Ideas have consequences. Inaction has consequences.
For the past several years, I've chronicled the left's
escalating war on military recruiters—and the apathetic,
weak-kneed response to it. The anti-recruiter thugs on
college campuses and in liberal enclaves have thrived
thanks to a combination of public indifference, law
enforcement fecklessness and left-wing ideological
apologism.
It has now been a week since the Times Square
military recruitment center bombing. The investigation
continues—and so does the left's denial of the
ongoing campaign against military recruiters. At a
national conference of anarchists in Washington, D.C.,
last weekend, a "solidarity
sticker" glorifying the biker bomber
made the rounds. On the Internet, "peace"
activists threatened the
Gathering of Eagles, a
national military support group that organized a
rally at Times Square last weekend. From Pittsburgh
to Berkeley, anti-war extremists have smeared recruiters
as "death pimps" and "child predators."
The militant Code Pink group continues to organize
in-your-face protests to drive recruiters from major
metropolitan areas.
The Times Square bombing was not an isolated
incident, but an all-too-predictable symptom of reckless
tolerance for dangerous "peace" peddlers skating
on the edge of
sedition. Lone nuts? Here is a brief history of the
anti-military recruitment movement's mounting acts of
vandalism and violence. I'll
list, you decide:
- March 2003: Anti-war zealots
in Ithaca, N.Y., target a recruitment center that
had been hit before with Molotov cocktails. On St.
Patrick's Day, wielding cups of their own blood,
they entered a Lansing military recruitment office
and
splashed their blood over recruiter posters,
military cutouts and the American flag. Daniel
Burns, Peter De Mott, Clare Grady and Teresa Grady
were
convicted in 2005 on two misdemeanor counts of
trespassing and damaging federal property. All but
Burns have been released from prison.
- January 20, 2005: At Seattle
Central Community College, Army recruiter Sgt. Jeff
Due and his colleague Sgt. 1st Class Douglas
Washington were
hounded by an angry mob of 500 anti-war students.
The recruiters' table was destroyed; their handouts,
torn apart. Protesters threw water bottles and
newspapers at the soldiers. The far-left Students
Against War had been agitating to kick the
recruiters off campus. The college administration
refused to punish the radicals.
- Jan. 31, 2005: Recruiters in
Manhattan reported that
a door to their office had been beaten in.
Anarchist symbols were scrawled in red paint on the
building. On the same day, New York police collared
a young Manhattan College junior and charged him
with throwing a burning rag into an Army recruiting
station and ruining the door locks with super glue.
- Feb. 1, 2005: At a
South Toledo, Ohio, recruitment center, unhinged
protesters hurled manure all over the building. They
broke windows and sprayed vulgar graffiti—"War is
Sh*t"—on office property.
- Mid-Feb. 2005: Twenty-year-old
anti-war goon Brendan Walsh is sentenced to
five years in federal prison for hurling a
Molotov cocktail through the window of a Vestal,
N.Y., military recruitment office in 2003.
- March 2005: In East Orange,
N.J., young anti-military protesters shattered the
windows of an Army recruitment station and a
neighboring Navy office. At City College in New
York, a campus secretary protesting recruiters was
charged with second-degree assault, disorderly
conduct and obstructing governmental administration.
Police also arrested students
Justin Rodriguez and Nicholas Bergreen for
resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and assaulting
a police officer.
- May 2005: Anti-military
students swarmed the booths of the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers and the USAF at a San Francisco State
University career fair. In Wisconsin, an Air Force
ROTC information day was
canceled due to threats by the University of
Wisconsin-Madison chapter of Stop the War.
- April 2006: UC Santa Cruz
students
ambushed military recruiters. Vandals at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill tossed
cans of red paint in front of an ROTC office and
spray-painted vulgarities all over its doors.
University of Minnesota students splattered red
paint all over an Army recruiting station.
- December 2006:
Anarchists in Lawrence, Kan., crippled business
at an Army/Navy recruitment center, where workers'
car tires were slashed and bomb-proof glass had to
be installed.
- July 2007: A teenager in
Bremerton, Wash., was charged with a felony for
slashing 42 government tires of Army recruiting
vehicles to protest the Iraq war and because he
"hated the military." In Maryland,
anti-recruiter vandals smashed a Rockville Air Force
career center. In Lufkin, Texas, Navy recruiters
were the targets of vandals who keyed their cars,
smashed their windows and
shot at their vehicles with "with what
appeared to be a high-powered pellet gun."
- August 2007: In Stamford,
Conn., Francis Monaghan
is arrested on charges that he twice left a fake
bomb package at a military recruitment office.
- Jan. 2008: The Code Pink/city
council
siege at the Berkeley recruiting center reaches
a boiling point. Protesters chain themselves to the
station to shut it down, and vandalize the windows
with
bloody handprints and signs branding recruiters
"death pimps."
When will this escalating war end? There will be no
end in sight until lawmakers, law enforcement, the media
and the public open their eyes to the hate, connect the
dots, and stop coddling the
increasingly crazed and emboldened anti-military
militants before more bombs go off—and innocents get
harmed—in the name of "peace."
COPYRIGHT
CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Michelle Malkin [email
her] is author of
Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists,
Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores.
Click
here for Peter Brimelow's review. Click
here for Michelle Malkin's website.
Michelle Malkin's latest book is "Unhinged:
Exposing Liberals Gone Wild."
