RUTHFULLY YOURS

Promising to “flood the subways,” AnswerCoalition.org advised “every high school, college and community…to flood the subways with their message, their chants, and their signs…In the name of Mike Brown, Eric Garner and all the victims.”

Wherever you stand on policing issues, and whether or not you think disrupting the subways is an effective way to win support for reform, it’s worth knowing that the ANSWER agenda goes far beyond issues of “racist police murder.”

The professionally printed ANSWERCoalition.org signs have been prominent in the anti-police protests throughout the city.

The ANSWER folks hand out hundreds of signs proclaiming, “Stop Racist Police Terror” and “Stop the War on Black America” at each organized action to maximize media exposure.

But we should all understand the real goals. From its earliest days, ANSWER Coalition has been mobilizing support for entirely different issues, such as the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and ending (in ANSWER’s words) the “ongoing occupation of Afghanistan, the renewed assaults on Iraq and Syria, and the drone attacks on Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.”

ANSWER Coalition was founded by Ramsey Clark and his International Action Center in 2001, a few days after the 9/11 attacks.

Clark, a progressive activist who served as US attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson, founded the International Action Center in 1992 to help radicalize others by providing “information, activism and resistance to US militarism, war and corporate greed, linking with struggles against racism and oppression within the United States.”

Yet ANSWER Coalition has always had a strong commitment to other issues. On many, it has heavy support from groups such as the Free Palestine Alliance, the Muslim Student Association and the Middle East Children’s Alliance. Last August, this coalition organized a 50,000-strong march against Israel in Washington, DC.

While several progressive religious leaders were initial supporters of ANSWER, the coalition’s Steering Committee includes several groups that have long protested US intervention in Latin America and the Middle East, including the Free Palestine Alliance, Partnership for Civil Justice, Nicaragua Network, International Action Center, Muslim Student Association of the US/Canada, Mexico Solidarity Network and the Middle East Children’s Alliance.

And ANSWER has been Anti-Israel (and anti-US “imperialism”) from the start, seeking to unite the antiwar, anti-racism and pro-Palestinian movements.

Indeed, it boasts of having sponsored the “largest demonstration in US history in support of Palestinian rights” on April 20, 2002.

In May 2003, ANSWER supported the Iraqi resistance against our own US troops in the publication “Counter-revolution and Resistance in Iraq,” warning: “The occupiers now confront a people who have a long and proud history of resistance. . . The antiwar movement here and around the world must give its unconditional support to the Iraqi anti-colonial resistance.”

And, as New York Times reporter Lynette Clemetson noted in 2003, some of ANSWER Coalition’s “chief organizers are active in the Workers World Party, a radical Socialist group with roots in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. . . The party has taken positions that include defense of the Iraqi [Saddam Hussein] and North Korean governments and support for Slobadan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president being tried on war crimes charges.”

By joining in recent protests over policing, ANSWER may have increased its appeal, but its real agenda has much more to do with these international concerns.

Most recently, ANSWER Coalition’s Web site celebrated the Obama opening to the Castro regime by lauding the release of the “Cuban Five” — Cuban nationals convicted in 2001 of acting as a spy ring.

ANSWER sees the Five as heroes who “came to the United States to expose and prevent terrorism directed against Cuba from within the territory of the United States.”

In reality, these spies helped Cuban authorities monitor Cuban exile groups in Florida and US military activities in the Caribbean.

One of the Five, Gerardo Hernández, was convicted in 2001 of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the shooting down of two Brothers to the Rescue planes over Cuba in 1996, killing four Cuban émigrés.

Bottom line: If you’re an hour or two late for work thanks to Thursday’s protest, don’t write it off as a result of the horrible deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

The folks behind your nightmare commute are exploiting those tragedies for their own ends. And if you’re out at a protest, think twice before holding up one of those handy ANSWER signs.

Anne Hendershott is director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.