Pacifists for Power and Might

Sometimes I do not know whether to laugh or cry when I read about the antics of radicals in the USA and around the world. For one thing, many of them take on such high sounding names that I am suspicious from the first moment that I see their monikers.

Perhaps my lack of confidence in these holy minded groups springs from an experience I had back in the Anti-War Sixties and Seventies. I was Associate Dean at the University of Cincinnati and dealt almost daily with radicals of all sorts.

There was a famous group operating on campus called, Students for a Democratic Society who was as vicious and undemocratic as any mob I ever saw. Their motto could well have been, "Support our anti war rhetoric or we will destroy you!"

One fine spring evening I overheard a group of people vow to "Set fire to the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) Building and burn it to the ground." I immediately called the Campus Cops and reported the conversations with a description of the woman I heard.

The cops thought they knew who it was and immediately wanted to arrest her. We piled in two or three police cruisers and drove over to Daniels Hall to pick her up. It was apparent that the woman, Joyce Reichman, an SDS leader, was not the person I heard so the police reluctantly turned her loose.

Later, SDS developed a plan to kidnap my family and me to teach me a lesson. I am not sure what lesson I was to have learned but maybe it was about supporting SDS and similar peace groups. This, and other similar experiences taught me to have a healthy scepticism about the claims of peace groups.

In today's Opinion Journal we have examples of other hypocritical peace mongering. Opinion Journal [OpinionJournal@wsj.com]

"A group devoted to social tolerance has been accused of being intolerant," reports the Argus of Fremont, Calif. The finger-pointing came after an altercation occurred at a meeting for the Fremont Alliance for a Hate-Free Community, where a discussion about hate crimes deteriorated into an ugly incident, witnesses said.

While trying to eject 71-year-old Barbara Marques from the monthly gathering Monday, the Rev. Garnet McClure grabbed and shook the chair in which Marques was sitting, attendee Sharon Giottonini said.

McClure, a female pastor at Fremont Congregational Church, reacted after Marques said the 2002 slaying of transgender teen Gwen Araujo might not be a hate crime, several witnesses said.

A scuffle ensued and McClure continued to pull on Marques' chair, said Giottonini, a member of the alliance and the East Bay Coalition for Border Security, a Fremont anti-illegal-immigration group.

In Montreal, "more than a dozen people have been arrested after a demonstration against police brutality turned ugly," the Canadian Press reports:

Montreal police riot squad officers are swooping on demonstrators after they got off a subway in the city's east end and targeted a McDonald's restaurant. After that, other businesses were hit. Several trash fires have been set and one police van has been damaged.

They hate hate, and they're violently opposed to violence!