<HTML>Brad: This is not the way to conduct honest political debate. By the time I intervened in the thread, it had already become one about the legal restraints [or the lack thereof] on private employers firing employees for exercising their First Amendment rights outside of the job, and what unions could do in that context. I was responding to what were at least the last two generations of the thread, all of which focused on this question. If you had chosen to take up the issue of what I had to say many weeks ago at that point, when it was fresh in our minds, it would have been perfectly clear that the reason why I placed "Zionism" in quotation marks in my comments, was not because I questioned its existence -- an absurd position that no one of sound mind would take -- but because I was suggesting that "anti-Zionism" can be used, on the American left and elsewhere, as a "politically correct" cover for what is, in fact, anti-Semitism. And before someone jumps the gun here, let me be perfectly clear: I was not saying that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism [the flip side of "Zionism is racism"] ; I was saying that it can be -- and often is -- used as a cover for anti-Semitism. << Leo, this is a point about political repression being carried out by supporters of Zionism - a term you once put quotes around in a certain response on this list a few weeks ago in order to allude to its "nonexistence". It is not about trade unionism. Raising it in this context is just a distraction from the issue at hand. >> Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869) Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- </HTML>