IDEAS have consequences.Inaction has consequences. For the last
several years, I've chronicled the left's escalating war on military
recruiters - and the weak-kneed response to it. The
anti-recruiter thugs on college campuses and in liberal enclaves have
thrived, thanks to public indifference, law-enforcement fecklessness
and left-wing ideological apologism.
It's now been a week
since the Times Square military-recruitment-center bombing. The
investigation continues - and so does the left's denial of the ongoing
campaign against military recruiters.
From Pittsburgh to
Berkeley, anti-war extremists have smeared recruiters as "death pimps"
and "child predators." The militant Code Pink group continues to
organize in-your-face protests to drive recruiters from major
metropolitan areas.
The Times Square bombing wasn't an
isolated incident, but a symptom of reckless tolerance for dangerous
"peace" peddlers skating on the edge of sedition. Lone nuts? Here's a
brief history of the anti-military recruitment movement's mounting acts
of vandalism and violence:
* March '03: Anti-war zealots in
Ithaca, NY, target a recruitment center that had been hit before with
Molotov cocktails. On St. Patrick's Day, they entered a Lansing
military recruitment office and splashed cups of their own blood over
recruiter posters, military cutouts and the American flag.
Daniel Burns, Peter De Mott, Clare Grady and Teresa Grady were
convicted in '05 on two misdemeanor counts of trespassing and damaging
federal property. All but Burns have been released from prison.
* Jan. 20, 2005: At Seattle Central Community College, Army recruiter
Sgt. Jeff Due and his colleague Sgt. 1st Class Douglas Washington were
hounded by an angry mob of 500 anti-war students.
The
recruiters' table was destroyed; their handouts, torn apart. Protesters
threw water bottles and newspapers at the soldiers.
The far-left Students Against War had been agitating to kick the
recruiters off campus. The college administration refused to punish the
radicals.
* Jan. 31, 2005: Recruiters in Manhattan reported
that a door to their office had been beaten in. Anarchist symbols were
scrawled in red paint on the building.
On the same day, New
York police collared a young Manhattan College junior and charged him
with throwing a burning rag into an Army recruiting station and ruining
the door locks with super glue.
* Feb. 1, 2005: At a South
Toledo, Ohio, recruitment center, unhinged protesters hurled manure all
over the building. They broke windows and sprayed vulgar graffiti -
"War is Sh--" - on office property.
* Mid-Feb. '05:
Twenty-year-old anti-war goon Brendan Walsh is sentenced to five years
in federal prison for hurling a Molotov cocktail through the window of
a Vestal, N.Y., military recruitment office in 2003.
* March
'05: In East Orange, NJ, young anti-military protesters shattered the
windows of an Army recruitment station and a Navy office.
At
City College in New York, a campus secretary protesting recruiters was
charged with second-degree assault, disorderly conduct and obstructing
governmental administration. Police also arrested students Justin
Rodriguez and Nicholas Bergreen for resisting arrest, disorderly
conduct and assaulting a police officer.
* March/April '05:
Anti-war extremists at Bronx Community College shut down several
military recruitment sessions. At UC Santa Cruz, "peace" thugs drove
recruiters off campus after an hour-long demonstration of shouting and
window-banging.
* May '05: Anti-military students swarmed the
booths of the Army Corps of Engineers and the USAF at a San Francisco
State University career fair. In Wisconsin, an Air Force ROTC
information day was canceled due to threats by the University of
Wisconsin-Madison chapter of Stop the War.
* April '06: UC Santa Cruz students ambushed military recruiters.
Vandals at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill tossed cans
of red paint in front of an ROTC office and spray-painted vulgarities
on its doors. University of Minnesota students splattered red paint on
an Army recruiting station.
* December '06: Anarchists in
Lawrence, Kan., crippled business at an Army/Navy recruitment center.
Workers' car tires were slashed and bomb-proof glass had to be
installed.
* Jan. '07: Anti-war radicals laid siege to the US
Capitol and smashed windows at a downtown Washington recruitment
center. Pittsburgh radicals shut down a recruitment station for a day,
wielding signs calling recruiters "child predators."
* March '07: Vandals broke into a Milwaukee recruitment station wielding crowbars.
* July '07: A teen in Bremerton, Wash., was charged with a felony for
slashing 42 tires of Army recruiting vehicles to protest the Iraq war
and because he "hated the military."
In Maryland,
anti-recruiter vandals smashed a Rockville Air Force career center. In
Lufkin, Texas, Navy recruiters were the targets of vandals who keyed
their cars, smashed their windows and shot at their vehicles with "with
what appeared to be a high-powered pellet gun."
* September
'07: The far-left group Iraq Veterans Against the War calls on
followers to commit fraud to interfere with military recruiters.
Anti-war punks shut down the Times Square recruitment station.
* October '07: Code Pink defaces the Berkeley recruitment office, branding our troops as assassins.
* Jan. '08: Code Pink protesters chain themselves to the Berkeley
station to shut it down, and vandalize the windows with bloody
handprints and signs branding recruiters "death pimps."
* Feb.
'08: Anarchists trash the recruiting station at 14th and L streets in
Washington, DC, which has been subjected to multiple attacks.
* March 2008: The bomb goes off at the Times Square recruitment station.
When will this escalating war end? There will be no end in sight until
lawmakers, law enforcement, the media and the public open their eyes to
the hate and stop coddling the increasingly crazed and emboldened
anti-military militants before more bombs go off - and innocents get
harmed - in the name of "peace."