Brian Becker, national coordinator for the ANSWER Coalition vs. Ariel Cohen, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, with a laughably biased interviewer from Fox. The subject was the Lebanon invasion.

BECKER: I think both sides have armies. I think both sides have weapons. But the use of the label terrorism is in order to demonize one side and justify any crime committed against the Palestinian and Lebanese people. And in that sense the word terrorism, if you’re going to use the word…

COHEN: Hezbollah and Hamas are targeting innocent civilians and you know full well they killed children, they killed mothers, they killed grandmother.

BECKER: What do you say about the airstrike yesterday in Qana? What about all those children who were pulled from the rubble yesterday in Qana?

GIBSON: Before I go, Mr. Cohen, thank you very much. Brian Becker, you did notice that Hezbollah was shooting rockets from that building.

BECKER: Every time an Arab shoots back, they’re a terrorist, but Israel can commit any crime.

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Mayor Bloomberg of New York City played an active role in blocking protests in Central Park in 2004, and did so for purely political reasons, documents in a lawsuit filed by the National Council of Arab Americans and the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition show.

Those documents, which include internal e-mail messages and depositions in the court case, show that Mr. Bloomberg’s involvement in the deliberations over the protests may have been different from how he and his aides have portrayed it. They also suggest that officials were indeed motivated by political concerns over how the protests would play out while the Republican delegates were in town, and how the events could affect the mayor’s re-election campaign the following year.

The absurd reason given at the time was the protestors might harm the grass on the lawn. No, I am not making this up….

From the Partnership for Civil Justice, who has all the documents online.

The City of New York, and the corporate sponsors of the private Central Park Conservancy, refused to allow the National Council of Arab Americans (NCA) and the ANSWER Coalition to use that same space for a peaceful family-oriented assembly and rally in support of civil rights and liberties, even though the size of the proposed event was within the government’s claimed capacity of the Great Lawn and equal or less than the size of allowed corporate sponsored events.

These wealthy individuals and corporations, acting through the private “Central Park Conservancy,” assert that certain political assembly on the Great Lawn would harm their investment in the park because it would constitute unacceptable wear and tear on the grass and is incompatible with the purposes of public parkland. Apparently, it is the content of the speech that determines the likelihood of injury to the grass.

This was a politically motivated attack on freedom of speech and assembly engineered by the mayor and others, trying to stifle dissent during the 2004 RNC protests. Apparently the billionaire mayor thinks freedom of speech only applies to the wealthy and to those whose politics he approves of. Just another loathsome freedom-hating Republican, eh?

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Britain

This is borne out by the size and vigour of anti-war protests both here in Britain and around the world. The Downing Street protest called by Stop the War last Friday was significantly larger and angrier than similar protests held over Iraq and Afghanistan.

Australia

Protesting for Lebanon revives anti-war movement.
Yesterday (Sunday July 30) Melbourne saw the 3rd big radical demo in 3 weeks against Israel’s latest war.

United States

On August 12, there will be mass marches and rallies in Washington DC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in support of Lebanon and Palestine.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a mainstream Arab/Muslim group, has endorsed and listed it on their website. Buses will be headed to D.C. from as far away as New York City and Chicago. Here in L.A., we’re also expecting many busloads. Ditto for San Francisco.

Some have asked, why August 12? Why wait so long? It’s because the plans for the demo were formulated as the Lebanon invasion happened. The main demo will be in DC. Arab and Muslim groups are arranging to bus in large numbers of people, and this takes time to do. Plus, you need time to build the demo, to make sure it’ll be as big as possible.

While predicting the size of a protest in advance is tricky, it’s looking like these will be sizable. Be there!

More info at ANSWER Coalition.

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“Christopher Hitchens? The former leftie gone gleefully neo-con. Why quote him?”, you say. Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day - and this is one of Hitchen’s (rare) times.

[Mel Gibson's anti-Semitism] is validated by his fealty to his earthly father, a crackpot who belongs to a Catholic splinter group of which our Mel is a member. This group more or less lives off the stench of medieval anti-Semitism. Allow me (as one who has Mel’s father’s books to hand) to give you an example. In an attempt a few years ago to heal the breach between the Vatican and the Jews, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger did his best to make nice. Jews did not accept Jesus as savior and redeemer, said the man who is now the pope, but they did originate monotheism. Therefore, Judaism could perhaps be regarded in some ways as an “elder brother” of Christianity. The response of Gibson senior was to say that Abel also had an elder brother. … You know what? I think that this qualifies as anti-Semitism, too.

I do not believe for an instant that the sins of the fathers should descend to later generations. But when asked about his old man’s many effusions on this subject, from the cheery view that the Jewish population of Europe actually increased in Hitler’s day to the no less upbeat opinion that persons unknown brought down the World Trade Center, the younger Gibson stonewalled consistently by saying that “my father has never told me a lie.”

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