Mideast conflict lands in mayor's race

May 20, 2003  --  Rocky Mountain News 

John Hickenlooper told a reporter he can't recall whether he said the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace has a link to the terrorist group Hamas on its Web site but acknowledges he might have - in a private conversation. If he did, it was a dumb mistake that could have been avoided with a few clicks of a mouse. Yet there are plenty of reasons to be "horrified" by the group's positions, to use Hickenlooper's word, without alleging explicit support for terrorists.

Why is the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace an issue in Denver's mayoral race? Well, that's indirectly Hickenlooper's fault, too. Years ago he helped found a group called the Chinook Fund, which he still supports and which gives money to a number of community-based activist groups. Some do good work and some are eccentric yet harmless, but a few are, to be honest, obnoxious. One is the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace.

When Chinook's support for the group became public some weeks ago, Hickenlooper quickly distanced himself from the funding decision and has since sought to reassure Jewish voters that he does not share its views. We take him at his word - after all, even this newspaper has described the organization with the benign term "peace group" when that is not what it is at all. It is an aggressively pro-Palestinian group whose Web site is replete with links to articles that portray Israel and the United States in the most sinister light possible; to authors such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Said who do the same (when Said isn't inventing details about his own past, that is); and to organizations such as International A.N.S.W.E.R., a radical outfit associated with Ramsey Clark, who has made a career of whitewashing one brutal, repressive regime after another.

Consider the sort of material that the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace believes worthy of attention:

* An article in which a spokesman for the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council compares U.S. policy toward Iraq with 19th century treatment of Indians. "This is the same history," he says. "We are watching history repeat itself again and again. It is mass murder for oil and resources."

* An article claiming U.S. soldiers aided and encouraged the looting of Iraqi cultural treasures: "American soldiers often made the looting possible at all, by breaking open or unlocking well-protected doors and then animating bystanders to plunder: 'Go in, Ali Baba, it's yours!' "

* A column by The Independent's Robert Fisk praising Iranian President Mohammad Khatami for affirming his support of the terrorist group Hezbollah in a speech last week in Lebanon.

* Commentary denouncing the idea of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in favor, presumably, of a single state complete with millions of Palestinian refugees - the abolition of Israel, in other words.

* Analysis comparing Israel's policies toward Palestinians with the Holocaust: "The Holocaust happened to state-less Jews, Gypsies, etc, who became the victims of the nihilism of a racist, Nazi state; similarly, stateless Palestinians have become victims of the nihilism of the racist, Zionist state. Given the nihilistic violence built into the Zionist state, it is reasonable to say that such an outcome is in the interests of both the bodily and spiritual survival of the Jewish people."

You don't have to be a hard-core supporter of Israel to find this sort of stuff offensive. Hickenlooper is right to be "horrified" by the group's positions, even if he did misstate one of the reasons.