Follow the money - #2
I have written about the Tides Center
before. They are a tax-exempt 501(c)3 organization that provides funding for various radical left groups. In my first article, I showed how they funded a group called Peaceful Tomorrows which protested Bush's use of 9-11 imagery in his campaign advertisements. I also pointed to an article detailing Theresa Heinz Kerry's involvement with them to the tune of over $4 Million.
Now we are looking at Act-MA - to quote from the Act-MA website:
bq. In 1996, act-ma was born as an email list for promoting local events in the broad "peace and justice" community of greater Boston. It was an attempt to popularize the use of the already well-developed email list technology in support of progressive activists. Currently, about five messages per day are posted to the list, and now the list has an associated web page where all announcements are stored and available for review. act-ma is moderated by a group of about five volunteers who take turns screening the messages to ensure that they fit the stated guidelines.
bq. Act-ma has the strength—and weakness—of not being affiliated with any major organization. Being independent, it has built up a wide base of users and carries announcements from a variety of organizations in the area. But because no strong ongoing organization has adopted act-ma, it has grown more slowly than it would have otherwise.
But if you continue reading this page, you will see that they are not an independent grass-roots organization but an offshoot of a much larger parent organization:
bq. act-ma actually started as a conference/bulletin board within Peacenet, which was the largest and most active subset of the Institute for Global Communications (IGC).
Let's look at the
Institute for Global Communications:
bq. IGC Internet is a project of the Tides Center, a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization.
OK - now what did act-ma do to warrant inspection?
From
Little Green Footballs comes this tale of bigotry in the USA.
Alan Dershowitz writes in
Israel Insider:
bq. The other day, I experienced violent anti-Semitism for the first time in my adult life. It took place in front of Faneuil Hall, the birthplace of American independence and liberty.
bq. I was receiving a justice award from the Jewish Council on Public Affairs and delivering a talk on "Civil Liberties in the Age of Terrorism" from the podium of that historic hall. When I left, award in hand, I was accosted by a group of screaming, angry young men and women carrying virulently anti-Israel signs. The protest was denominated a peace event and was sponsored by a group calling themselves by the vague name ACT-MA. Their website describes them as promoting peace and justice and associated with larger solidarity organizations, but there was nothing peaceful or just about this protest.
And more:
bq. One sign carrier shouted that Jews who support Israel are worse than Nazis. Another demanded that I be tortured and killed. It wasn't only their words; it was the hatred in their eyes. If a dozen Boston police were not protecting me, I have little doubt I would have been physically attacked. Their eyes were ablaze with fanatical zeal.
bq. The feminist writer Phyllis Chesler aptly described the hatred often directed against Israel and supporters of the Jewish state by some young people as eroticized. That is what I saw: passionate hatred, ecstatic hatred, orgasmic hatred. It was beyond mere differences of opinion. When I looked into their faces, I could imagine young Nazis in the 1930s in Hitler's Germany. They had no doubt that they were right and that I was pure evil for my support of the Jewish state, despite my public disagreement with some of Israel's policies and despite my support for Palestinian statehood. There was no place for nuance here. It was black and white, good versus evil, and any Jew who supported Israel was pure evil, deserving of torture, violence, and whatever fate Hitler and Goebbels deserved.
These people are sick in the head...
Posted by DaveH at March 8, 2004 4:32 PM