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Disrupted speech to Congress shouting, ‘stop Israeli war crimes’

By Aaron Klein

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s much-anticipated speech to a joint session of Congress was disrupted today by a protester from an antiwar group tied to President Obama, WND has learned.

The heckler was identified as Rae Abileah, a 28-year-old Jewish-American activist who works as the national organizer for Code Pink. She coordinates Code Pink’s Middle East campaigns.

While Netanyahu was congratulating the U.S. for eliminating Osama bin Laden, Abileah stood up from the gallery and shouted: “stop Israeli war crimes.”

In a statement released shortly after the incident, Code Pink said, “Prime Minister Netanyahu says that the 1967 borders are indefensible. But what is really indefensible is the occupation of land, the starvation of Gaza, the jailing of dissenters and the lack of equal rights in the alleged Israeli democracy. As a Jew and an American taxpayer, I can’t be silent when these crimes are being committed in my name and with my tax money.”

This was not the first time Abileah heckled Netanyahu, WND has found.

Abileah was one of the five young Jewish leftists who interrupted Netanyahu’s speech at a meeting of the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America in New Orleans in November 2010.

Netanyahu used the incident to congratulate the U.S. for its democratic rule which, he said, creates a platform for freedom of speech and the freedom to protest. “You can’t have these protests in Tehran,” Netayahu said. “This is real democracy.”

In Netanyahu’s address today, he reiterated Israel’s strong ties to the U.S.; warned of Iran’s nuclear armament; offered a peace deal to the Palestinians and affirmed the right of Jews to the land of Israel.

Netanyahu also said Israel “will not return to the indefensible borders of 1967.”

“Israel will be generous on the size of a Palestinian state, but will be very firm on where we put the border with it,” Netanyahu said.

Code Pink, meanwhile, is led by Jodie Evans, the group’s co-founder. The group previously met with Hamas and with leaders of the Taliban.

Evans was a fundraiser and financial bundler for Obama’s presidential campaign.

WND reported that in JanuaryEvans and other Obama associates provoked chaos in Egypt in an attempt to enter the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to join in solidarity with the territory’s population and leadership.

WND has learned that Abileah was part of that delegation attempting to enter Gaza.

WND reported at the timethose protests were led by former Weather Underground terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn – close Obama associates for years.

Also protesting in Egypt was Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the anti-Israel Electronic Intifada website.WND previously reportedObama spoke at pro-Palestinian events in the 1990s alongside Abunimah. At one such event, a 1999 fundraiser for Palestinian “refugees,” Abunimah recalls introducing Obama on stage.

Obama pals provoked Egypt chaos

The Egypt-Gaza saga began when the radicals arrived Dec. 31, 2009. Evans appealed to Suzanne Mubarak, wife of Egypt’s then-president, to allow some 1,400 activists to cross from Egypt into neighboring Gaza to march there, deliver humanitarian aid and stage a protest at an Israeli border crossing with thousands of Palestinian Gazans. Egypt’s Interior Ministry had said the march was illegal and a threat to national security.

Mubarak reportedly offered to allow only 100 activists to cross into Gaza. The decision was at first reportedly accepted by Evans but was later rejected, leading to protests throughout Cairo all week under a heavy police presence.

The rioters claimed some of the protests were violent.

A press release by organizers claimed: “Members of the Gaza Freedom March are being forcibly detained in hotels around town as well as violently forced into pens in Tahrir Square by Egyptian police and additional security forces. Reports of police brutality are flooding a delegate legal hotline faster than the legal support team can answer the calls. The reports span from women being kicked, beaten to the ground and dragged into pens, at least one confirmed account of broken ribs, and many left bloody.”

The website BigGovernment.com noted author Philip Weiss wrote of witnessing Ayers’ and Dohrn’s involvement in the debate about whether to accept Egypt’s offer of allowing only a limited number of protesters to enter Gaza.

“As for the Egyptian statement that only hooligans were staying behind in Cairo … Dohrn said that the principle of ‘All or none’ was a miserable one for activist politics. … A European man in a red keffiyeh screamed at her that she was serving the fascisti. Her partner Bill Ayers gently confronted him and asked him why he was so out of control.”

