Extremist organizers could be ‘a gigantic ruination for the antiwar movement’

The new antiwar movement is in danger of being hijacked by bizarre extremist groups – and most protesters don’t even know it,” reports the liberal online journal Salon.com.

Todd Gitlin, former president of the radical 1960s group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), laments that the upcoming October 26 protests will be “a gigantic ruination for the antiwar movement.”

“That’s because the politics of the group behind it, the International Action Center [IAC], are anathema to most Americans,” according to the article, which says that most protesters don’t share the organizers’ extremism. The IAC issued a statement in 1999 defending the Saddam Hussein regime’s “right to a military force sufficient to defend itself.”

According to Salon.com, “The International Action Center and the Revolutionary Communist Party [a Maoist group sponsoring protest activity] aren’t just extremists in the service of a good cause – they’re cheerleaders for some of the most sinister regimes and insurgencies on the panet. Once people realize this, it could easily discredit any nascent antiwar movement, unless a more rational group moves to the forefront.”

IAC founder Ramsey Clark, Gitlin notes, is a co-chairman of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic.