by Dennis T. Avery
Knight Ridder-Tribune Columnist
WASHINGTON - In case you missed the heartwarming failure of the anti-globalization demonstrations last weekend, let me recap the key events:
Nobody really paid much attention to the announced protest targets, the World Bank and big corporations, or to the once-looming threat of genetically engineered crops.
The biggest event of the protest weekend was a demonstration by several thousand young people - in support of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its suicide bombers. One of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators held a sign that read, "Stop using God as an excuse for genocide."
He was apparently too young to understand the irony - that the Israeli Jews were driven out of Europe by real genocide. Six million Jews were slaughtered in Hitler's death camps, with the tacit approval of many European citizens. Now the PLO is blowing up Israeli women and children in a sworn effort to destroy their country of last refuge.
"What the United States felt and saw on September 11, Israel has felt and is feeling on a daily basis," said a Jewish bystander.
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On the morning of Earth Day, April 22, 2,000 of the young protesters started an unauthorized rush-hour march on the Capitol to protest U.S. policy toward Colombia. Personally, I have never been able to figure out who's on which side in Colombia, but I lived next door to some nice people who had fled its multi-sided violence 30 years ago.
It's unclear whether the Monday marchers were pro-Colombian or pro-drugs, but halfway to their goal they were surrounded in a small park by phalanxes of police and unable to move until after the rush hour was over.
Two years ago in Seattle, the anti-global demonstrations were massive and aimed against genetically engineered crops and world trade - both causes dear to my heart.
The eco-protesters were flaunting plywood trees and Monarch butterfly costumes. Never mind that the biggest threat to the world's trees is low-yield farming or that field tests show Monarch butterflies are safer in a biotech field than in conventional cornfields sprayed with pesticides.
In Seattle, the big numbers of demonstrators were paid union members, who'd rented big trucks with signs that read, "World Trade Has Exported A Million U.S. Jobs."
Seattle also featured the eco-shock troops, the black-masked anarchists. They roamed through downtown, breaking huge plate glass windows, overturning kiosks and strewing newspaper vending machines. Since Sept. 11, the demonstrations have been carefully non-violent - and poorly attended.
You can't really blame the youthful protesters for being short-sighted and foolish. What do typical First World kids know about the harsh realities of ancient religious prejudices, really corrupt governments and grinding poverty?
Today's young street demonstrators are trying to recreate the "glory days" of the Vietnam protests, when everybody said the kids knew more than their elders.
In reality, the kids were trying to avoid getting shot in a foreign war, which is a pretty normal, if self-centered, reaction. America lost 50,000 young people in the fighting. After we pulled out, more than 1 million more people were killed by communists as they "liberated" the region.
There are still serious questions facing human society that will have to be resolved by the adults and the legitimate institutions.
One of these questions is whether we will allow people to kill masses of other people because of their religion. Another is whether we'll let the activists kill off biotech crops for the whole planet because the First World has plenty of food, leaving the malnourished kids of the Third World to feed themselves.
A third is how we can advance the trade liberalization that has brought more people out of poverty in more countries than anything else in history.
Before Sept. 11, we'd fallen into the comfortable belief that America no longer faced any serious challenges. It's time for the adults to get back to work.
Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis. Readers may write to him at Hudson Institute/DC, 1015 18th Street NW, Suite 300, Washington, D.C. 20036.