Dohrn later wrote on a blog that she was briefly detained at the U.S. embassy in Cairo following protests there by her group.

“Bill and I went to the American embassy at 10 a.m. and asked to see the ambassador. We were ushered into a holding pen a block away from the embassy building where we joined 35 people already there, surrounded by Egyptian soldiers,” she wrote.

Protests also were staged in front of other foreign embassies as well as in a public area in central Cairo.

Eventually, the protesters accepted the Egyptian offer of allowing about 100 marchers into Gaza. The marchers indeed entered Gaza and were reportedly met on the Gaza side by Hamas’ former Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

“We have managed to overcome the occupation plans and we will surely meet at the al-Aqsa Mosque and in Jerusalem, which will remain Arab and Islamic,” Haniyeh declared.

Evans squarely blamed Israel for Egypt’s refusal to allow her group to cross en masse into Gaza.

“It’s obvious that the only reason for it is to make Israel happy. Israel is behind the refusal – what other excuse could there be?”

Close Obama associates

Abunimah traveled in some of the same political circles as Obama in the 1990s. Abunimah previously described meeting with Obama at a fundraiser at the home of Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, reportedly a former PLO activist. Khalidi was also a close associate of Obama.

“[Obama] came with his wife. That’s where I had a chance to really talk to him,” Abunimah recalled. “It was an intimate setting. He convinced me he was very aware of the issues [and] critical of U.S. bias toward Israel and lack of sensitivity to Arabs. … He was very supportive of U.S. pressure on Israel.”

According to quotes obtained by Gulf News, Abunimah recalled a 2004 meeting in a Chicago neighborhood while Obama was running for his U.S. Senate seat. Abunimah quoted Obama telling him “warmly” he was sorry that “I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race.”

“I’m hoping when things calm down, I can be more up front,” Abunimah reportedly quoted the senator as saying.

Abunimah said Obama urged him to “keep up the good work” at the Chicago Tribune, where Abunimah contributed guest columns that were highly critical of Israel.

Ayers, meanwhile, became a name in the 2008 presidential campaign when it was disclosed the radical worked closely with Obama for years.

Ayers helped launch Obama’s political career with a fundraiser in his home. Obama served on the board of a Chicago nonprofit alongside Ayers. The terrorist later hired Obama to serve as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a job Obama later cited as experience that helped qualify him to run for public office.

While at the CAC, Obama and Ayers both granted funds to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.

WND columnist Jack Cashill has produced a series of persuasive arguments that it was Ayers who ghostwrote Obama’s award-winning autobiography, “Dreams from My Father.”

Ayers and Dohrn were two of the main founders of the Weather Underground, which bombed the New York City police headquarters in 1970, the Capitol in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972. The group was responsible for some 30 bombings aimed at destroying the defense and security infrastructures of the U.S.

Characterizing the Weather Underground as “an American Red Army,” Ayers summed up the organization’s ideology: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents.”

“Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,” Ayers recalled in his 2001 memoir, “Fugitive Days.” “The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”

Ayers brandished his unrepentant radicalism for years, as evidenced by his now notorious 2001 interview with the New York Times, published one day after the 9/11 attacks, in which he stated, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Ayers posed for a photograph accompanying the New York Times piece that showed him stepping on an American flag. He said of the U.S.: “What a country. It makes me want to puke.”

Read more:Netanyahu heckler tied to Obamahttp://www.wnd.com/?pageId=302969#ixzz1NMcgFma0

The normalcy bias refers to a mental state (head in the sand) people enter when facing a potential disaster.
It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects.

This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of the government to include the populace in its disaster preparations.

The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred that it never will occur. America will always be America – yeah right.

It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.
Possible causes

The normalcy bias may be caused in part by the way the brain processes new data. Research suggests that even when the brain is calm, it takes 8–10 seconds to process new information. Stress slows the process, and when the brain cannot find an acceptable response to a situation, it fixates on a single solution that may or may not be correct. An evolutionary reason for this response could be that paralysis gives an animal a better chance of surviving an attack; predators are less likely to eat prey that isn’t struggling.

