Wed, Aug 18, 2004 6:11pm ET

Send to a friend Print Version

Hannity predicted nonviolent peace advocacy group will be "out of control" at RNC, will "repulse" Americans

As part of his claim that protests expected at the upcoming Republican National Convention in New York will be "good for the Republicans," Hannity & Colmes co-host Sean Hannity predicted during an August 17 interview with Scott Lynch, communications director of the group Peace Action: "[I]f you get as out of control as I think you're capable of, I think the American people will be repulsed by it."

Lynch replied, "It's ridiculous to say that about us." And he's right.

A Media Matters for America Nexis search yielded no evidence of violent protest by Peace Action, but it did uncover many instances of Peace Action spokespeople urging nonviolent civil disobedience. The Associated Press reported on March 20, 2003, that Gordon Clark, director of Peace Action from 1996 to 2001, "speaks passionately about the importance of leaving violence out of anti-war protests." According to the Portland Press Herald on September 28, 2002, Peace Action Maine executive director Greg Field has noted that "[w]hen Peace Action Maine engages in acts of civil disobedience, we do it in the tradition of passive, nonviolent resistance, in the tradition of Thoreau, Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr." The Courier News (Bridgewater, N.J.) reported on January 27, 2002, that "[f]or years, Peace Action has carried on the non-violent tradition of protest Martin Luther King Jr. spearheaded during the civil rights movement." And Peace Action of Central New York executive director Diane R. Swords wrote an editorial in the Post-Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.) on September 29, 1998, praising protesters of the School of the Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) who "have maintained non-violence at all times."

According to the Peace Action's website, the organization is "the nation's largest grassroots peace group," with a membership of 85,000 and "30 state affiliates and over 100 chapters that organize on a local level." Peace Action organizes through a quarterly newsletter and an "Action Alert Network which allows citizens throughout the country to rapidly respond to important legislation online," and works to "lead successful issue advocacy efforts in congressional districts throughout the nation as part of its Peace Voter Campaign." The group, which has a 40-year history, is now focused on the structural aim of building a "broad political base for a new US foreign policy."

—A.S.

Comments (0)
 
Post a new comment

You must be a registered user to post and flag comments on this site.

Please log in or sign up to post in this forum.

Media Matters uses a taxonomy structure to help readers find information on various subjects. You can view all items by issue (the broadest category), view an issue's subissue, and even drill down to a particular topic. You can also look at items according to the related media personality, show/publication and network/publisher.

Social bookmarking sites allow you to save links to interesting items and share them with other users. Some, like Digg.com, also allow you to discuss these items and promote them to wider audiences by "digging" the ones that you like. To start using these services, simply register with the site in question.