Mercury Rising

David Horowitz's DiscovertheNetworks.org is achieving new lows in its attacks on Cindy Sheehan. The basic idea behind Horowitz's Networks is that if you ever appear with anyone, you are part of a conspiracy with them. By his criterion, Bush is a terrorist because he campaigned with Sammy Al-Arian and invited him to the White House.. Not to mention the drug dealer, name since forgotten, and Ahmed Chalabi. By this sort of flabby reasoning, Sheehan is also an FBI agent, since Coleen Rowley has headed for Camp Casey. David Horowitz is living proof that you can make this stuff up. Anyway, the basic story that Horowitz's site is putting out is this: "According to Kaplan's account, Sheehan's rhetoric that evening could as easily have been written by the "Blind Sheikh" [and 1993 World Trade Center conspirator Abdul Ahmed Rahman] himself; she, too, regarded America as the "Great Satan": "America has been killing people on this continent since it was started. This country is not worth dying for." So, we have the word of Lee Kaplan. That's it. The quote marks around the words "Great Satan" almost certainly amount to a lie. There's no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt on the other quotes. See, Kaplan is an interesting guy. Very interesting. He is an activist-journalist (sort of like Jeff Gannon, but without the sex angle), and the chief editor of Dafka, also spelled Davka. Dafka stands for "Defending America For Knowledgeable Action. "[I]n modern Hebrew slang it means 'in your face!'." Davka states as its mission "to proactively fight the propaganda and indoctrination campaign currently being waged on US campuses by proactively providing the truth and information about the Arab and militant Muslim war being waged against a fellow American ally, Israel." "Proactively providing the truth" sort of sounds like preventing anyone with a different view from speaking. Would misquoting Cindy Sheehan be a means of "proactively providing the truth?" Dafka claims that "the Arabs are simply too primitive to make any viable lasting peace." While it doesn't claim there is a genetic basis for this, it certainly makes it sound as if it's pointless to do anything except kill Arabs. Dafka also makes some very strange ideas about what makes for an extremist. Included in its so-called Rogues Gallery are Michael Lerner of Tikkun. An interesting choice from an interesting activist-journalist. However, the report of a link of Dafka to a death threat seems to have been in error. The associations that Dafka has are also interesting. AIPAC, accused of spying on the US. Little Green Footballs. MEMRI, which makes a point of translating and publicizing every crackpot statement by any Arab. WorldNetDaily. If Kaplan were held to the same standards he holds Sheehan, he'd obviously be a lying, racist, Israeli spy. Fortunately, the only sort of people trying to convict people by who they associate with and silence dissent through "proactive truth" are Horowitz and Kaplan. By the way, if Kaplan's writing leaves you wondering who Lynne Stewart is, Law.com has a pretty good description of the case This certainly looks like an example of overzealous prosecution. The charges were filed two years after the infraction and involved a government approved translator and ironically involved letting Rahman tell the Islamic Group to keep on fighting with one another. Uhhh... isn't that what we want? Stewart almost certainly deserved to have been disbarred for disregarding court instructions. Had it rested there, it would have hurt her very deeply. But calling this a terrorism prosecution, as Networks and Kaplan did, is to confirm the sense that justice was not done.