Effects
The normalcy bias causes people to drastically underestimate the effects of the disaster.
Therefore, they think that everything will be all right, while information from the radio, television, or neighbors gives them reason to believe there is a risk.
This creates a cognitive dissonance that they then must work to eliminate.
Some manage to eliminate it by refusing to believe new warnings coming in and refusing to evaluate (maintaining the normalcy bias), while others eliminate the dissonance by escaping the danger.

The possibility that some may refuse to evaluate causes significant problems in planning for the future.

Our present disaster is the Obama – Soros (Fabian Socialists) dumbing down of America, Making America a third world country. They are presently behind all the uprising in the middle East. The Fabian Socialists believe the smashing apart the World and rebuilding it in their elite One World Order image. It is easy to pick up their agenda. We write about it every day at our website – www.itmakessenseblog.com It is time to wake up your neighbors and your children.

Sad to say my grown children get their news from the comedy channel, the food channel, the travel channel and believe that somehow the world will stay the same.
Let’s try to get their heads out of Normalcy bias. – The Meister

Posted by Jim Hoft on Thursday, February 10, 2011, 6:15 PM

Medea Benjamin, Communist leader of the left-wing, pro-Islamist-terrorist group Code Pink said in an interview Wednesday the group had previously worked with organizers of the campaign to overthrow the Egyptian government when Code Pink agitated in Cairo the year before.  Code Pink worked on behalf of the terrorist group Hamas against the government’s blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. At the time, Code Pink said their safety in Gaza was guaranteed by Hamas.

Code Pink has acted as a go-between from Hamas to President Barack Obama. In 2009, Hamas gave Code Pink a letter for Obama. Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans, who is also a top fundraiser for Obama, visited the White House and met with a senior aide to Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett after one of the group’s trips to Hamas-controlled Gaza in 2009.

made the startling revelation about previously working with the protest Speaking to Laura Flanders on GritTV, Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin organizers to help Hamas when asked a question about outside influence on the protests.

Benjamin had just returned from a week in Cairo where she and her Code Pink lackey Tighe Barry had originally planned to lead Code Pink’s ninth trip to Hamas-controlled Gaza via Egypt in the past two years. That trip was cancelled by the Egyptian government in the wake of the protests.

As we previously reported, when Benjamin arrived in Cairo last weekend, she was brought to the nerve center of the protests (the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Justice) and met with protest leaders.

Code Pink claims to have raised more than $10,000 to aide those in Egypt working to overthrow the Egyptian government.

Laura Flanders: “We want to debunk the myth that this was the all work of the brotherhood of Islam or the Islamic brotherhood or the work of Code Pink.”

(Plays video clip mocking Glenn Beck for pointing out ties between Code Pink and the Muslim Brotherhood.)

“But there is something in that space between a conspiracy of outsiders and a completely spontaneous eruption. There are groups on the ground–we’ve heard about the role of big labor movement. You found people on the ground who you recognized, who you knew from other work.”

Medea Benjamin: “We have been going to Egypt to get into Gaza several times. And on one occasion a little over a year ago we had 1300 people who were trying to go to Gaza with us called the Gaza Freedom March. And we were joined by many Egyptians who then lo and behold were among the people who were the organizers of this. Groups like the April 6 Movement, people who are part of the journalist groups, the lawyers groups, the, some of the, a group called Kifaya, which means ‘enough.’

So we had interacted with many of these people before. And in fact it was in that square (Tahrir Square) that we had been beaten up by the police just over a year ago. And I had a feeling Laura going back and forth to Egypt that this was going to explode…

Benjamin neglects to mention that among those who traveled to Cairo with Code Pink a year ago were former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, both of whom waged a Marxist terror war against the United States forty years ago. The Muslim Brotherhood coincidentally borrowed a Weather Underground tactic and name for their violent protests, the “Day of Rage.” On that day of rage police stations were ransacked and Muslim Brotherhood (as well as Hamas and al Qaeda) prisoners were reportedly freed from Egyptian prisons by rioting mobs.

While Benjamin ignores Code Pink’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood (Code Pink advertised on the Muslim Brotherhood’s Web site beseeching jihadis to “Join us in cleansing our country!”), she does mention that the Muslim Brotherhood was involved in the protests at Tahrir Square:

“…I have faith in so many of the secular people who just came to (Tahrir) Square and said, “I’m not leaving here,” and for the first time made relationships with the Muslim Brotherhood people…”

Flanders raised an interesting point that critics of Glenn Beck have failed to raise–that the protests didn’t develop in a vacuum, that years of interaction by Egyptians with leftist outsiders experienced in fomenting revolutions and otherwise undermining governments helped lay the groundwork for the campaign to overthrow the Mubarak government.

