Atrios claims
Opposing the War is Not Anti-American
It's the people who claim it is who are.
I responded in the comments section that his formulation amounted to "Free speech for me, but not for thee".
Boiled down to its essence, his claim is, "It's alright for me to exercise my rights to free speech by protesting the war, but it's not alright for you to exercise your right to free speech by calling me anti-American." Of course this is quite silly. I agree with the first part of his formulation and not the second. And I even defend his right to call those who call the war protesters anti-American, anti-American in turn. But I disagree with his statement nevertheless.
And he's wrong on another level. Most of the people who are saying the war protesters are anti-American are confining their comments to that segment of the war protesters who ARE actually anti-American. Most people, if they were to look at the
folks who are organizing the movement, would conclude that a high percentage of the people behind this movement are in fact anti-American. Don't take my word for it, take
David Corn's.
The WWPers in control of ANSWER are socialists who call for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, who support Slobodan Milosevic and Kim Jong Il, who oppose UN inspections in Iraq (claiming they are part of the planning for an invasion aimed at gaining control of Iraq's oil fields), and who urge smashing Zionism.
I would say that you could call those folks anti-American. May not summarize them completely (after all, they are so much more than that), but then calling me a football fan does not summarize me completely, either. So the question becomes, are conservatives calling ALL the protesters anti-American, or are they just calling some of them anti-American?
Here's
Michael Kelly:
But doubtless, hundreds of thousands of marchers--and many more millions who did not march--believe quite sincerely that theirs is a profoundly moral cause, and this is really all that motivates them. They believe, as French President Jacques Chirac recently pontificated, ``war is always the worst answer.''
Here's
Bill Murchison:
Some, it was clear, came out of sincere if misguided attachment to the principle that once you have given peace a chance, you have to give it another chance, then another and another, and so on.
And
David Horowitz:
It is true that some of the marchers were well-intentioned or at least not so blind yet that they could look past the evil that is the regime in Iraq.
Sorry, I don't buy the notion that anybody is calling all of the antiwar crowd anti-American. Useful idiots, yes, but that is another issue.
