By: Ryan Shaw
Re: FASCIST GROUPS AND ANTI-ABORTION ATTACKS

From: Workers World Service 
Date: Sun, 26 Feb 1995 01:56:20 -0500 (EST)
Reply-To: ww@wwp.blythe.org


Workers World 3/2/95

FASCIST GROUPS LINKED TO ANTI-ABORTION ATTACKS

By Shelley Ettinger

A string of arson attacks hit California women's health clinics the first two
weeks in February. By pure luck no one was injured.

On Feb. 1, a three-alarm fire destroyed the Planned Parenthood clinic in
Modesto. On Feb. 9, someone threw a fiery tire into the Family Planning
Associates clinic in Ventura.

Two days later, the Santa Barbara Women's Medical Group clinic was torched. And
a major fire caused extensive damage to a
Planned Parenthood clinic in San Luis Obispo on Feb. 15.

All these clinics--even the one in Modesto, which does not
perform abortions--have been targets of anti-abortion groups. "Operation
Rescue" and "Missionaries to the Preborn" are
currently conducting a campaign of harassment against clinic staffers called
"No Place to Hide."

Yet Teri Reiser, executive director of the "Right to Life League of Southern
California," claims she's baffled at the violence. "I'm not sure what gives or
what's behind it," she told
reporters.

Really? It's no great mystery.

The most reactionary arm of the ultra-right wing--including
neo-Nazis openly espousing racist and anti-Semitic ideology
linked with anti-abortion rhetoric--has been swept into the
campaign against women's right to choose abortion.

Increasingly, these are the forces actually carrying out the attacks. In fact,
John Salvi--accused murderer of two clinic employees in Brookline, Mass.--has
been linked with several such groups.

CARRIED AWAY WITH ANTI-SEMITISM

Most leaders in the drive to make abortion illegal again have lately tried to
burnish their images. They want to appear
"mainstream" rather than look like wild-eyed ultra-reactionary woman-hating
terrorists.

Their own words and actions trip them up.

In May 1989, Newsweek reported that Randall Terry, the founder of Operation
Rescue, "is critical of the Jewish doctors who he
believes perform a large number of abortions."

An August 1993 report from the Center for Democratic Renewal quoted Tom Metzger
of the ultra-racist "White Aryan Resistance" saying: "Almost all abortion
doctors are Jews. ... Almost all abortion nurses are lesbians."

"Human Life International"--which bills itself as a "mainstream" Catholic
organization--blames a "Jewish conspiracy" for the
"abortion industry," according to a June 1994 Planned Parenthood report.

Carried away with anti-Semitism, some on the ultra-right take their case even
further.

According to information distributed on the Internet by Tom
Burghardt of the Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights, these groups
assert that the Nazi Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews never happened. But
that's not all.

Human Life International's founder and leader, Father Paul Marx, wrote in his
autobiography that "a segment of the Jewish
community ... more or less led the greatest holocaust of all time, the war on
unborn babies."

One of the Canadian anti-choice crowd's key publications is Life Gazette. A few
years ago the magazine sponsored a forum in
Vancouver. Its topic: "Satanism and Bolshevism."

And remember Missionaries to the Preborn? That's the group
currently terrorizing clinic staffers in California.

According to Burghardt's report, MTP operates "under the broad umbrella of the
Christian Patriot movement" along with several ultra-racist and neo-Nazi
groups.


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