Benjamin was kind enough to admit to the world that that indeed was the case–and that the groups involved were also involved in aiding the terrorist group Hamas by publicly challenging the blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza and provoking a violent response from the Egyptian government.

While the average man and woman in the Egyptian street may be protesting forfreedom and against corruption and government abuse, some of the organizers of the protests appear to have a different agenda–one of furthering radical Islam by aiding terrorists like Hamas with the help of Code Pink.

An American leftist women’s anti-war group has landed in Cairo to take up banners alongside Egyptians as they fight for the future of their country.  In all of the chaos today, our friends atBusiness Insider noticed this:

According to their website, the group’s nine-person “international solidarity delegation” has been “in the streets with the Egyptian people for the last five days.” On Thursday, the group actually plans to picket outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, though their presence in Egypt is purely accidental:

The international CODEPINK delegation had been en route to Gaza via Egypt but with the Rafah border closed they are unable to enter Gaza, and remain in Cairo. The activists will stay in Cairo until they can safely make their way to Gaza, where they intend to continue their delegation for peace. The delegation includes people from the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, Switzerland and India. This is CODEPINK’s ninth trip to Egypt and Gaza in the past two years.

The group is demanding that President Obama, the U.S. State Department and Congress cease monetary and military assistance to “criminal” President Hosni Mubarak.

One of the group’s founders also insisted they’re also ready to step in front of any microphone. It’s not the first time the pink ladies have protested in Cairo.  In 2009, the group followed President Obama to protest outside his outreach remarks to the Muslim world

Posted on February 3, 2011 at 9:28am by  Jonathon M. Seidl

The following video was taken at the anti-Koch brothers protest in Palm Spring, CA last weekend. What you’re about to see is shocking — “peaceful” Communist leftist protesters calling for the torture and death of Clarence Thomas as well as the death of Fox News executives, and one woman challenging Glenn Beck to a duel with her “Glock.”

You’ll also hear one person calling for revolution and another saying Thomas should sent “back to the fields”:

I saw a political cartoon today that has Patrick Henry saying, “Give me liberty or give me civility.” The apparent point being that civility is a limit on liberty. There is a saying that people in the old west tended to be rather polite, because everybody was armed; to the degree that is true, people voluntarily limited the offensiveness of their speech as a matter of prudence. The reality is that anything that governs any action is a limit on liberty, which is why the Founding Fathers held the idea of limited government as a basic tenet of the foundation of our republic.

There is a balance that should be maintained between complete freedom to say and behave in any way a person chooses and in civility and polite behavior. Politeness and civility come from a person’s upbringing and the social culture of society.

When I was a child, in the 1950’s, society was considerably more polite than it is today, not only in speech, but in grooming, dress, and general behavior. Men were careful of their personal appearance, were chivalrous, tipping their hats (everyone wore a hat), stepping aside to allow others to pass on the sidewalk, holding doors for women, children, and the elderly, and watching their language in public.

The big change to this came from the younger members of my generation in the late sixties and seventies. Inspired by left-leaning professors, it started with college students who refused to honor the draft, developed into opposition to the Viet Nam war; running counter to traditional patriotic support of our soldiers during time of war. This bloomed into the hippy era, drug culture, free love, abortion rights, women’s rights, environmentalism, and a general anti-establishment philosophy. They rose up in a mass rebellion against pretty much every social and moral more of the time.

From the close of World War II, the Soviet Union was very actively working to foment this type of unrest through agents and contacts in the American Communist Party, the Socialist Party, labor unions, the universities, and the media. These have elevated extremism to mainstream politics via left wing groups from followers of Alinsky, SDS, Acorn, and various other “community organizations” and radical groups.

The McCarthy hearings of the early fifties identified some of this activity, but concentrated most on the film industry, where they were fairly successful in disarming that propaganda effort. The irony of the Soviet success in placing socialist plants and creating civil unrest was that, while they ended up succeeding beyond their original hope, it did not cause a push for Soviet style communism, but instead a push toward greater liberty; almost, but not quite, an anarchy type of freedom.

