Two Blue Star moms were threatened with violence and one was shoved by a Code Pink lady, and when the mom called the Berkeley police for help, they hung up on her. Another call to the police was made by someone else with the same response.
Melanie Morgan, spokeswoman for Move America Forward, was in the middle of her morning KSFO radio program, called in from the scene in Berkeley. She told me yesterday that she honestly could not believe what was happening, and might not have believed it if she had not seen it with her own eyes.
The scene she encountered was one of "near mayhem," she told me. Cursing, shouting, profanities being hurled at moms and dads waving small American flags in support of our armed services.
Then high school students showed up. The students donned yellow and black "Palestinian" masks and t-shirts emblazoned with the charming slogan: "F*** Bush." Riding skateboards, they rammed into Move America Forward and Blue Star Families' peaceful protest. Some of the teens grabbed American flags from the hands of soldiers' moms and dads, and set them afire right in front of the startled parents. Police did nothing.When I spoke today with Mark Coplan, Director of the Public Information Office for the Berkeley Unified School District, he was just as upset about the teen participation as was Melanie Morgan. These teens, he said, were recruited by World Can't Wait to "disrupt the peaceful protest."
According to Mr. Coplan, this teen recruitment has been a common strategy of World Can't Wait agitators, who have clashed with school authorities repeatedly in the past. Mr. Coplan was onsite at the demonstration himself, to make sure that students and teachers who had permission to observe the demonstration from a distance were not breaking the district's admonitions. He told me that he himself heard World Can't Wait demonstrators tell the students they had brought that they "did not have to listen to or obey any police instructions," that "they were participating in democracy at work," and that he personally saw older adults using teens as shields to harass and shove the peaceful counter-demonstrators.
World Can't Wait is an organization started in 2005 to actively thwart the American war effort. Its founder, Charles Clark Kissinger, is a Maoist and longtime leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who has stated his intention to organize "people living in the United States to take responsibility to stop the whole disastrous course led by the Bush administration." By "disastrous course" he means the war, specifically.
And of course, Code Pink's most visible spokesperson, Medea Benjamin, says her idea of heaven on earth is Castro's Cuba. Benjamin, readers may remember, is the patriotic American who spearheaded the effort in 2004 to hand over $600,000 in cash and supplies to the terrorist "insurgents" in Fallujah, Iraq. Why isn't that an act of treason? I must be too unsophisticated to understand.
So, we shouldn't be surprised when shameful un-American tactics are used by these people, as they were Tuesday in Berkeley.
But when a civil authority, such as the Berkeley Police, stand by while people are abridging the First Amendment rights of other citizens, then there is a huge problem.
Move America Forward has an attorney. He has written a formal protest letter to the City of Berkeley, citing numerous infractions of his client's First Amendment Rights, with the appearance of help from the police, and a lawsuit against the city is being considered.
Even though the Berkeley City Council went through the motions Tuesday night, listened to both sides of the Marine debate, and agreed to soften the language of its request to the Marines to vacate, not much has changed.
Code Pink gets to keep their parking space next to the recruiting center. They get to keep their cost-free permit to continue their agitating activities. And since Code Pink has posted a photo of Berkeley's mayor, Tom Bates, sporting a nauseatingly pink beret while he himself demonstrates with Code Pink at the recruitment office, I really don't think Berkeley has gotten the message.