Posted on 11/01/2004 12:25:44 AM PST by calcowgirl
On August 5, 2004, speaking to about 7,000 minority journalists at the "Unity 2004: Journalists of Color Conference", John Kerry reportedly said "I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror" than President Bush.
While briefly reported by USA Today, and The Atlanta Journal Constitution, it was largely ignored by the press at the time the comment was made. John Tierney's commentary in The New York Times "Political Points" did award Kerry the "Kumbaya Prize" for the week based on the comment. (Kumbaya Prize, Runner-Up: Teresa Heinz Kerry, for telling an audience in Missouri, ''The only way you solve problems is by holding hands and talking about it. And that's what we want to do in this campaign.'')
The following week in Dayton, Ohio, Vice President Cheney criticized Senator Kerry's comment by pointing out that America has not won any wars by being "sensitive."
The mainstream media then published headlines such as "GOP Assails Kerry's Call for 'Sensitive' War; Bush, Cheney Remarks Escalate Conflict With Democrats Over Combating Terrorism (Washington Post, Aug 13, 2004) and "Cheney Gets In a Jab on Terror as Kerry Throws a Punch on the Economy" (New York Times, Aug 13, 2004).
But, no one seemed to ask the meaning or real source of Kerry's "Sensitive War" comment.
The phrase is strikingly similar to that stated by Kerry's old anti-war associate, Cora Weiss.
The following excerpt is from an August 21, 2000 article by J. Michael Waller in Insight on the News about Ms. Weiss and the sources for funding proponents of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The CTBT was narrowly defeated in Congress in 1999, notwithstanding Kerry's appeal on the Senate floor to delay the vote in an effort to effect successful passage.
From her glass tower at 777 United Nations Plaza in New York City, Samuel Rubin Foundation President Cora Weiss sees things with a clear sense of purpose in protracted terms. Her father, Samuel Rubin, built his Faberge empire in the 1930s with clandestine help from Soviet-backed Communist groups, according to veteran journalist James L. Tyson. Such an ideologue was Rubin that he named his son Reed after U.S. Communist John Reed, whom the Soviets buried in the wall of the Kremlin. The elder Rubin founded and endowed the foundation where Weiss has been a fixture since at least the 1960s.
During the Vietnam War, Weiss funded not only agitprop against U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia but groups supporting Hanoi and the Viet Cong against U.S. troops. For decades she funded a range of hard-left groups from the Center for Constitutional Rights - which has litigated for the likes of CIA defector Philip Agee and Puerto Rican terrorists (Agee and one of the terrorists are living in Cuba) - to the Institute for Policy Studies. During the Cold War, though, most of the Samuel Rubin Foundation's grantees were considered even by liberals to be on the far left. Today, however, Weiss and her beneficiaries are more in the mainstream.
Not that they have shed their radicalism. They and others have changed the terms of debate. Unlike many Vietnik activists and Soviet apologists, Weiss never has broken with the hard left and, unlike even Jane Fonda, never has apologized for supporting the Communists. Today Weiss is a leader in a new effort among large defense- and security-- related foundations to coordinate their giving more effectively.
Not that they have shed their radicalism. They and others have changed the terms of debate. Unlike many Vietnik activists and Soviet apologists, Weiss never has broken with the hard left and, unlike even Jane Fonda, never has apologized for supporting the Communists. Today Weiss is a leader in a new effort among large defense- and security-- related foundations to coordinate their giving more effectively.
That effort began early last year. Amid concern that a handful of conservative senators were threatening to derail decades-old arms-control processes, the largest or most active foundations convened a Peace and Security Funders Group, or PSFG, in Cambridge, Mass. The initial steering committee consisted of Weiss and her family foundation along with the Ploughshares Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the John Merck Fund, the Hewlett Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The PSFG welcomed smaller traditional defense and security funders to join but has a bylaw permitting any member to be expelled without cause.
PSFG coordinator Wayne T. Jaquith has more than 30 years of movement activism under his belt. He and many grant-giving officials in foundations have worked together informally for decades. While the target then was "U.S. imperialism," many of the big funders are promoting an imperialism of their own. At one PSFG meeting a MacArthur Foundation foreign-policy official said, "On some things I am an unabashed imperialist - feminism is one of them." "Weiss, in an October 1999 funders meeting, said she wanted to create more "sensitive" armed forces, saying she detested "men in uniform with guns" and outlining a campaign for global gun control and a plan to make every U.N. peacekeeping soldier attend gender and cultural sensitivity training."
Once one sees that the big funders of defense and security policy are coordinated at the top, a lot of grants make more sense. "It's rather like the FBI discovering that the mob had a council," says a source inside the grants community.
The big funders felt invincible. Last year's Senate defeat of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, or CTBT, shocked the new funders group into overdrive. "I'm sitting here stunned at the defeat of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty - something many of us have worked on for 35 years," Jaquith wrote to funders-group members in advance of their October 1999 meeting in San Francisco.
Discussing the CTBT's defeat at the San Francisco gathering, Weiss told members, "We have to organize. This is how all the anti-Vietnam demonstrations got funded - at a table like this."
For more on Cora Weiss, see:
"Red Queen of 'Peace' " from FrontPageMagazine.com , December 11, 2002
"Kerry: No comment", from Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, October 03, 2004
Maybe this is Kerry’s “sensitive war”
JUST8
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