Peace kooks

The new antiwar movement is in danger of being hijacked by bizarre extremist groups -- and most protesters don't even know it.

By Michelle Goldberg

Oct 16, 2002 | On Oct. 6, an antiwar movement seemed to have blossomed in New York. A sea of people -- newspaper estimates ran from 10,000 to 20,000 -- filled Central Park's East Meadow to protest a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq. And yes, there were the usual suspects, like the girl from the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade who donned a kaffiyeh and hurled red-faced imprecations against capitalist tyranny.

But there were many more average people, the kind who don't usually spend their sunny Sunday afternoons demonstrating against government policy -- suburban middle-class families, Muslim women from Brooklyn and Queens in headscarves and sneakers, wry upper West Side yuppies, downtown hipsters, rabbis and angry grandmothers representing their churches. They were matched by smaller demonstrations around the country, in cities including San Francisco, Seattle, Austin and Chicago. And along the meadow's perimeter, volunteers were coordinating rides to the upcoming antiwar march in Washington on Oct. 26, with many people making plans to attend. Momentum seemed to be building.

Yet Todd Gitlin, author of "The Sixties: Years of Hope and Days of Rage" and former president of the '60s antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society, fears the Oct. 26 protest will be "a gigantic ruination for the antiwar movement."

That's because the politics of the group behind it, the International Action Center, are anathema to most Americans -- including the vast majority of people who oppose a U.S. war on Iraq. IAC opposes any action against Saddam, including containment. "It is the position of the International Action Center that Iraq, as part of its self-determination, has the right to a military force sufficient to defend itself," says a 1999 statement. Its Web site is a cornucopia of empty lefty hyperbole that boils down to the notion that, as Richard Becker, IAC's western region co-director writes, "No one in the world ... has a worse human rights record than the United States."

Its call for the "workers movement here in the heartland of imperialism" to rise up is not a message that will stir great numbers of Americans. Neither is the ideology of the group behind the Oct. 6 protest, Not In Our Name, which was started and is being run by founders of a New York-based radical activist group called Refuse & Resist, who are closely tied to the Maoist-inspired Revolutionary Communist Party.

Yet as extreme as these groups are, they remain the two most prominent ones organizing large-scale antiwar protests. Though they've been cagey about the fanatical aspects of their agenda -- most of IAC's Iraq organizing is done through a front group called ANSWER -- Gitlin says, "the capacity of this movement to grow depends on what it has to say," and what these two groups have to say may alienate even people horrified by Bush's war mongering.

The International Action Center and the Revolutionary Communist Party aren't just extremists in the service of a good cause -- they're cheerleaders for some of the most sinister regimes and insurgencies on the planet. Once people realize this, it could easily discredit any nascent antiwar movement, unless a more rational group moves to the forefront.

The IAC, which is particularly active on college campuses, was founded by former attorney general-turned-radical anti-imperialist Ramsey Clark, who, as Gitlin points out, is also a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic. It's a group that has close links to the Workers World Party (IAC's spokesman, Brian Becker, also churns out communiqués for the party's newspaper) and is a staunch defender of North Korea. An IAC dispatch from Pyongyang reads: "The army-first policy has guaranteed a strong, healthy, well-disciplined fighting force despite several years of arduous conditions for the people of socialist North Korea. It represents a sacrifice the people are proud of, and their respect for those in uniform is unmistakable, as is the élan of the fighting forces ... The land, factories, homes, hotels, parks, schools, hospitals, offices, museums, buses, subways -- everything in [North Korea] belongs to the people as a whole."

Unfortunately, some of the people behind Not In Our Name are as enthralled with tyrants and terrorists as the IAC.

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