
sustained applause. Nothing to
get worked up about, I thought; just a leftist speaker
spouting lunacy. But
today it seemed particularly bad. It wasn't just that
I was missing what might be
lovely canap?? (or perhaps spring rolls being brought
about on trays with
delectable dipping sauce); rather, it was the thought
that the speaker was dismissing
something that Afghanis of all ages had recently
risked their lives to
participate in, something Iraq's insurgents view as so
transformative that
they are murdering scores of Iraqis to prevent it. No,
what I needed to counter
this speaker was not a Democrat like me who might
argue that elections were, in
fact, important. What I needed was a Republican like
Arnold who would walk up to
him and punch him in the face.

But the worst came with the final speaker, a woman by
the name of Sherry Wolf,
who is supposedly on the "editorial board of
International Socialist Review."
She talked, and talked, and talked; terms like
"architects of the slaughter,"
"war criminal," and "Noam Chomsky" wafted about the
room; and my eyes grew so
bleary that I ceased taking notes. But then she
brought up the insurgents in
Iraq. Sure they were bad, she admitted: "No one cheers
the beheading of journalists." But, she continued,
they had a "right" to rebel against occupation. Then
she read from a speech by the activist Arundhati Roy:
"Of course, [the Iraqi resistance] is riddled with
opportunism, local rivalry, demagoguery, and
criminality. But if we were to only support pristine
movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our
purity." In sum, Wolf said, the choice boiled down to
supporting occupation or resistance, and we had to
support resistance.

So there it was. I even forgot about the Constitution
Ball for a minute. Apparently, we were to view the
people who set off bombs killing over 150 peaceful
Shia worshippers in Baghdad and Karbala as
"resistance" fighters. And the audience seemed
entirely fine with this. These weren't harmless
lefties. I didn't want Nancy Pelosi talking sense to
them; I wanted John Ashcroft to come busting through
the wall with a submachine gun to round everyone up
for an immediate trip to Gitmo, with Charles Graner on
hand for interrogation.

I left early (I couldn't stomach the question-answer
session) and made my way to
the Metro. In the station were people wearing fur
coats and tuxedos and lovely gowns and shiny shoes. I
assumed they were in town to celebrate Bush's
reelection, and, for a moment, I wanted to join in.
After my session with the ISO, they suddenly
looked--well, so appealing.

Having attended college in New York City, I know what
it's like to be
confronted with some of the more irritating forms of
campus leftism. Yet I never quite understood why,
ultimately, such leftism should drive sensible people
away
from liberalism. But yesterday's display made it a
little more understandable: Maybe sometimes you just
want to be on the side of whoever is more likely to
take
a bunker buster to Arundhati Roy.

T.A. Frank is a reporter-researcher at TNR.

--------------------------------------------------------------
The Right has a License to Write Anything
Ward Churchill and the Mad Dogs

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

When it comes to left and right, meaning the
respective voices of sanity and dementia, we're meant
to keep two sets of books.

Start with sanity, in the form of Ward Churchill, a
tenured prof at the University of Colorado. Churchill
is known nationally as a fiery historian and writer,
particularly on Indian matters. Back in 2001, after
9/11, Churchill wrote an essay called "Some People
Push Back", making the simple point, in his words,
that "if U.S. foreign policy results in widespread
death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign
innocence when some of that destruction is returned."

That piece was developed into a book, On the Justice
of Roosting Chickens. On the matter of those killed in
the 9/11 attacks, Churchill wrote recently, "It is not
disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or
that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade
Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense
Department spokespersons have consistently sought to
justify target selection in places like Baghdad 1991
this placement of an element of the American 'command
and control infrastructure' in an ostensibly civilian
facility converted the Trade Center itself into a
'legitimate' target."

At this point Churchill could have specifically
mentioned the infamous bombing of the Amariya civilian
shelter in Baghdad in January, 1991, with 400 deaths,
almost all women and children, all subsequently
identified and named by the Iraqis. To this day the US
government says it was an OK target.

Churchill concludes, "If the U.S. public is prepared
to accept these 'standards' when they are routinely
applied to other people, they should be not be
surprised when the same standards are applied to
them._ It should be emphasized that I applied the
'little Eichmanns' characterization only to those
[World Trade Center workers] described as
'technicians.' Thus, it was obviously not directed to
the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen
and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack.
According to Pentagon logic, [they] were simply part
of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And
that's my point. It's no less ugly, painful or
dehumanizing a description when applied to Iraqis,
Palestinians, or anyone else." I'm glad he puts that
gloss in about the targets of his characterization,
thus clarifying what did read like a blanket
stigmatization of the WTC inhabitants in his original
paper.

