Perhaps If They Had An Anonymous Source

Is the Washington Post simply incapable of accurately describing ANSWER, one of the chief organizers of this Saturday's protest?

From Antiwar War Rally Will Be a First For Many by Petula Dvorak, set for page one in the Metro section, as I write this in the early a.m.:

"This demonstration will reflect, by far, the most diverse group of antiwar protesters since before the war began," said Brian Becker, national coordinator for the ANSWER Coalition, one of the event's sponsors. "We have people coming from all political persuasions, including a very large number of people who have never before been part of the antiwar movement or protest activity."...

The two primary organizers of the march, for which planning began in May, are ANSWER and United for Peace and Justice. Both groups have sponsored other major demonstrations against the war in Iraq but also protested U.S. foreign policy in places ranging from Haiti to the Gaza Strip....

Dvorak veers close to informing the public about other groups, such as Code Pink ("a women's antiwar group that is widely criticized by war supporters for undertaking a humanitarian mission on behalf of refugees from the Iraqi city of Fallujah, an action that some said was helping the Iraqi insurgency").  But ANSWER and United for Peace and Justice, the prime movers, remain ciphers. ANSWER also appeared in David Montgomery's Peace by Pieces in the Style section on Thursday, and received even less scrutiny.

Why?

Dvorak writes of "many causes" that antiwar protesters have marched for, but leaves out the really interesting ones.

Why can't Dvorak do a little digging on the connection between ANSWER and the Stalinist Workers World Party (WWP)? It would spice up the bio on Brian Becker, identified in her story as merely national coordinator for the ANSWER Coalition. That he may be, but unless something has changed lately he is also this, as The Nation's David Corn reported for LA Weekly  in 2002 about another demonstration:

Officially, the organizer of the Washington demonstration was International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). But ANSWER is run by WWP activists, to such an extent that it seems fair to dub it a WWP front. Several key ANSWER officials — including spokesperson Brian Becker — are WWP members.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Oh wait, (via Powerline) there is:

International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) is a front group for the communist Workers World Party. The Workers World Party is, literally, a Stalinist organization. It rose out of a split within the old Socialist Workers Party over the Soviet Union's 1956 invasion of Hungary -- the breakaway Workers World Party was all for the invasion. International ANSWER today unquestioningly supports any despotic regime that lays any claim to socialism, or simply to anti-Americanism. It supported the butchers of Beijing after the slaughter of Tiananmen Square. It supports Saddam Hussein and his Baathist torture-state. It supports the last official Stalinist state, North Korea, in the mass starvation of its citizens. It supported Slobodan Milosevic after the massacre at Srebrenica. It supports the mullahs of Iran, and the narco-gangsters of Colombia and the bus-bombers of Hamas."

If some bloggers can find this in an old Michael Kelly column, why can't the combined staff of the Washington Post?

Red star, guys? Ring a bell?

Update: Welcome, Instalanchers. As Glenn has been saying, MSM generally and (I can say with deep conviction) the Post specifically has a very hard time informing the public about organizations like ANSWER in a way that would be, you know, informative.  As I say above, another recent example is this David Montgomery story, which I blogged Thursday. We learn that ANSWER exists, but little else. It must be in the Post's copy-editing manual.

Thanks for visiting and take a look around. Other items this week included reporter Dana Priest  re-writing history about what the Administration has said about 9/11 and Saddam; and Howard Kurtz's beliefs about the impertinence of General Honore. 

Comments

[Mr. Snitch!]

I hear you!

[John Blake]

It really is hard for some to admit that much of so-called "right-wing" comment dating from the early 1950s was prescient in flagging where socialisms of all stripes were heading.

Baselines include: East vs. West Germany from about 1946; North vs. South Korea from circa 1954; Japan vs. Red China since WWII. No matter how murderously retrogressive, to the point of Darwinian inverse-selection, collectivist regimes become, they never lack for hard-left support in prosperous free-market states.

Homosexual "marriage", quota hiring, environmental expropriations etc. have all been forecast decades in advance... in such cases, the "slippery slope" argument has been validated time and again. This is because your typical leftist is a ranting schemer who works only to gain power. Once suitably ensconced, he will destroy you: Not merely because any halfway decent citizen abominates him, but because narcissistic nihilism is all he knows.

Anyone who approves ANSWER's totalitarian obsession has psychological rather than political problems, because celebrating regimes so gruesome represents a death-wish
projected onto others. Islamofascist terrorism is a case study in such delusions, made if possible more reprehensibile by its reptilian pretense to
spiritual values.

Let 'em march. And at day's end, may they and all they stand for be seen for what it is: Profoundly vicious, radically anti-peace and prosperity, dangerous only to the extent that we ignore it or perversely refuse to call it by its name.

[JC]

If they're the ANSWER, how hideous must the QUESTION be?!

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