A Gathering of Eagles

Via Bill Faith of Small Town Veteran, A Veterans group calling themselves "A Gathering of Eagles" will be on hand to protect the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, D.C. on March 17, against anti-war protesters they feel might intend to deface the monument dedicated to the more than 58,000 Americans who lost their lives fighting the Vietnam War. Anti-war protestors recently defaced the steps of the U.S Capitol with anti-war slogans.

From the "Gathering of Eagles" Web page:

"We'll be there to act as a countervailing force against the Cindy Sheehan-Jane Fonda march from the Vietnam Memorial to the Pentagon," retired Navy Capt. Larry Bailey said. "We will protect the Vietnam Memorial. If they try to deface it, there will be some violence, I guarantee you."

Bailey and thousands of his fellow Vietnam vets are worried that the anti-war protesters will damage the wall, just as they spray-painted the steps of the Capitol at their last march.

The wall is sacred to the men and women who fought in that war.

"It is our contact with our dead brothers -- those who lost their lives in the cause of their country," Bailey said.

And so it is that Washington will see a Gathering of Eagles - Americans determined to stand up against leftist propagandists who denigrate U.S. troops and the mission for which they sometimes sacrifice their lives.

Retired Col. Harry Riley organized the Gathering of Eagles. Organizers hope thousands will show up in Washington from as far away as Hawaii, and they won't only be Vietnam veterans. Families, friends and veterans of other wars, including Iraq, and soldiers still on active duty, will be there to defend the Wall.

It is shameful that this overwatch even needs to occur, but as the recent incident at the Capitol indicates, some anti-war protesters—and please note that we're only talking about a small minority of those protestors, I hope—feel there is something to gain by such seething displays of unbridled contempt for this country.

That said, looking at the participants in this march, I think that the "Gathering of Eagles" has every reason to feel concerned.

The leftist Web site MarchonPentagon.org describes the anti-war demonstrators this way: "The March on the Pentagon has already attracted more than 1,500 endorsers, including prominent individuals and national and grassroots organizations. Students on college campuses and in high schools will be attending in large numbers. There will be a large turnout from the Muslim and Arab American community, which is organizing throughout the country."

The movement is well-financed. Its sponsor list is lengthy and contains highly recognizable names, as well as those of Fonda and Sheehan:

• Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark (who offered his services to defend Saddam Hussein)
• Ultra-liberal Congresswoman Maxine Waters
• Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney
• Ron Kovic, Vietnam veteran and author of "Born on the 4th of July"
• Mahdi Bray, executive director, Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation
• Waleed Bader, vice chair of the National Council of Arab Americans and former president of Arab Muslim American Federation
• Medea Benjamin, co-founder, CODEPINK and Global Exchange
• Free Palestine Alliance
• Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation
• Islamic Political Party of America
• FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front)
• Islamic-National Congress
• Gay Liberation Network
• Muslim Student Association
• Jibril Hough, chairman, Islamic Political Party of America

It may be worth noting that for a march apparently organized by leftists, the overwhelming majority of sponsoring groups have a radical Islamic focus.

The Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation is one of the groups that threatened a "Sheikdown" of U.S Airways after the removal of six imams from a Minneapolis- to-Phoenix flight in which the imams performed what one airline pilot stated was "a terrorist probe in the airline industry."

A 2004 Chicago Tribune article states that the MSA is the American face of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that seeks to impose radical Islamist sharia law as the government of the United States. The terrorist group Hamas is also a wing of the Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood was financially supported by none other than Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini's movement is also responsible for kidnapping American embassy personnel for 444 days from 1979-81.

Osama Bin Laden was influence by professors closely alligned with the Brotherhood, and his current cavemate, Ayman al-Zawahiri joined the group at age 14 before "graduating" to found al Qaeda with bin Laden.

Mahdi Bray, current leader of that group and a supporter of the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups according to JihadWatch, protested on behalf of both Ahmad Abu-Ali (charged with plotting to kill President Bush), and Abdurrahman Alamoudi, a man convicted in a plot to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

Waleed Bader, vice chair of the National Council of Arab Americans and former president of Arab Muslim American Federation, previous protested against the "occupation of Iraq and Palestine." The National Council of Arab Americans called the creation of the state of Israel as the "Palestinian Catastrophe (Nakba) of 1948" just this past July.

The Free Palestine Alliance has attempted to stifle the business of Caterpillar Corporation (the bulldozer folks), saying that they want "to expose Caterpillar’s complicity in Israel’s war crimes." This "complicity" is apparently the IDF practice of using Caterpillar bulldozers to destroy tunnels used to smuggle firearms and explosives to terrorist groups in Gaza, which are then used to target Israeli civilians.

The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, better known as FMLN, is a communist organization from El Salvador formed in 1970 which fought a civil war against that country's government in the 1980s, and was once identified as a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization before putting down their arms to become a purely political party.

The Muslim Student Association, with multiple chapters at universities around the country, has been investigated for funding terrorism multiple times. A Speaker from the group was once quoted by Robert Spenser as saying, "The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it." The MSA has invited neo-Nazis to speak at forums sponsored by the group.

These primarily Islamist groups are among the vanguard of those sponsoring the anti-war march scheduled in the nation's capitol for March 17. Based upon this roll call of Islamists, terror supporters, and neo-Nazi admirers playing a leading roll in the anti-war march, I'd say that the Gathering of Eagles has every reason to be concerned for the sanctity of the powerful monument known simply as The Wall.