There were some very good things that came from all this. Freedom of speech and expression were given a greater emphasis than ever before. Women gained equality in the workplace and a greater say in the political and civic arena. Citizens became openly hostile toward public corruption and cronyism. Industrial pollution and toxic waste has been reduced by probably 90%.

Business has been changed from the type X labor/management conflict model to a more win/win approach. Families have switched from a rigid patriarchal style, to more of a partnership with greater parental involvement with children. All these are examples of the good that came out of this period of unrest.

However, there were almost an equal number of bad things that came from this period; it was a sort of a “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” situation. The polite civility of our parent’s generation didn’t completely disappear, but it was badly damaged and greatly reduced.

The use of slang, poor grammar, and of aggressive, offensive, and threatening language greatly increased. Self-discipline and personal accountability have been replaced with selfish hedonism and victimization. The concept of earning respect was replaced with deserving respect. Our children have been raised to believe that competing is bad, and winning isn’t important; everybody deserves the same reward regardless of personal effort and performance.

Political correctness has created a society unable to address differences between cultures, races, or other social distinctions, while at the same time destroying the concept of the American social “melting pot.” We now have Afro-, Hispano-, Asian-, etc. Americans who believe the culture and values of their homeland or racial group is more important than their identity as Americans. We have inadvertently created a new type of segregation.

So in addition to the many good things, the history of the Baby Boomers and their children has created all kinds of bad fall-out. Examples are extremely high rates of birth out of wedlock, huge numbers of abortions, huge numbers of single parent families, widespread use of drugs, illogical environmental and social laws, great loss of heavy industry, tremendous growth in government and the taxes required to support it, and a less civil, more crude society.

A second irony is the left accusing the right of using violent rhetoric when the use of extreme aggressive violent language, hyperbole, rhetoric , and imagery has been an invention and mainstay of the left; they are now accusing a much more mild right, in particular the Tea Party and talk radio, of abusing freedom of speech with excessive use of violent language. For any liberal to make such an accusation is not only ironic, but also hypocritical.

Personally, I would like for people on all sides of the political spectrum to avoid aggressive language and instead endeavor to express their ideas and opposition with more accuracy and less emotion. I don’t think this will really happen, because the left is steeped in the concept of using every crisis to drive an emotional following to a loud attack on their opposition.

I recently stated that I dislike seeing the Republicans “playing nice” with the Democrats; and I definitely feel that way. I think the Republicans need to respect the right of the Democrats to their opinions, but I also think Republicans need to strongly counter those damaging and anti-American ideas.

Modern politics is more clearly than ever aligned between not just conservative and liberal, but right and wrong. The conservatives are simply right, and the liberals are simply wrong, and there is nothing in that to compromise. I would rather see congress unable to ever pass another law than to pass one more law that will hurt our country.

An example of left-wing civility

400 Leftist organizations involved in destroying our country  are marching in the One Nation Rally on Saturday, 10.02.10.

Posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 1:13:04 AM by Art in Idaho

Glen Beck had a segment today on the upcoming One Nation rally and described many organizations sponsoring it including communist party usa. I did some research and found on the Communist Party USA site, a link to Political Affairs at the top of the CPUSA home page. Click that and in the middle of the site is a story “March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs”. Click that and you go to a page devoted to the 10.2.10 March on Washington. Then click on One Nation and voila’, you’re at the main One Nation Page. There you can Find a Ride. You can also click the News and Updates Link and click this Link Liberal Groups plan One Nation rally in D.C. There you can click 300 Progressive Groups and you’ll go to Endorsing organizations. At that site it says, wait, not 300 organizations, but 400 organizations: “These are some of the more than 400 organizations, representing tens of thousands of individuals who have endorsed the One Nation Working Together campaign.”

Wait until you see the List. I didn’t know there were so many leftist/marxist/socialist/communist organizations in the United States. Check out the names.

If you got lost in my listed urls, just go Here That’s where The List is. An eye opening experience. Keep in mind I started at the Communist Party USA site and just kept clicking from their site to find the list.

