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Jewish World Review April 12, 2001 / 19 Nissan 5761
Evan Gahr
Last Thursday evening, Chung delighted a Washington, DC gathering of left-liberal clergyman with her vision for a new women's movement that would deface federal property, threaten murder and neglect their own children. Her April 5 emancipation proclamation was issued at the "Founding Conference of the Religious Partnership." Cosponsored by television producer Norman Lear's People for the American Way, the conference launched a new movement that purports to reclaim Martin Luther King's legacy. How did Chung's exhortation to criminal behavior, which arguably flirted with the boundaries of protected speech, follow in King's nonviolent tradition? In a speech repeatedly interrupted with laughter and applause, Chung told how her youthful dream to commit anti-American terrorism had given way to her new plan to smear menstrual blood all over the United States. "I'm representing recovering terrorist because I came from very radical student movement and we grew up [in South Korea] really dreaming about bombing American embassy. I was madly in love with the most radical leader of student movement who also tried to bomb American embassy and I married to him because I thought if I married a revolutionary I could be a feminist at the same time I can have a marriage." Soon after their marriage, her husband became a religious fundamentalist. They got divorced but she remained animated by her hatred for America, which she said today is a sick country ruled by "cowboys," therapists and lawyers. Cowboys exploit and lawyers sue, she explained. But the "therapists" were most problematic because they helped keep potential revolutionaries docile. "Sometimes I think maybe we ask all American women stop taking antidepressant and become, becoming a mad woman. We all mad--become so mad, we go to Pentagon, we go to Washington," she declared to enthusiastic applause. "We go to ... armament making factories. We just become a totally mad woman, like smearing our menstrual blood and saying 'you shall die' or something like that." After brief laughter and applause, from a crowd that included the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, she continued. "We don't comb our hair. We don't wash our hands. We don't make love to our husband. We don't take care our children. We just become mad woman. It would change America." She concluded, "We shall overcome." Chung was followed at this session on "Spirituality in Action" by Arthur Waskow, a longtime functionary for the far-left Institute for Policy Studies. Has Waskow also envisioned quite literally bloody ideas for social justice? According to a well-informed source, at a notoriously anti-white and anti-Semitic New Left conference in 1967, Waskow urged that whites voluntarily castrate themselves to redress racism. Waskow denies the allegation. He refused to answer follow-up questions and labeled this writer "tendentious" and "foolish" for inquiring about some of his published remarks, including his suggestion that Jews could plant trees in North Vietnam to hasten the arrival of the Messiah. In any event, Waskow, is probably the only rabbi who dresses like a stereotypical Muslim terror chieftain--complete with Arab skull cap and dress-length shirt draped over his huge stomach. Waskow told a black-white morality tale about the riots in Washington, DC that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King. The City was placed under "military occupation" and a curfew only enforced on blacks. Speaking of injustice, why did he fail to mention that many white Jewish businesses were destroyed in what he glorified as an "insurrection?" Still, all this selective history seemed rather quaint on the heels of Chung's hate-filled rant, before a conference that PFAW subsidized with $200,0000 form its tax-exempt educational fund (longtime contributors include Hollywood mogul David Geffen's charitable foundation).
Her speech took place after this writer's Wall Street Journal piece on the
conference went to press. The next day, PFAW president Ralph Neas publicly
denounced the author for an unfair account of the conference. Is PFAW
prepared to denounce Chung in no uncertain terms and bar her from future
conferences? Sadly, Andrea Dworkin would be an improvement. To remain silent
on Chung is to condone and thereby embolden the forces of anti-American
terrorism and criminal mendacity. Unlike the religious right that so
frightens PFAW, these twin plagues pose a serious threat to the real American
03/28/01: Liberal chickens come home to roost
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