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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