You have to wonder who was in the audience that cheered that statement. Must of been either WWP cadre or activists who are totally ignorant of the long history of peace movements in the United States. It doesn't surprise me that the WWP would utter such a lie, since lying is par for the course with their so-called "coalition."
They can't even get it right when it comes to the origin of their own coaltion. Here's a paragraph about their founding which ANSWER includes in all communiques:
"The Coalition organized the first national demonstration against war and racism following September 11 on September 29, 2001, which brought 25,000 people into the streets of Washington DC and 15,000 in San Francisco."
The ANSWER Coalition did *not* organize the first national demonstration against the war after 9-11. That distinction belongs to the Anti-Capitalist Convergence DC, which conducted the first national demonstration on the streets of Washington, DC several hours before the ANSWER event even took place. The ACC, along with the Mobilization for Global Justice and the Latin American Solidarity Coalition, had been organizing for the September 2001 anti-globalization protests for six months. In their typical fashion, the International Action Center tried to muscle in on the organizing and in June of that year announced their own competing anti-Bush rally for that weekend. Both the ACC and MGJ were subject to annoying efforts by the IAC to be a player at the table, but the IAC was pretty much frozen out.
After 9-11, the MGJ decided to call of their protests, the ACC changed their protest into an anti-war protest, and the IAC set up ANSWER in the hopes of establishing themselves as the new movement. Since the ACC had done most of the national outreach for the anti-globalization protests, ANSWER was able to take advantage of this publicity and the numbers coming to DC to claim that they had done this magic act of organizing "the first national demonstration against war and racism following September 11..."
What's more, the existing peace movement did not put together ANSWER after 9-11. Folks involved in the peace movement and other concerned about the plans for war, had a huge meeting in Washington the week before the September 29 protests. There was much talk at this meeting about creating a national coalition, but ANSWER was NOT the result of this meeting. The ANSWER coalition was created by WWP and IAC cadre in the days after 9-11; it was not created via a grass roots process. The fact that a few cadre created this fake coalition allowed them to maneuver so fast in the weeks after 9-11. Remember that many activists were in a state of shock and that things were moving slowly, so it's simply hard to believe that a grassroots coalition was set up within hours of 9-11.
Chuck0