Also this issue:

The Other Tyrant
-Bruce Schimmel

The Bill of Wrongs
Patriot II is another Bush assault on the Constitution.
-Brian White

Letters to the Editor

February 27-March 5, 2003

pretzel logic

Speak Up

by Howard Altman

My participation in Philadelphia's antiwar march on the Ides of February raised a few questions about my conduct, which is totally understandable.

Two criticisms in particular stand out.

"Journalists who publicly oppose or support the war effort, the government or the military move from the balcony to the stage," Bob Steele writes this week in the Poynter Institute's widely read online ethics column. "They become vested participants rather than impartial observers."

Acknowledging that "columnists are paid to express an opinion," Steele writes that "columnists can more effectively wield influence by sticking to the written word and avoiding the pitfalls of public activism that will blur their already complex role."

I respectfully disagree.

"At this critical juncture in our history, I cannot sit on the sidelines," I write Steele in an e-mail. "My role will be blurred when the cruise missiles are launched and I did not exercise my full range of Constitutional rights to show my fierce objection."

Steele responds like a mensch.

"Thanks, Howard, for your good note and the elaboration on your reasoning," he writes. "Let's hope there is a spirited discussion on this important issue."

I cannot agree more.

Dr. Adam Garfinkle, too, has some trouble with my marching.

Garfinkle is the Jim Thome of foreign relations.

He was once research director for General Al Haig Jr. He is editor of The National Interest, and was executive editor of The National Review. He's a visiting professor of politics at Tel Aviv University. A study group member of the Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security. A U of Penn Ph.D. in international relations. A Fulbright research fellow and author.

Garfinkle submitted to me, via the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a piece titled "The Spirit of the New Antiwar Movement."

In his piece, Garfinkle, author of Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, makes a number of pointed criticisms about the current protests. Garfinkle supports quick action against Saddam. "But I also believe that a high-profile, protracted U.S. military occupation of Iraq, and an attempt to impose democracy on societies with no experience of it in the teeth of Muslim resentment of American power, will do more harm than good," he writes. "Accelerating the rate of social disruption within Muslim societies will produce more apocalyptic terrorism, not less. Everything we know about the history of modernization, even in Europe, and the sociology of contemporary Islam tells us this."

I have been saying this for months and I write to Garfinkle to express my worries that the president hasn't really thought about what happens after Saddam.

"Mr. Altman, your view is not unreasonable," he responds. "This is why many very serious and experienced people are worried about a war. I do not share your concern, however, that the administration has not thought this through, nor do I assume that some very bloated rhetoric is actually going to be U.S. policy."

Then comes his kicker.

"But while your view is not unreasonable, your joining your voice to that of ANSWER, a group whose members go around wearing T-shirts advocating the Œliberation of Palestine from the river to the sea,' I do find unreasonable," he writes. "Harmful, too."

It is an interesting point, given the level of Jew-bashing taking place in the world right now.

This much should be noted.

I did not march on behalf of ANSWER or anyone else, for that matter.

I marched because I don't trust the Bush administration to handle this situation. His domestic policy -- slashing taxes for the rich while spending hundreds of billions on a war, all while laws like the USA Patriot Act (and the proposed Patriot II) dismember the Constitution -- hasn't exactly inspired overwhelming confidence.

The terrible irony here is that a lot of the people who are most upset about the Bush assault on civil liberties are Jews like me who see what's happening to Arabs and Muslims in this country and are wondering when, not if, it will happen to us. For Jews, any government-sponsored assault on civil liberties induces uncomfortable reminders of the changes in Germany's legal system in the early '30s.

Despite being a target, of both the Osamas of this world and of many of the people organizing protests against war in Iraq -- who, when they call for a liberation of Palestine from river to sea, are really calling for the slaughter of Jews -- I still have to raise my voice in opposition to Bush's foreign and domestic agendas.

This is no easy task. But I am guided by the words of Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoller, the son of a World War I U-boat captain who left the Nazi party to protest against Hitler and wound up in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps for his efforts.

"In Germany they came first for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist," Niemoller wrote. "Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me -- and by that time no one was left to speak up."