It appears communist are very well organized, must network extensively and have been working infiltration for decades. They are ‘on the march’ as it were. Well, so are we.

We’ve all seen the 1963 congressional record list of the communist goals. A scary list which reveals their decades long struggle to infiltrate, brainwash and eventually take over. Education of Truth is our key. Is the Cold War over? . It never ended.

I hope people go to the rally and document as much as possible. Go in groups and remember these people are brainwashed, unstable but dedicated. If you go, go in small groups and hang tight.

On a personal note, I had 8 people I knew: one family member, close friends, and acquaintances, die in Vietnam. We were told we were fighting communism. We still are. We need to unite and continue this fight or we are going to be overrun from within. This isn’t a college discussion anymore. They are going for total control, and soon. They smell victory. They must be stopped.

George Soros, Obama, and all their Socialist and Communistic friends Believe this

Manifest Destiny as is practiced today is a term used by the Progressives, Socialists, Elites and Communists that there is a widely held underlying belief among them , that they are the “chosen people,” had a divinely inspired mission to spread the fruits of their beliefs to the less fortunate and unwashed masses.
The idea of an almost religious Manifest Destiny is a common staple in the speeches and newspaper articles of the Progressives. Most of the exponents of Socialism were Democrats.

Critics see the Manifest Destiny rationale as a thinly veiled attempt to put an acceptable face on taking freedom from other peoples. Motives are often described as well-intentioned efforts to improve the lot of backward masses, but in truth the motivators were greed, power and control. The Manifest Destiny crowd are thinly disguised in wonderful names – such as Center for American Freedom.
The American people having derived their origin from many other nations, and the Declaration of National Independence being entirely based on the great principle of human equality and freedom, that we have, in reality, but little connection with anyone trying to take our freedom away. On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the future as regards the entire development of the natural rights of man, in moral, political, and national life, we may confidently assume that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity with individual freedom.

Jodie Evans

• Leftist activist and Democratic Party fundraiser
• Co-founded Code Pink for Peace
• Board member of the Rainforest Action Network

Jodie Evans is a radical activist and Democratic fundraiser best known as the co-founder — along with Global Exchange’s Medea Benjamin — of Code Pink for Peace. Evans also works closely with Leslie Cagan, the pro-Castro leader of United For Peace and Justice. Over the years, Evans has supported such activist groups as Citizen Action, the Earth Island Institute, and the California subsidiary of NARAL Pro-Choice America. She is currently a Board of Directors member for the Rainforest Action Network.

Evans rose to public prominence via her leadership role with Code Pink for Peace, a self-described “grassroots peace and social justice movement” formed in 2002 to organize public protests against America’s impending war in Iraq. For four months, from late 2002 through early 2003 (shortly prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq), Evans led Code Pink members in staging all-day antiwar vigils outside the White House. She initiated a campaign where activists literally gave pink slips (women’s lingerie) to President Bush and other pro-war officials — a metaphor for pink slips of the paper variety, which are traditionally given to employees whose jobs are being terminated. These unique tactics brought Evans and her group considerable national news coverage and many talk-show invitations.

After the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Evans led a delegation of fifteen Code Pink women to Baghdad, where they met with Iraqi women for the purpose of “creat[ing] the understanding that the people of Iraq are no different than you and me.” While in Baghdad, Evans repeatedly and publicly painted America as an unprovoked aggressor, and Iraqis as noble defenders of their invaded homeland. “Iraqis continue to resist the occupation in their own way,” said Evans and Code Pink.

In addition to her Code Pink duties, Evans also sits on the Advisory Board of Iraq Occupation Watch (IOW). Her fellow IOW officials include Leslie Cagan; Medea Benjamin; Rania Masri of the Iraq Action Coalition, Peace Action, United for Peace and Justice, and the American Civil Liberties Union; Maria Luisa Mendonca of the World Social Forum; Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies and the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation; Milan Rai of Voices in the Wilderness; Pratap Chatterjee of Berkeley’s Pacifica radio station KPFA; and Stanford University professor Joel Beinin.

In January 2006, Evans traveled to Venezuela with Cindy Sheehan and Medea Benjamin for a friendly meeting with President Hugo Chavez.

