Although it took A.N.S.W.E.R. blackballing a Jewish rabbi to do it. To their credit, the Mercury News did put this story on the front page.

As always, REAL diversity, i.e. diversity of ideas, not diversity of irrelevant factors like race, ancestry, or other externality, is not welcome in the ranks of the radical Left.

"There's been a huge gap between the agendas of some of these groups and the motivation of the vast majority of people who attend these events,'' said Rabbi Doug Kahn of the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Relations Council.



"We've clearly been disturbed by the anti-Israel sentiment that has been mixed in on occasion with the larger anti-war movement. I've disagreed with Lerner on many occasions. If Michael Lerner is considered unwelcome, then it makes fairly clear some real questions about how tolerant the organizers are of diverse views."



Well, gosh. Comes the dawn!

Longtime observers of the Bay Area's anti-war movement are not surprised that infighting among a wide array of organizers has finally boiled into public view.



"This has been brewing for a while,'' said David Walls, a sociology professor at Sonoma State University. "To restrict speakers because they have been publicly critical of some of these groups is really undemocratic, and it's a very bad and counterproductive principle."

The dust-up with Lerner isn't A.N.S.W.E.R.'s first brush with controversy. Many of the group's lead organizers have close ties to the Workers World Party (WWP), a socialist sect whose views often are criticized as too extreme. Among the WWP's more controversial positions are its support for the governments of Iraq and North Korea, and its defense as recently as 2000 of the Chinese government's deadly 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.



Another item of interest in the article, tagged onto the end as an afterthought:

Even as anti-war protests are growing, support for President Bush's Iraq policy has risen, spurred by Secretary of State Colin Powell's Feb. 5 presentation of the administration's case against Iraq before the United Nations. Powell documented Iraqi attempts to hide weapons evidence and argued that Islamist militants with ties to Al-Qaida had established a terrorist cell in Baghdad.



Zogby International, a non-partisan polling firm, has been tracking U.S. opinion of Bush and his Iraq policy. A poll released Sunday found that nearly six in 10 respondents said they now support a war against Iraq, an 11-point increase since a Jan. 27 poll. At the same time, opposition to a war declined from 49 percent to 37 percent.



Oddly, the New York Times apparently missed this particular poll. Sixty percent support. Did any of you hear this anywhere else?