RUTHFULLY YOURS

Code Pink members became known during the Bush Administration as confrontational anti-war protestors, but the group is actually worse than that. Code Pink’s leadership has aligned with almost every tyrannical force opposing the U.S., from Chavez to Ahmadinejad to Hamas to Iraq insurgents. Code Pink is acting more like the ambassador for enemies of the free world than an advocate for peace.

Kristinn Taylor and Andrea Shea King over at BigGovernment.com ^[1] are doing an excellent job chronicling the outrageous activities of Code Pink and its leadership over the years. Most recently, Code Pink has organized a “Gaza Freedom March” ^[2] to call for an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip, currently controlled by Hamas. The organization boasts that they have provided humanitarian aid to the territory, and has done so under the protection ^[3] of Hamas. The terrorist group often diverts such aid for its own purposes, and it should be suspected that this is no different. Hamas also builds support by providing social services, so if such aid didn’t directly go to supporting the group’s violent operations, it certainly did go to support its recruiting efforts.

Hamas is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamic organization whose goal is to wage “a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” In other words, it wants to create a worldwide Islamic state. Code Pink has also teamed up with this extremist organization, placing ads on its website asking ^[4] them to “join us in cleansing our country.”

Code Pink has been embraced by the Iranian government as well. Jodie Evans ^[5], one of the group’s leaders, met ^[6] with Ahmadinejad in New York in September 2008, resulting in a trip to the country two months later. The group met with high-level government officials, and offered ^[7] to help fund a “peace park” and environmentally-friendly businesses in Tehran. Co-founder of Code Pink Medea Benjamin praised the prices of public transportation in Iran and said ^[8] she was “struck by how much more open Iran is than I had thought.”

To their credit, Code Pink did express sympathy ^[9] for the protestors confronting the regime this summer, but called on the U.S. to lift sanctions and end threatening language and supported President Obama’s initial silence. In other words, Code Pink said they supported the Iranian people, but did not want do anything to support the Iranian people.

In January 2006, Evans and other colleagues including Cindy Sheehan met with Venezuela’s President Chavez. Benjamin had previously described ^[10] Chavez as a “doll,” and said ^[11] “George Bush—and John Kerry for that matter—could learn a thing or two from Hugo Chavez about winning the hearts and minds of the people.”

Jodie Evans’ reaction to the 9/11 attacks shows a complete ignorance of the ideological element of the terrorists, instead linking the disaster to Middle Eastern anger over U.S. foreign policy. She agreed in an interview ^[12] that Bin Laden had a valid argument against the U.S., and said, “Why do we have bases in the Middle East? We totally violated the rights of that country,” referring to Saudi Arabia. Apparently, Evans is unaware that those bases were constructed with the permission of the Saudi government and are meant to protect the country from the very people she defends, like Saddam Hussein.

In 2003, Saddam hosted Evans and other Code Pink members in Iraq, aware that their anti-war activism had crossed the line into propaganda efforts on his behalf. As long as a regime redistributes wealth and is socialistic in how it governs, the country is praised by Code Pink, who seems to have little passion for promoting democracy, free markets or the human rights of oppressed citizens overseas. This type of thinking was apparent when she praised ^[13] Saddam Hussein’s social services, saying “there was a good education and health care system, food for everyone. That system didn’t belong to Saddam, it belonged to the Iraqis, it belonged to year of creating what a civilization needed. If your parents didn’t send you to school, they could be put in jail.”

After Saddam’s toppling, Evans supported the insurgents fighting American soldiers, ignoring the fact that many of these were foreign jihadists affiliated with Al-Qaeda-type groups, and were former members of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guards, Fedayeen militia, and intelligence service. To Code Pink, these forces of oppression and evil were the representatives of the Iraqi people fighting for liberation. They are completely unaware that the insurgents fight not only against American forces, but target Iraqi civilians and want to overthrow Iraq’s elected democratic government.

“We must begin by really standing with the Iraqi people and defending their right to resist. I can remain myself against all forms of violence, and yet I cannot judge what someone has to do when pushed to the wall to protect all they love. The Iraqi people are fighting for their country, to protect their families and to preserve all they love. They are fighting for their lives, and we are fighting for lies,” Evans wrote ^[14] on June 26, 2005.

When Coalition forces began an offensive into Fallujah when it was the primary safe harbor of the insurgents, Code Pink reacted by delivering ^[15] tens of thousands of dollars in humanitarian aid to its residents. This act sounds noble on the surface, but when you consider the group’s sympathy for the insurgents, it is quite possible that this aid was given to the enemy side. Furthermore, Evans and her delegation met ^[16] with Iraqi politicians connected to the extremist Iranian-backed militia leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, and other supporters of killing American soldiers.

Evans has even, according to her friend, Jane Fonda, ^[17] met with members of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Benjamin has tried to paint them as being motivated by lack of employment.

“Everybody we talked to said that most of the Taliban are poor rural people, $10-a-day Taliban, who are doing this for economic reasons. If you want to encourage people to stop fighting, encourage them to work,” Benjamin said ^[18].

According to an account posted on the Free Republic forum, a group of counter-protestors were confronted by Evans on August 30, 2004. During the exchange, Evans reportedly said ^[19], “We have nothing against communism.” This shouldn’t be surprising considering Medea Benjamin’s ties ^[20] to the Workers World Party and described her life in Cuba as feeling like she had “died and went to heaven.”

Today, Code Pink is campaigning ^[21] against President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan and against the use of drones in Pakistan. Politics seems to pull more weight than principle though, as Code Pink is against ^[22] an immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan for the exact same reasons as such a move would be wrong in Iraq. President Obama can pursue a similar type of policy that Code Pink lambasted under the previous administration, but they aren’t calling for citizens’ arrests ^[23] of him and his officials like they are doing for members of the Bush Administration.

Code Pink’s embracing of anti-American actors is part of a calculated strategy. Medea wrote ^[24] in 2003 that members of the movement she belonged to needed to “link up with appropriate local and regional groups” overseas to “channel the bursting anti-American sentiment overseas.” Forces supporting America are left out as part of the equation.

Code Pink is not a group genuinely promoting peace and human rights. The organization links up and supports virtually any anti-American actor, ignoring their oppression of their citizens that can hardly qualify as “peace” and the threat that they pose. In choosing its friends, Code Pink’s leadership has decided that the sole standard is that they must be an enemy of the United States.