Just got back from that march/rally. About 40 of the usual suspects, lotsa familiar faces. Reactions from bystanders, shouts of, "Self-Hating Jews!, " and (sarcastically), "I Love Israel!"
Got into it with a far right opportunist, who I'd months ago, outside the downtown public library, seeing he was reading, "The Spotlight, " got into "debating" The Holocaust. This fellow, has an eerie resemblence to Michael Lerner (!). Was passing out leaflets, with quotes from Roger Garaudy, the ex-PCF intellectual, gone into Holocaust Denial/Revisionism. His rejoinder, again, on the Zyklon-B, "Where's the evidence?" I raised my eyebrows, "You Believe the Leuchter Report, eh?" The conversation went downhill from there.
Thank G*D, there were folks I knew from News & Letters
http://www.newsandletters.org/Issues/2002/March/lead_Mar02.htm
, Soli and DSA, to chat with!
One note on the small #'ers. Last yr. a series of demos outside the Israeli Consulate here on Montgomery St. gathered, I'd say, a good thousand folks, mostly Arab-Americans. Michael Pugliese