On Friday, the leaders of the Peace Workers wrote an article responding to statements that have "blatantly misrepresented" their organization. In doing so, however, they misrepresented the statements in those articles.
The accusation that the articles claimed that Professor Wolfe created and leads the Peace Workers meetings is misleading. The only statement made about Professor Wolfe creating the group was in the first article I wrote. If the members of the group and the initial founders have stated that Professor Wolfe did not create it, so be it. All other statements about his relationship with the program, however, are still relevant and have not been refuted. He is the faculty advisor for the group, the chairman of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies (through which he provides the group funding for their activities), and he recruits members from his classroom to join the group as a part of their grade.
The Peace Workers proved my statements about the intent of the in-class trip to Washington D.C. by providing the link to the organization that organized it. Anyone who visited the link would find that a Quaker group called the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) organized the event. Quakers are extreme pacifists and do not support the use of violence or the military under any circumstance. The FCNL intends to connect "historic Quaker testimonies on peace, equality, simplicity and truth with peace and social justice issues which the United States government is or should be addressing." Events at this "lobbying workshop" included "Adrien Niyongabo of the Alternative to Violence Project in the African Great Lakes region" who "spoke to the group about his peace work in Africa." The students also attended a "Meeting for Worship at Friends Meeting of Washington" and the "novice lobbyists" visited the statue of Gandhi. The intentions of the organizers and students attending were clearly anti-military. The three Peace Workers who went stated that they wanted to protest the war in Iraq.
The big list of projects and groups the Peace Workers provided intended to respond to "being called terrorists." If the members would have read the articles they would have seen that neither Thomas Ryan nor David Horowitz called anyone in the group a terrorist. The only mentions of the group's activities and terrorism in Thomas Ryan's article point out that the Peace Workers were a part of the "Books not Bombs" protest which also had support from the Muslim Student Association and other groups that sympathize with terrorist groups. Ryan also points out that links on the Peace Workers Web site will connect students to these types of groups. David Horowitz points out in his article, "One Man's Terrorist is Another Man's Freedom Fighter," also published in Frontpage Magazine, that the group is part of a coalition that includes MSA and the Young Communist League. This again refers to the "Books not Bombs" protest.
In no way was the Peace Workers group misrepresented. Documentation of the group's activities has been heavily researched and none of the connections that have been found to groups such as MSA and YCL have or can be refuted. Don't let the leaders of this group twist the words of others in an attempt to delegitimize their statements and purpose.
Write to Brett at
bamock@bsu.edu
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