Ideas have consequences. Inaction has consequences. For the past several years, I've chronicled the left’s escalating war on military recruiters — and the apathetic, weak-kneed response to it. The anti-recruiter thugs on college campuses and in liberal enclaves have thrived thanks to a combination of public indifference, law enforcement fecklessness and left-wing ideological apologism.
It has 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. At a national conference of anarchists in Washington, D.C., last weekend, a "solidarity sticker" glorifying the biker bomber made the rounds. On the Internet, "peace" activists threatened the Gathering of Eagles, a national military support group that organized a rally at Times Square last weekend. 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 was not an isolated incident, but an all-too-predictable symptom of reckless tolerance for dangerous "peace" peddlers skating on the edge of sedition. Lone nuts? Here is a brief history of the anti-military recruitment movement’s mounting acts of vandalism and violence. I'll list, you decide:
March 2003: Anti-war zealots in Ithaca, N.Y., target a recruitment center that had been hit before with Molotov cocktails. On St. Patrick’s Day, wielding cups of their own blood, they entered a Lansing military recruitment office and splashed their blood over recruiter posters, military cutouts and the American flag. Daniel Burns, Peter De Mott, Clare Grady and Teresa Grady were convicted in 2005 on two misdemeanor counts of trespassing and damaging federal property. All but Burns have been released from prison.
January 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*t" — on office property.
Mid-Feb. 2005: 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 2005: In East Orange, N.J., young anti-military protesters shattered the windows of an Army recruitment station and a neighboring 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.
May 2005: Anti-military students swarmed the booths of the U.S. 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 2006: 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 all over its doors. University of Minnesota students splattered red paint all over an Army recruiting station.
December 2006: Anarchists in Lawrence, Kan., crippled business at an Army/Navy recruitment center, where workers' car tires were slashed and bomb-proof glass had to be installed.
Jan. 2007: Anti-war radicals laid siege to the U.S. 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."
July 2007: A teenager in Bremerton, Wash., was charged with a felony for slashing 42 government 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."
August 2007: In Stamford, Conn., Francis Monaghan is arrested on charges that he twice left a fake bomb package at a military recruitment office.
Jan. 2008: The Code Pink/city council siege at the Berkeley recruiting center reaches a boiling point. Protesters chain themselves to the station to shut it down, and vandalize the windows with bloody handprints and signs branding recruiters "death pimps."
Feb. 2008: Anarchists trash the recruiting station at 14th and L Streets in Washington, D.C., which has been subjected to multiple attacks.
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, connect the dots, 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."