Last week, Senator Tom Cotton lied about CODEPINK in front of Congress. He said we were funded by the Chinese Communist Party and called CODEPINK volunteers “lunatics.” Sure, we certainly are a bit eccentric – but people who support peace are simply representing the interests of the vast majority of the world that doesn’t want endless war. The real lunatics are the people who support genocide, endless war, and stoking conflict with nuclear armed nations. And the only people who are actually paid off by foreign interests are the senators like Tom Cotton, who take money from AIPAC.
Tell Tom Cotton to stop lying about CODEPINK & trying to intimidate anti-war activists!
I want to set the stage for you a bit more, because this isn’t just about CODEPINK. We are a very small piece of the puzzle, but what happened to us last week is just a microcosm of the repression that is going on all over the U.S. During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, run by the head of the committee Tom Cotton, our volunteer Tighe got up and said: “The greatest threat to global security is Israel!” That’s when Cotton called him a “lunatic”, as Tighe was being dragged out of the hearing.
But don't worry, we took matters into our own hands. Dressed as the Ethics Committee, we raided Cotton's office for April Fools' Day!
Anyways, Tighe isn’t a lunatic, he’s entirely correct. Israel has led a nearly two year-long genocide on the people of Palestine, invaded Lebanon, bombed Iran, bombed Yemen, bombed and expanded into Syria, and violated numerous ceasefire deals. When Israel is stoking a huge regional war by invading and bombing numerous sovereign nations, what would a sane person call that other than a “threat to global security”?
Tom Cotton called Tighe a “lunatic” just as Marco Rubio called students who oppose genocide “lunatics.” They call us names to discredit us, hoping that ordinary people fall for the smears and do not take Tighe’s words seriously. But Tighe was just stating the facts – facts that the warmongers in power don’t want us to recognize.
Moments later, Cotton went on to claim that CODEPINK is funded by China’s Communist Party. Retired U.S. Army Colonel and former diplomat Ann Wright promptly stood up in defense of the truth: we aren’t funded by the Chinese Communist Party. But Ann’s truth didn’t seem to matter, because, in the subsequent days, other senators would go on to repeat the same lies in other hearings. Once a lie is told, as Michael Parenti says, “The truth seldom catches up because those who rule nations… have no interest in giving it equal currency.”
Tell Tom Cotton: Retract your lies about peace activists! Start serving the people's interests!
These members of Congress may seem laser-focused on us, but they aren’t. They are regurgitating these kinds of lies about everyone who is challenging the U.S.-Israel war machine. They say that students who don’t like seeing babies killed in bombings are funded by Hamas or Hezbollah. They say that people who don’t want war with Iran must be Iranian agents.
They say that people who are struggling to make ends meet, who insist their tax dollars shouldn’t be sent off to prolong war in Ukraine are affiliated with Putin. What this aims to do is marginalize and isolate the anti-war movement. Every time this accusation gets levied against someone else and we fall for it, we are capitulating to their intimidation and repression.
I coincidentally wrote a piece about Mahmoud Khalil and the new Red Scare that got published the day that Tom Cotton slandered us. What’s happening to Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk are among the ugliest outcomes of what happens when a government lies about people – like Tom Cotton did. Here’s an excerpt from my essay in InkStick:
"The repressive forces despise that most of us are just regular people, trying to keep our head above water. Some of us, like activists in DC and Mahmoud Khalil in New York, take the time to express the opinions of the masses. As the legal lines blur, the right-wing raises the threshold of hysteria, and the center makes room for them to do it through capitulation and political ease, Americans must stand firm in our beliefs. Demanding dignity is not terrorism, and the elite ringing the alarm bell about anti-war activists proves that the only threat we pose is to their ever-hungry war machine."
Let’s get this straight: we aren’t funded by China. Students who are anti-genocide aren’t terrorists. All such accusations sound bananas in isolation – but, over a long period of time, they work to isolate and silence movements. For the activists who are even more vulnerable than CODEPINK is, don’t let them.
Tell Tom Cotton to stop lying about peace activists! Demand an apology and retraction!
In solidarity,
Danaka and the entire CODEPINK team