In August 2006, Evans was one of a dozen activists (among whom were also Medea Benjamin, Cindy Sheehan, and Tom Hayden) who participated in a Code Pink-sponsored trip to meet Iraqi “political leaders” in Baghdad. Team member Geoffrey Millard referred to this trip as a “diplomatic communication.” As such, it may have violated the legal prohibition against private U.S. citizens conducting their own foreign policy. Among the Iraqi parliamentarians with whom Evans and her cadre met were:

• Sheikh Ahmad al-Kubaysi, who once declared that foreign-born jihadists killing U.S. soldiers were “very brave” heroes who were “guaranteed Paradise”; Al-Kubaysi also is said to have given militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr $50 million.
• Saleh al-Mutlaq, the trip’s prime sponsor, who chided Americans for trying “to brand as terrorists the honorable national resistance movements.”

Shortly after that 2006 trip, Evans spoke highly of the conditions that had existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein: “Let’s go back to the Iraq before we invaded, there was a good education and health care system, food for everyone. That system didn’t belong to Saddam it belonged to the Iraqi, it belonged to years of creating what a civilization needed. If your parents didn’t send you to school they could be put in jail.”

In January 2007, Evans traveled to Cuba as a guest of that nation’s Communist regime.

In early September 2008, Evans perpetrated identity theft that enabled her to gain admittance to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota; she was detained by the Secret Service when she attempted to rush the stage during the acceptance speech of vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

In a June 2008 radio interview, Evans expressed sympathy for the grievances that had prompted Osama bin Laden to order the 9/11 attacks: “We were attacked because we were in Saudi Arabia, that was the message of Osama, was that because we had our bases in the Middle East, he attacked the United States.” When the interviewer subsequently asked Evans whether she considered that “a valid argument,” she replied: “Sure. Why do we have bases in the Middle East? We totally violated the rights of that country. Why do we get to have bases in the Middle East?”

In 2009 Evans and Code Pink led several trips to Gaza, Egypt and Israel to deliver cargoes of “humanitarian aid” to Gaza’s Hamas-led government, and to publicly denounce Israel. During one trip to Gaza in early June of that year, Hamas gave Code Pink a letter to be hand-delivered to President Barack Obama.

In December 2009, Evans and Code Pink led more than 1,000 leftists, among whom were Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, to Cairo in order to deliver “humanitarian aid” to the Hamas-led government of Gaza. To lend credibility to her mission, Evans carried with her a letter of support from Senator John Kerry. Prior to the trip, Hamas had guaranteed the safety of the Code Pink retinue in Gaza.

In January 2010, Evans and Code Pink asked the Muslim Brotherhood to “join us in cleansing our country!” — and implied that an appropriate means of doing that would be to kidnap former President Bush and his wife, as well as Karl Rove and other members of the former Bush administration.

Evans’ ties to Barack Obama are extensive:

• In February 2007, Evans co-hosted (along with her now-deceased husband Max Palevsky and Dreamworks executives Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg) a key Obama fundraiser just weeks after Obama had announced his presidential candidacy. Evans herself donated the maximum $2,300 to Obama’s campaign.
• In April 2007, the Obama presidential campaign announced that Evans was one of its early fundraising bundlers.
• In June 2008, Evans met with Obama at a high-priced fundraiser.
• In late August 2008, Evans attended the Democratic National Convention and, because of her status as a bundler, was invited to two private receptions with Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden.
• In September 2008, Evans attended two exclusive Hollywood fundraisers with Obama. Two weeks later, she met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York City.
• In October 2008, Evans worked with Code Pink’s Los Angeles chapter on a get-out-the-vote campaign in Obama’s behalf.
• After Obama’s election as President in November 2008, Evans and some fellow Code Pink representatives traveled to Iran at the personal invitation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
• On June 19, 2009, Evans visited the White House and met with Buffy Wicks, the deputy of Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. That same month, Evans visited the White House residence.
• In the fall of 2009, Evans, at a San Francisco fundraiser for Obama, personally gave the President a propaganda package compiled from her recent trip to Afghanistan, where she had met with the Taliban. The next day, Evans was given a briefing by Obama’s deputy chief of staff.
• In November 2009, when Obama announced his plan to send additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, his staff coordinated with Evans on the matter of how the anti-war left’s dissent against that policy should be expressed.