You gotta hand it to Cindy Sheehan – she’s not a quiter. As part of her ongoing effort to remain in the spotlight, she is about to release a book entitled Not One More Mother’s Child, which will be a compilation of material from various sources.
The catalyst for the project is Arnie Kotler, Buddhist monk and book publisher from Hawaii, who followed Sheehan’s exploits this summer. He read the various blog entries she made during those heady days and thought, "This is already a book. This is incredible." His publishing company, Koa Books, has already printed 20,000 copies to be released this Wednesday. Says Kotler of the urgency of the project, "We got it done as quickly as we could, and the deepest reason is to stop the war."
Reading the general description of the content of the book, it looks as though it will be as confused and haphazard as has been the activities and pronouncements of Sheehan herself. To those people who oppose the war with honest and patriotic motives, take a closer look at Sheehan before hitching yourself to her wagon.
A couple of days ago, I wrote of the plethora of Palestinian flags that have been waving everywhere Sheehan goes. That’s because so much of the supposed anti-war movement that Sheehan has willingly collaborated with is really a network of pro-Palestine, anti-Israel and yes, pro-terrorist organizations whose true motives are not to save the lives of American soldiers, but to get the U.S. military presence out of the Middle-East altogether. We’re making it impossible for them to operate unencumbered as they wish to do.
On the one hand, I empathize strongly with Sheehan’s grief over the loss of her son. I myself came desperately close to losing my two-and-a-half year-old daughter this summer and I can tell you that there can be nothing worse than facing the death of your own child. But I think that Sheehan’s grief has mutated into a particularly virulent cancer.
First, she has become enamored with her own celebrity, a condition that is obvious to all but her most loyal admirers. In a phone interview with an AP reporter from her home in Berkeley, California, Sheehan gushes with giddy excitement about, well, herself, "I never wrote anything more than a note to excuse my kids from school before Casey was killed, so to see something I wrote in print with my name on it is amazing!"
But the darker side of all this, and the side that I doubt will be played up in the book, is her association with some really dangerous and clearly anti-American people and organizations. For example, Lynne Stewart, the lawyer who was convicted of conspiring with the "Blind Sheik" Abdel Rahman, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 is considered by Sheehan to be a mentor.
Stewart’s crime was smuggling secret messages from Rahman to his followers in the Middle East calling for violence against Israel. While on the witness stand at her trial, Stewart was asked if she knew that these messages were in fact "fatwas" instructing followers to kill Jews. She replied that yes, she was aware of that but that Rahman had told her that killing Jews was a good thing.
Then there is British member of Parlaiment, George Galloway, who was a featured speaker at Sheehan’s March on Washington, which the press conveniently stayed away from. Galloway dressed in Palestinian head gear and had the Palestinian flag, not the American flag, flying on stage behind him. He delivered a scathing attack on the United States and President Bush after lying to the U.S. Congress about his involvement in the Oil-for-Food scandal. Galloway apparently accepted quite a bit of cash from Saddam Hussein before he was driven from power – no wonder he’s angry with us!
Other groups in Sheehan’s circle of friends and supporters include, among others, ANSWER, The World Worker’s Party, The Muslim-American Society, and the list goes on and on. The one thing all these groups have in common is that they are rabidly anti-America and anti-Israel.