Thoughts on counter protests

This guy is an unashamed Leftist. He’s proudly chanting away with his friends in front of the Israeli Embassy on Friday afternoon. After a half hour of repeating “Liars, liars, occupiers” and “End Zionist apartheid”, he got sick of being harangued from fifty-feet away by counterprotesters. He marched his pudgy, pasty butt over to a poor policewoman and demanded that she take control of the situation.

He told her she should moderate the protest – that first one side should get the opportunity to shout bumpersticker slogans, and then they’d shut up while the other side had their opportunity to be heard. It was really quite a pathetic request. He even went so far as to suggest that the counterprotesters were rude for interrupting the Jew haters’ protest. One of the Jewish students with whom I stood that frigid afternoon called him “their Jimmy Carter”.

Before this princely fellow made his suggestion, someone had approached the counterprotesters and asked if they could turn down the volume on the bullhorn. Luckily there was only one volume setting – loud.

Although counterprotests aren’t a new phenomena, they are more frequently attended these days. And the Left is having trouble dealing with that. Cindy Sheehan wouldn’t get out of her car last summer when faced with counterprotesters in Virginia, Code Pink demanded police protection in Miami when Cuban-American counterprotesters curtailed their little theater on Calle Ocho this month. The presence of Gathering of Eagles, Move America Forward and other organizations at ANSWER and IVAW protests, which have been relatively unopposed until recently, has driven the Left’s attendance numbers down.

I know that Free Republic and Protest Warrior have always had a presence at these events, but turn out has been relatively low. The Left has always been able to laugh these groups off. But those groups have provided a catalyst for larger, more mainstream counterprotests and protesters are concerned that maybe they aren’t the voice of the majority after all. After having enjoyed sole proprietorship of the bullhorn for decades, they are facing extinction and irrelevance.

I’ve been to many of the protests back to 1999 when I first moved to the DC area and I’ve seen the rise of attendance up until last January’s anti-war demonstration when they peaked. During that protest, there was a small crowd of counterprotesters at the National Archives building. The next protest was the “march on the Pentagon” in Marhc. the protesters were shocked that counter protesters probably equalled the number of protesters and lined both sides of the march route. In September, protesters denied there was a significant presence of counterprotesters, but bothsides of Pennsylvania AVeue was lined with counterprotesters from the White House to the Capitol. That’s pretty significant.

I can say with some certainty, but no real evidence, that counterprotests have had an effect on the debate in this country and I hope they continue.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Politics