Once again, television personality Bill O’Reilly has raised the hackles of the liberal media. This time, he suggested that if the city of San Francisco doesn’t want military recruiters on campus, then they shouldn’t expect help from the military if the need arises, "Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead. And if Al-Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead."
A little over the top? Well, maybe, but O’Reilly raises a good point. Whether the voters in San Francisco want to acknowledge it or not, the world can be a very dangerous place with lots of bad guys who don’t want to reason with us. And as usual, there’s more to this than meets the eye.
Prop 1 doesn’t actually bar recruiters from recruiting on campuses but rather, it challenges the city officials to offer programs that might be more appealing to students. And while San Francisco School Board member Dan Kelly paints the recent proposition in benign terms, saying that it will “strengthen the board’s resolve†to make sure recruiters “don’t have free access,†student organizations such as College Not Combat feel emboldened by the vote. Activist Bob Matthews says of the proposition, “We now have the moral weight of the city behind us, and it’s definitely a valuable asset to have in our corner."
But if you look beyond the rhetoric, you’ll find that the supporters of Prop 1 have a different agenda than simply wanting to end war. San Francisco State University has been smack in the middle of this debate starting on March 9, when around 100 war protesters and members of the International Socialist Organization, a group dedicated to the destruction of capitalism and very antagonistic to America, confronted five College Republicans military recruiters at a career fair and forced them off the SFSU campus.
But it doesn’t end there. Cindy Sheehan’s Palestinian flag-loving friends are firmly entrenched at SFSU. Sheehan herself has appeared there (it’s where she made the infamous statement that "George Bush is a terrorist") along with her friend and mentor, Lynne Stewart, who was convicted in Federal Court of conspiring with "the Blind Sheikh" to smuggle communications to terrorist organizations in the Middle East.
At that same event, student leftists actively proselytized fellow students by distributing flyers that asked, “Should we support the Iraqi Resistance?â€Â
And a large chapter of the General Union of Palestinian Students has been active at SFSU for decades. GUPS is actually an arm of the PLO, falling under the PLO’s “Department of Mass Organizations.†Many GUPS, such as SFSU graduate and PLO negotiator Saeb Arakat, are recruited from the SFSU campus into the PLO.
When there’s more Palestinian flags than American flags on campus, it should give pause. The people of San Francisco may have acted out of sympathy to the anti-war message, but the message from the people who engineered Prop 1 appears to be something completely different. The folks at SFSU are clearly not against war – they’re actively encouraging war with Israel. And they’re not against recruiting on campus – recruitment for the PLO is alive and well.
Sooner or later, someone with the bully pulpit, perhaps O’Reilly, will connect the dots. Then the curtain will be drawn on these nefarious activities.