Americans are, to me, inspiring. After September 11th Americans showed that in spite of progressive urbanization and isolation, we can still pull together and defend our nation when under attack. People from all political, economic, racial and religious backgrounds renewed their commitment to the United States and to their fellow countrymen - and renewed their resolve to stand against our common enemies. However, even in this transformed environment, some side with the enemy - while the enemy is killing American citizens -in horrible ways. These ten people, presented in no particular order, deserve the title “Top Ten Leftist Americans.” Note: If you can’t see the links in this post, you can pass your cursor over the verbiage and you will find them. Or simply change the skin to ‘ours to fight for’ where you can clearly see them.

1. Brian Becker: Becker is co-director of the New York-based International Action Center (IAC), founded by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark to provide “information, activism, and resistance to U.S. militarism, war, and corporate greed.” In November 2001 Becker called America’s Afghanistan campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda “one of the great crimes and acts of terrorism” in modern times. By “rashly hit[ting] out at poverty-stricken and weak Afghanistan,” he said, America was conducting “not simply a defensive war” but a strategy of expansion in the Middle East. Becker deems the 9/11 attacks a natural, retaliatory consequence of “imperialist” and “oppressive” American policies. He is a principal organizer of the massive antiwar protests conducted by the ANSWER coalition, whose close ties with the socialist Workers World Party are well known.

2. Michael Moore: Filmmaker Michael Moore is similarly critical of his countrymen. “I believe our mentality as Americans is to shoot first and ask questions later,” he says. “We just . . . go for the gun in a way that no other country does. . . . The guy who’s sitting in the Oval Office tonight. He wants to bomb [Iraq]. We don’t need any more inspections, let’s just bomb them and we’ll find out later if they have the weapons. That’s the American way.” “Of course,” says Moore, “we all know it’s not about weapons of mass destruction, it’s weapons of mass distraction, you know, so that Bush can get our minds off the economy and what’s really going on because there’s an election coming up. . . . You know that Bush is lying through his smirk when he says Iraq has ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ He has not offered one shred of evidence to prove this.” Like so many of his ilk, Moore is content to cast Bush as less trustworthy than the Iraqi dictator, who passed a law making even the most trifling criticism of his regime punishable by having the offender’s tongue cut out.

3. Danny Glover: Also joining the chorus of affluent America-haters is actor Danny Glover, who, while attending last year’s International Festival of New Latin American Film in Cuba, condemned U.S. sanctions and threats of a war against Iraq. “Our government has declared itself an uncontested empire,” Glover said, agreeing with Harry Belafonte’s assertion that the Bush administration seeks only “to extend its imperialist, economic and political domination all over the planet.” “My position on the war is very clear,” says Glover, “above all for the impact that it will have on women and children in Iraq who are already suffering the consequences of sanctions.” He does not mention that the sanctions are in place for one reason alone: Saddam’s utter refusal to comply with the terms to which he agreed following the Gulf War. At the February 15 “peace” rally in New York, Glover had nothing negative to say about Saddam, while he condemned President Bush and “his administration of liars and murderers.”

4. John Walker Lindh: The “American Taliban” soldier captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan says his “heart became attached” to the Taliban while he studied Islam at a Pakistani madrassah. He later received military training at an al-Qaeda camp where he personally met Osama bin Laden, who thanked him “for taking part in jihad.” By Walker’s own admission, he was told by al-Qaeda members that twenty teams of fellow terrorists had been sent to attack the United States and Israel. On the eve of the U.S. invasion in Afghanistan, Lindh presented himself to a Taliban recruitment center as “a Muslim who wants to go to the front lines to fight.” Yet the day he was sentenced to a twenty-year prison term by a U.S. District judge, the bold Muslim warrior suddenly turned meek, telling the court that if he had known of the Taliban’s close ties to terrorists like bin Laden, he would never have joined it. “I have never supported terrorism in any form and never would,” said the man whose non-cooperation with American CIA agent John Spann led to Spann’s murder at the hands of some escaped al-Qaeda savages.

5. Oliver Stone: Last year, paranoid movie director Oliver Stone joined hundreds of prominent people in the arts and academia who signed a public “Statement of Conscience” drafted by the group Not in Our Name. The signatories promised “to resist the [U.S.] policies . . . which pose grave dangers to the people of the world,” and pledged alliance with those who come under attack. The reference, of course, was not to Americans under attack, but to the sworn enemies of our nation who are feverishly plotting our destruction. According to Stone, the 9/11 mass murders were not caused by the hate-filled hearts of bigoted Islamic madmen, but by large American movie-making corporations. “They control culture,” he said of the corporations. “They control ideas. And I think the revolt of September 11th was about ‘F– you! F– your order.’ ” He goes so far as to accuse the US government of having purposely allowed bin Laden to escape unharmed while pretending to be hot on his trail. “Bin Laden,” says Stone, “was completely protected by the oil companies in this country who told [President] Bush not to go after him because it would piss off the Saudis.”

6. Rep. James McDermott, D-WA: He may be a U.S. Representative, but one could argue whether Jim McDermott is “honorable” after becoming a willing accomplice in Saddam Hussein’s international propaganda war. Just after the anniversary of 9/11, McDermott set off for Iraq with fellow Congressmen David Bonior, D-MI, and Mike Thompson, D-CA, and concluded President George W. Bush is a liar. “I think the president would mislead the American people,” he thundered. After all, maniac-in-chief Bush is “trying to provoke a war.” However, the jaded McDermott had not lost faith in all of humanity. “I think you have to take the Iraqis on their face value,” chirped the credulous Congressman. McDermott claims Tariq Aziz and other Iraqi officials “said they would allow us to go look anywhere we wanted"; evidently, Hans Blix didn’t get the memo. For honoring the word of a maniacal dictator over that of President Bush, the U.S. intelligence establishment and 12 years of UN consensus, McDermott & co. garnered the title “spokespeople for the Iraqi government” from the always-perceptive Senator Don Nickles. We concur.

In 1973, President Nixon signed a truce in Vietnam and withdrew our soldiers. John Kerry and Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden conducted a campaign to persuade the Democrats in Congress to cut all aid to South Vietnam and Cambodia. When Nixon went down in Watergate, the Democrats cut the aid as their first legislative act. They did this in January 1975. In April, the Cambodian and South Vietnamese regimes fell. This is a particularly important fact to remember, because this is exactly what Terry McAuliffe has proposed for Iraq now - that we cut and run. In 1975 the Democrats cut military and economic aid to the two regimes we had been defending against the Communists. As a result, the Communists won. Within three years the Communist victors had slaughtered 2.5 million people.

If we cut and run or are defeated in Iraq, there will be a bloodbath when we leave. The jihadists will slaughter our friends, our allies, and all of the Iraqis who are struggling for their freedom. But this bloodbath will also flow into the streets of New York and Washington and potentially every major American city. The jihadists have sworn to kill us all. People who think America is invulnerable, that America can just leave the field of this battle, do not begin to understand the world we are in.