By Dave Lindorff
It was a beautiful sunny day yesterday in Philadelphia, birthplace of the United States. Crowds of people took advantage of temperatures that were in the ’80s for the second day in a row to stroll the streets of Center City, shopping and patronizing the various restaurants and coffee shops. The only sign that the US had just attacked the capital of another Middle East country with a shock-and-awe blitz of cruise missiles was a small group of Marxist protesters gamely standing in a line along 15th Street on the west side of City Hall, holding up signs criticizing the attack on Syria and pointing out how US military spending and endless wars are robbing schools, health care and other human needs of funding.
The hastily arranged protest by several dozen activists was not derided by the strolling tourists and passing drivers so much as it was simply ignored like a part of the scenery.
Totally missing was any protest action by the larger peace and justice organizations — the ones that are calling themselves the “Resistance” to President Trump. Indeed, the so-called Resistance has been seeking pledges from supporters to come out on the street the moment Trump tries to fire special counsel Robert Mueller. Obviously the organization has a huge mailing list, but it didn’t turn to it to call people to action in protest of Trump’s criminal launching of an attack on Syria, ostensibly intended to “punish” Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad for an alleged, but not proven, chemical attack on Douma, a suburb of Damascus on April 7.
How could they have taken action? The Democratic Party “leaders” of this “Resistance” — people like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) were actually cheering the Trump attack on Syria, as were many other Democratic members of Congress who keep talking about “resisting” Trump.
Never mind that the attack on Syria was both a major war crime under the UN Charter, a treaty drawn up largely by the US, approved by the US Senate and signed into law in 1945, or that Trump had absolutely no authority under the Constitution to launch the attack, since Syria posed no threat, imminent or otherwise, to the US or its allies.
It’s almost as if the attitude among the broader “Resistance” movement against Trump just went, “Phew, that’s over. At least he didn’t attack the Russians and get us into WWIII!”
The response of the American public, save for a few dedicated souls like those gathered at the City Hall protest in Philly, has been largely ho-hum…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3861