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In 2000, Fertig made a monetary contribution to anti-war activist Medea Benjamin‘s unsuccessful run as the Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate in California. Benjamin, who co-founded both Global Exchange and Code Pink, aligns her politics closely with those of Fidel Castro. She was a principal architect of the violent 1999 protests in Seattle, where rampaging anti-globalization activists burned cars, smashed windows, and caused millions of dollars in property damage. She spearheaded a 2004 effort to donate $600,000 in medical supplies and cash to the families of the terrorist insurgents who were fighting American troops in Fallujah, Iraq. And in 2006, she and Cindy Sheehan together traveled to South Korea to publicly condemn a U.S. plan for expanding an American military base near Seoul. According to Ms. Benjamin, the “innovative” economic policies of Venezuela’s communist president Hugo Chavez have placed his country at “the center of a new, progressive model of socioeconomic development that is shaping Latin America’s future.”
It should be noted that Fertig’s support for far leftists and Marxists does not end with Benjamin, Castro, and Chavez. In 2008 he donated money to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and was, for awhile, in contention to be selected as a delegate for Obama in California’s 30th Congressional District.
Representing Fertig and his fellow plaintiffs in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project was David Cole, a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). In Cole’s estimation, the Court’s ruling “basically says the First Amendment allows making peacemaking and human rights advocacy a crime.” Since 9/11, Cole and CCR have focused their efforts heavily on derailing the U.S. government’s newly implemented anti-terrorism measures, which the Center depicts as having “seriously undermined civil liberties, the checks and balances that are essential to the structure of our democratic government, and indeed, democracy itself.” In December 2006, CCR and the Humanitarian Law Project jointly petitioned a federal judge to dismiss charges that had been brought against the Hamas-linked Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which in 2001 was shut down by the U.S. government because of its terrorist ties.
In 2002 Cole wrote, “It appears that the greatest threat to our freedoms is posed not by the terrorists themselves but by our own government’s response” to 9/11. That same year, Cole was a signatory to a “Statement of Conscience” drafted by Not In Our Name (NION), a self-described “peace movement” initiated by C. Clark Kissinger of the Revolutionary Communist Party. The NION Statement condemned not only the Bush administration’s “stark new measures of repression,” but also its “unjust, immoral, illegitimate, [and] openly imperial policy towards the world.” According to NION, it was the American government – and not that of any other nation – that posed the most “grave dangers to the people of the world.”
Also in 2002, Cole came to the defense of Sami Al-Arian, the University of San Francisco professor arrested for his involvement with the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. “People cannot be punished for advocating criminal activity unless the Supreme Court has said their speech is intended and likely to incite imminent lawless actions,” Cole maintained. That said, he claimed that Al-Arian’s infamous remark wishing “Death to Israel” was protected speech.
Cole and CCR garnered considerable media coverage in 2005 when representing the self-described radical attorney Lynne Stewart during her trial for having abetted the terrorist ambitions of Islamic Group leader Omar Abdel Rahman, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. When Stewart was found guilty in February of 2005, Cole lamented that “this case illustrates how out-of-hand things have gotten in the ‘war on terrorism’” (scare quotes in original).
In the calculus of leftists like Ralph Fertig and David Cole, there is nary a pro-terrorist word or act that cannot ultimately be defended under the rubric of “free speech.” Thus continues the Left’s quest to interpret the United States Constitution as a national suicide pact.
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