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This email indicated that there was a precise political agenda to the event, which was confirmed the following week when Marcie Winograd and Progressive Democrats and Palisadians for Peace organized two actions -- one to descend on the offices of Democratic Representative Jane Harman and hector her for not signing Rep. Lynn Woolsey's resolution that we should withdraw immediately from Iraq and the second a campaign to descend on Hispanic high schools in East L.A. to dissuade students from volunteering to serve in the American military. The Hispanic community of course has already provided many of the heroes of the Iraq war, including its only Congressional Medal of Honor winner, and as a community takes great pride in the military service of its young men and women.

When I arrived at Pali Hi, the auditorium was filling up. I introduced myself to more than a dozen of the teenagers present and asked them if they knew why they were there. Only about four did. All of them said they were there because their teachers had brought them there. One of the students said the same group had been shown an anti-war film by the same English Department teachers a few days earlier. One of the teachers present was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of John Brown on the chest side and a political slogan advocating the use of force and violence to overthrow governments that were unjust. Of course slavery is an issue that was decided 140 years ago, so obviously the incitement to armed revolution was directed at some other injustice. When I visited this teacher's classroom some days later this suspicion was confirmed by the posters of Che Guevara and Mother Jones she had adorning her English classroom walls along with a sign that said "Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam."

Had I not intruded myself into the Pali Hi proceedings these schoolchildren would have been subjected to the unchallenged views of Ray McGovern. When the event commenced, McGovern described the war in Iraq as a "war for oil" because, as he explained, "we're running out of oil," and the war on terror as caused by "America's support for Israel." He told the students that 100,000 innocent Iraqis had been killed by America (repeating a false story that the left was spreading) and that President Bush's policy in the war was really the policy of Ariel Sharon, a not very subtle suggestion that the Jews control American foreign policy. McGovern also toed Marcie Winograd's party line, telling the students that America should get out of Iraq at once, even if it meant a bloodbath, because staying in would be much worse since we were only spreading terror and killing innocents by being there anyway. The only way to fight the war on terror, he summed up, was to "deal with the grievances of those who hate us," which in his view were principally our policies in support of Israel.

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