A storm has burst over Churchill's head, with protests
by Governor Pataki and others at his scheduled
participation on a panel at Hamilton College called
"Limits of Dissent." In Colorado he's resigned his
chairmanship of the department of ethnic studies, and
politicians, fired up by the mad dogs on the Wall
Street Journal editorial page and by Lord O'Reilly of
the Loofah on Fox, are howling for his eviction from
his job.

Why should Churchill apologize for anything? Is it a
crime to say that chickens can come home to roost and
that the way to protect American lives from terrorism
is to respect international law? I don't think he
should have resigned as department chair. Let them
drag him out by main force.

So much for the voice of sanity. Now for the dementia
of the right. The New Republic's Tom Frank (not the
Frank, please note, who just wrote a book about
Kansas) describes in TNR how he recently sat in on an
antiwar panel in Washington.

Frank listened to Stan Goff, a former Delta Force
soldier and current organizer for Military Families
Speak Out, whose speech duly moved Frank to write that
"what I needed was a Republican like Arnold
[Schwarzenegger] who would walk up to [Goff] and punch
him in the face."

Then upon Frank's outraged ears fell the views of
International Socialist Review editorial board member
Sherry Wolf, who asserted that Iraqis had a "right" to
rebel against occupation, prompting TNR's man to
confide to his readers that "these weren't harmless
lefties. I didn't want Nancy Pelosi talking sense to
them; I wanted John Ashcroft to come busting through
the wall with a submachine gun to round everyone up
for an immediate trip to Gitmo, with Charles Graner on
hand for interrogation."

After Wolf quoted Booker Prize-winning author
Arundhati Roy's defense of the right to resist, Frank
confided to The New Republic's readers, "Maybe
sometimes you just want to be on the side of whoever
is more likely to take a bunker buster to Arundhati
Roy."

Now suppose Churchill had talked about
Schwarzenegger's war on the poor in California and
called on someone to punch the guv in the face, or
have a jovial Graner force Pataki to masturbate what
remain of Schwarzenegger's steroid-shriveled genitals,
or have Ann Coulter rub her knickers in his face or
get blown up by a bomb? He'd be out of his job in a
minute.

Right-wing mad dogs are licensed to write anything,
and in our Coulter-culture they do, just so they can
burnish their profiles and get invited on Fox talk
shows. Why else would Tony Blankley call on the
Washington Times editorial page for Hersh to be
imprisoned or shot for treason? But it's a PR game
only right-wingers are allowed to play.

After savaging Churchill, the mad dogs of the right
are now turning their sights on Shahid Alam, a tenured
professor of economics at Northeastern University in
Boston. Alam, author of the excellent Poverty From the
Wealth of Nations, wrote a column for the CounterPunch
website in December in which he argued that the 9/11
attacks were an Islamist insurgency, the attackers
believing that they are fighting-as the American
revolutionaries did, in the 1770s-for their freedom
and dignity against foreign occupation/control of
their lands. Second, he argued that these attacks were
the result of the political failure of Muslims to
resist their tyrannies locally.

It was a mistake, Alam said, to attack the Twin Towers
and the Pentagon. Now he has been labeled "an
un-American" professor by O'Reilly and Daniel Pipes,
and there's an Internet campaign to have him stripped
of his faculty position. So write to all the
appropriate names, defending Churchill and Alam; and
if you feel like a pleasant outing to execrate Frank
and The New Republic, there'll be a demonstration
sponsored by the DC Anti-War Network, the DC chapter
of the ISO and others at 5 pm on Friday, February 11,
outside TNR's DC editorial offices at 1331 H Street.

Afterword: Latest word from Colorado since this column
went to press last Wednesday in the print edition of
The Nation, is that the university's Inquisition team
has taken time out, for a month, so that they can read
everything Ward Churchill has ever written. A month?
That's like saying you need only a year to read the
works of Alexander Dumas, which would mean reading a
couple of novels a day. This job will take those UC
officials a lot longer than that. Ward is a very
prolific guy and he's been at it for many years. And,
yes, this is the same University of Colorado whose
officials decided last year to take no firm
disciplinary action after Katie Hnida and two other
women charged they had been raped or assaulted by
members of the UC football team, also that Coach Gary
Barnett's staff had staged porno movie showings for
potential team recruits, also promising them easy sex
if they signed on. Once again, two sets of books. For
rapists and procurers a wink and a nod;for political
commentary, a full press persecution and threats of
termination. Hnida told Katie Couric a few days ago
that her lawyers are actively pursuing legal
sanctions.