On July 23-25th in Albany, New York, roughly 850 people gathered to found the United National Anti-War Coalition at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. The events are worth revisiting in light of recent revelations about Jeffrey Epstein, and the changed conversation regarding Palestine among leftists in the past few years.

The event was presided over by Jeff Mackler, a longtime Trotskyite anti-war organizer who had led the National Mobilization Against the Vietnam War, and insisted on following Robert’s Rules of Order. As a disciplined Workers World Party member, Caleb Maupin sat in the front of the hall next to Sara Flounders and each time a resolution WWP’s leadership opposed was put forward, he shouted with almost automatic precision “Motion to extend debate!”

Many elderly anti-war activists from the Vietnam generation were pleased to see a young man in his early twenties get so fired up about anti-war politics. His repeated line of “Motion to extend debate” became a bit of a joke among other attendees. Multiple times Caleb took the floor during the debate to push for WWP’s political line, insisting the anti-war movement take an anti-imperialist line and not advocate regime change at the same time it opposed military interventions around the world.

When Gerry Gordon, an older Trotskyite who worked with United Food and Commercial Workers and US Labor Against War, moved to remove Palestine from the anti-war coalition because “workers support Israel and will be confused by this,” Caleb took to the podium.

He said,“My name is Caleb. I’m 22. I work at a gas station in Cleveland, Ohio. My co-workers are not Zionists. Neither are the people I used to work with at the call center. It’s just a lie to say we should avoid talking about Palestine because workers support Israel. They don’t. It’s the Democrats who support Israel, and the labor union bosses who work for them, and we shouldn’t be worried about offending them.”

Caleb’s remarks received thunderous applause, but looks of hatred from a cluster of activists associated with the Communist Party USA, led by Judith LeBlanc who sat in one corner of the hall. WWP leader Fred Goldstein later commended Caleb for his remarks “sticking up for shop floor workers.” One elderly Jewish woman confronted Caleb in the hallway outside the main hall: “You called me a Zionist! Why don’t you just call me a baby-eater!”

Caleb was shocked, and did not even understand that her remarks were a reference to the “blood libel” used to justify pogroms against Jews in the Middle Ages. He responded, “I didn’t call you anything! I said working people don’t support Israel!” She snarled, “Someday you’re gonna grow up, kid! You’re gonna learn it’s people like you that are the reason these wars keep happening!”

Whoever this woman who confronted Caleb in 2010 was, most likely a member of the Communist Party USA as she sat next to Judith LeBlanc in the hall, she was more than simply a leftist who disagreed with him about Palestine being included. She had been sent to the convention to block criticism of Israel, and her invoking of the term “baby eater” and use of the phrase “people like you” indicates she was an ideological Zionist. As far as she was concerned, Caleb was a gentile,goyim. Despite him being an atheist and leftist anti-war activist at the time, she associated Caleb with the “blood libel” that Jews sacrifice children and interpreted his statement that normal working people like those who worked with him did not support Israel as a call to form an angry anti-Semitic mob and storm the ghetto. This is the Zionist mindset, though it is often dressed up in leftist and occasionally even anti-Israeli clothing.

MEK functions as a part of Israel’s push for US military attacks on Iran and has done so since 2003. MEK’s leader, Miriam Rajavi, directs the supposed “Islamo-Marxist” group that coordinates with Mossad, from Paris, the same city from which Bob Avakian directed the Revolutionary Communist Party from 1982-2004 while in “exile” from the United States. In the following years, Deborah Sweet would bring anti-Iran activists to UNAC rallies, resulting in scuffles with Iranians who do not share their “regime change” perspective.

The convention was full of anti-war protest hustlers, the misleaders who enabled Obama’s disastrous presidency to proceed in its criminal activities with restrained, ineffective opposition. LeBlanc and the Communist Party USA had worked closely with Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and the Democratic Socialists of America to run anti-war rallies as United for Peace and Justice. Brian Becker, who had broken away from Workers World Party in 2004 to form the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and taken the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) coalition with him, also sat in the hall with a cluster of college-aged flunkeys. Deborah Sweet of the Revolutionary Communist Party’s “World Can’t Wait,” previously known as “Not In Our Name,” sat in the hall.

Source: News - The Center for Political Innovation