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Send in the Marines!

When in danger, call for the US Marines.  That’s what CodePink’s Medea Benjamin did

Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, who can turn the air blue when shouting chants against American Marines called out for the Marines in front of Marine Recruiting offices in Berkeley yesterday.

Eamon Kelley, the young Marine who is featured in Move America Forward’s TV commercial that ran on Fox News earlier this week, could hardly believe his own ears when Benjamin called on the Marines for help.

Kelley, who is recovering from back surgery, spent his day in Berkeley, where CodePink continues with Berkeley council’s blessing, to keep a virtual blockade at the recruit center, expanding its efforts to harass American troops and to turn back any young Americans looking to enlist.

City Council stubbornly refuses to apologize and continues to subsidize free parking for CodePink to drive soldiers out of town.

“While we were at the protest in Berkeley from 12 to 4 p.m., a white Volvo drove by and a man spat upon CodePink,” Kelley wrote in an email to MAF’s Melanie Morgan.  “They chased him down the street and got into a verbal altercation.  The police were NOWHERE in sight. 

“That’s not the best part, ready for this?

“Medea Benjamin yelled and I quote “Marines!” She actually yelled for our help because this man had stepped out of his car.  I even asked her if she was yelling Police and she told me, “I said Marines” then put her arm around my friend Allen (the Marine Vet).  Ironic?”

Benjamin, who turned on her former close friend, San Francisco Bay Area activist Maria Ruzicka, later killed in Iraq in a widely-publicized suicide bombing, over Ruzicka’s decision to work with the U.S. military to secure compensation for the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, is on the record for supporting Cuba and Venezuela.

“Benjamin has drawn conservative criticism for her support of Hugo Chavez and her attacks on the U.S. embargo of Fidel Castro’s Cuba.  Conservative writer David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag has attacked her as “a long-time Castro acolyte.” “(Wikipedia, the free encylopedia).

“Many of the causes that Ms. Benjamin espouses are Communist in nature.  The Washington “peace” rally at which she spoke last month, for instance, was organized by the Workers World Party, a Communist organization…In years past, she staunchly opposed US military and to those fighting against Communist forces in Central America…She favors the creation of a government-sponsored universal health care system funded by taxpayer dollars.  She exhorts the US government to lift its trade embargo against Cuba—a nation she notably lauds as a place where people have managed to “thrive despite the odds against them.”

On Dec. 4, 2007 Benjamin was arrested by plainclothes officers, detained by the ISI for eight hours, and deported after protesting the house arrest of lawyers (including Aitzaz Ahsan) in Lahore, Pakistan.

Now the record shows that in spite of the slogans and chants delivered in high-pitched screams, when Medea Benjamin wants to put the enemy on the run, she yells for the same relief called upon by the citizens of many trouble spots in the world: America’s brave Marines. 

Yesterday in front of Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, Calif., Medea Benjamin gave new meaning to the old adage: Ah, the things you see when you don’t have your camera.

(For an update on the cities targeted by Benjamin’s CodePink, MAF’s Melanie Morgan is scheduled to appear tonight on the Fox News Network with Bill O’Reilly.)