Remember ANSWER, the Communist anti-Semitic, pro-Saddam organization that was responsible for the bulk of the protests in American cities in 2002 and 2003, prior to our liberation of Iraq? Guess what, dude...they're back!

This morning's Washington Times reports the astonishing--to me, anyway--news that last week's massive pro-illegal immigrant demonstration in Los Angeles was organized by International A.N.S.W.E.R. We've written about International A.N.S.W.E.R. a number of times; for example, here. It is a Communist organization and a front for the Workers World Party. The Workers World Party has been around for quite a while. It is one of the last unapologetically Stalinist organizations in the world; it supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. More recently, the WWP and ANSWER have supported dictators like Saddam Hussein and North Korea's Kim Il Jong.

These same groups organized or participated in most of the major demonstrations against the Iraq war; the fact that Communist organizations were heavily involved in the antiwar movement was, for the most part, an unreported story.

I once did some research to try to find out who is behind the Workers World Party. I obtained the government forms that it filed. Those forms are not required to identify donors, so, while I could infer that the WWP is kept afloat by donations from a few wealthy donors, I couldn't tell who they were. The individual named on the documents did not return calls asking for more information.

This is a project that is still well worth doing. I imagine that if a trained investigator--a reporter, say--exercised some persistence, it wouldn't be hard to find out who is behind these radical organizations. For some reason, though, mainstream reporters seem remarkably incurious about this subject.

The idea of investigating who’s behind a peace rally doesn’t occur to [the MSM] because they’re not inclined to think there might be anything unsavory about the organizers.

How could there be? They’re for peace. And most people in most newsrooms know someone who’s involved in the peace movement - an old friend, a neighbor, someone from church. (Yes, reporters go to church.) Everyone in the paper has read a dozen stories of Spunky Grandmas going off to march for peace. Even if Peace in a specific instance might have perilous repercussions, Peace in General is surely a concept we can all uphold. There’s no more reason you'd investigate the advocates of peace than you’d investigate a food shelf.

And if the food shelf turned out to be run by anarchists who think grocery store workers should seize control, smash the cash registers and open the doors to the poor - well . . . it's a idealistic notion that means well, but it’s not typical of food shelves in general, and if we lead with that fact, people might not give to food shelves, so let's just call them "advocates for the co-op grocery movement."

You really want to lose the argument with these people? Point out that the peace-rally organizers are Communists. I’ve noted this odd phenomenon for years; you can be indifferent to Communism, you can be an actual Communist, and no one will really care, but opposition to Communism will really make some people suspicious.

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Nowadays, if you point out that someone’s a Communist, you might well be accused of - dum dum DUMMMM - McCarthyism. The term has morphed from its original meaning. It no longer means falsely accusing someone of being a Communist. It now includes correctly identifying someone as a Communist, or ascribing a taint to someone because they don’t reject the Communists in their midst. (I’ll admit there’s a significant difference between the two.)

It was bad enough many protesters proudly waved Mexican flags. With such love of their homeland you'd think they'd want to return. I now know the protests are organized by a group that hates freedom and calls you a racist if you oppose them. My sympathy is wearing thin, and I'm pretty liberal when it comes to immigration. Americans who think there are too many people coming into the country will reject the massive protests by anti-American, totalitarian sympathizers. That will only harden their stance pushing Congress to a more hardline position. A fence will go up, people will be deported, and businesses will be punished. ANSWER will blame racism when they should look in the mirror.