RUTHFULLY YOURS

The same violent protesters in Ferguson, Missouri demonstrating against the killing of Michael Brown have also been taking it to the streets in Detroit and elsewhere to press for the release of a Palestinian terrorist who killed two Israelis.

Activists are blackmailing the grand jury that is now hearing evidence against Wilson. If the grand jurors refuse to indict Wilson, radical activists are promising even more mayhem. The message is unmistakable: indict the cop, and there will be peace; don’t, and Ferguson will burn.

Brown is the young, black, 6’4″, 292-pound man who was killed by white police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9. When media outlets describe Brown they usually omit the fact that he viciously assaulted Brown and tried to seize his handgun, presumably in an effort to do the officer harm. Journalists also tend to downplay the fact that minutes before Brown attacked Wilson he robbed a convenience store.

The Palestinian terrorist is Rasmea (also spelled Rasmieh) Odeh who was convicted by a Detroit jury on Monday of immigration fraud. Prosecutors accused Odeh of killing Israelis in the Sixties and then lying about it in U.S. immigration papers.

Odeh was previously convicted in Israel “for her role in the 1969 bombings of a supermarket and the British Consulate in Jerusalem, which were carried out on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terrorist organization,” according to the Investigative Project on Terrorism. Prosecutors said one of the supermarket bombs killed two people and injured others. Odeh received a sentence of life imprisonment but was released after 10 years as part of a prisoner swap.

Odeh used to live in Michigan and resided in Chicago until her bail was revoked Monday. In Chicago she was employed as associate director of the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), which was founded by terrorist promoter Rashid Khalidi and his wife, Mona. Khalidi, a Columbia University professor and former director of the PLO’s press agency, is a well-known friend of Barack Obama. AAAN, which is hostile to Israel, claims “to challenge government policies that violate the civil, political and human rights of the Arab American and Arab immigrant community.”

The seditious collaboration in Ferguson between anti-American left-wingers, some of whom are well-funded, and anti-American Islamofascists isn’t all that unusual in U.S. politics but it receives scant attention from the media.

Leftist and Islamist groups routinely work together in the U.S. Not many on the activist Left are wary of their comrades’ working relationship with Muslim totalitarians who would joyfully slit their atheist, infidel throats upon coming to power. One such leftist, Meredith Tax, acknowledged in a book last year that aligning with Islamic fundamentalists was a terrible idea.

But Tax is a very rare bird. Most leftists see America’s enemies as their natural allies, so when an opportunity for a working partnership arises they seize it with gusto. As they see things, whatever it takes to advance so-called social justice is justified.

As a Sixties radical once wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

In other words, whatever the cause, whether inner city blacks or illegal aliens or women, it is merely a pretext for action. It is an opportunity to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of the power needed to foment and effectuate revolutionary change.

Rana Baker, a writer at Electronic Intifada, explained the Marxist, identity politics-driven rationale for this cooperation between American leftists and Islamic supremacists in Ferguson. In an article filled with politically correct drivel she wrote:

Unsurprisingly, many of the police deployed to crush unarmed protesters demanding justice for the brutal murder of eighteen-year-old black American Mike Brown are Israel-trained. Despotic tactics Palestinians largely associate with Israel’s colonial military, such as teargassing protesters and harassing journalists, have all been implemented in Ferguson. Although Ferguson and Palestine are two different contexts, both places and their people are fighting against white supremacist regimes of oppression which continue to view them as “disposable others” and act accordingly … it is the moral responsibility of every Palestinian to support and foster relations with the struggles of the oppressed all over the world.

No one who follows the Left should be shocked to learn that Ferguson has been dominated by rent-a-mobs in recent weeks, complete with leftist astroturfers determined to stir the pot.

Groups endorsing Ferguson October, last month’s festival of leftist looting and self-righteous posturing in the beleaguered St. Louis suburb, included a hodgepodge of activist organizations –many of them Saul Alinsky-inspired pressure groups — that have little or nothing to do with Ferguson, Michael Brown, or Darren Wilson. The only thing these labor movement and Occupy Wall Street activists had in common was that they were left-wing.

Among them were: Action for the Common Good; Advancement Project; Alliance for a Just Society; Amnesty International; CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities (Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence); ColorOfChange.org; Catholic Worker; Chinese Progressive Association; Coalition of Black Trade Unionists; Code Pink; Divestment Student Network; Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation; Fighting Against Natural Gas (FANG); Gamaliel Foundation; International Socialist Organization (ISO); Juvenile Urban Multicultural Program (at Syracuse University); Korean American Resource & Cultural Center; LeftRoots; Million Hoodies Movement for Justice; National Domestic Workers Alliance; National Network for Arab American Communities; National Organization for Women (NOW); New Black Panther Party; New Economy Coalition; PICO National Network; Progressive Democrats of America; Sierra Student Coalition (a project of the Sierra Club); St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee; Universal African Peoples Organization; United for Peace and Justice; US Action; US Palestinian Community Network; Veterans for Peace; and Working Families Party.

Many of these groups have taken money from radical billionaire George Soros. Those on his payroll include Advancement Project, Gamaliel Foundation, NOW, and US Action.

Lee Cary has also painstakingly detailed at American Thinker the 45 organizations that are now placing demands on police agencies in the St. Louis area. The groups, which are part of the Don’t Shoot Coalition, are attempting to define the rules of engagement between law enforcement and activists to make it easier for radicals to set Ferguson on fire in the event Wilson is not indicted.

Remnants of the ACORN activist empire are involved in organizing unrest in Ferguson.

Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE), a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, is the rebranded Missouri branch of the former Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) which filed for bankruptcy in late 2010. That ACORN state chapter reconstituted itself in December 2009 as MORE under orders from ACORN’s national headquarters. President Obama used to work for ACORN and he represented it in court as a lawyer.

MORE has been active in the protests and in efforts to free jailed demonstrators so they can continue vandalizing businesses, intimidating perceived adversaries, setting fires, throwing projectiles and urine at cops, and engaging in the Left’s usual modes of so-called nonviolent protest. MORE believes that protesters should be given a blank check to inflict whatever harm they wish on the community in pursuit of social justice.

MORE is also a recipient of taxpayer funding — and to no one’s surprise — it is not a good steward of those dollars. MORE received $21,000 for its “foreclosure prevention” efforts but “did not fully comply” with the rules, according to the St. Louis city comptroller’s “fiscal monitoring review” released a few days before Brown was shot.

MORE’s executive director is longtime ACORN organizer Jeff Ordower. Ordower, an outspoken vote fraud apologist, previously ran Missouri ACORN and oversaw ACORN’s Midwest operations. He was also an SEIU organizer in Texas.

The Working Families Party, founded in New York State in the 1990s by ACORN members, is also involved in Ferguson. It endorsed Ferguson October but the extent of its on-the-ground involvement was unclear at time of writing.

All these superficially distinct groups have come together in Ferguson to pay homage to violent criminals –a murderer of Israelis and a would-be murderer of a police officer– for two reasons.

First, because Rasmea Odeh and Michael Brown are model citizens, according to the leftist worldview. Radical activists see them and their disruptive, antisocial behavior as representing the best that humanity has to offer.

Second, because banding together and pooling their power to disrupt society helps to create strife and chaos. The subsequent crises can be leveraged to promote the kinds of change that leftists would like to see.

As the old radical said, the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.