Conservative Bloggers Get The 9/11/05 Protests Wrong

[Update and Correction: Dammit. On rereading, I now realize that I missed the highly significant fact that these posts refer to this July protest. That was certainly my screw-up. Mea culpa. Nobody misread the relative turnout on that day because the conservatives apparently did outnumber the anti-Americans. But that’s not the end of the story.

By all accounts, the highest turnout either day was on 9/11/05, and it belongs to the neo-Stalinists, at 4,000 violent, screaming, clubbing militants. That shifts us to another question: if smaller pro-American demonstrations in July are significant, then why aren’t larger anti-American ones significant on 9/11? That’s especially the case when the entire story has been missed by American media, large and small.

And this, just a day after Jim at Gateway Pundit said such nice things about my CotR submissions. ]

Conservative bloggers are picking up on the MacArthur 9/11 protest story (warning: post title quotes an obscene anti-U.S. slogan), but it saddens me to report that they’re getting the story wrong. Gateway Pundit and Michelle Malkin, along with The Simi Valley Sophist and John C. Dvorak, all make the same error. They focus so exclusively on the welcome fact of the pro-American protests that they obscure the greater truth: that violent and hateful Anti-American protestors outnumbered them by 4-to-1 (I’m a fan of all of these blogs, by the way).

F’rinstance–

• Michelle Malkin calls her post, “Why They Like Us,” and quotes a photo caption written by an AP reporter: “Anti-MacArthur demonstrators marching at the Freedom Park were met by thousands of his supporters who pelted them with objects and shouted invective. . . .”
• Gateway goes further: “A small gathering of Anti-MacArthur activists were met at a rally at Freedom Park in Inchon, west of Seoulon Sunday, July 17, 2005 by THOUSANDS of Pro-MacArthur supporters . . . .”

In Jim’s defense, he quotes a story that supports his position, but that story and both quotes are against the great weight of the evidence, which is that the anti-Americans numbered 4,000, and that pro-Americans numbered around 1,000 (yes, I make some allowances for the accuracy of head counts, based on doing them myself and reading mischaracterizations in the papers later). Again, Korean press reports consistently put the number of pro-American protestors at one thousand, not thousands.

Then we get to the issue of excessive extrapolation. The statistical evidence is that South Koreans not only don’t like us (more accurately, don’t like our power and the policies we promote with it), but that a substantial percentage of them would like to side with the North in the event of war between the U.S. and North Korea. More here. Wish it weren’t true, but it is.

This is not to say that pro-American demonstrators are unworthy of our sincere gratitude; simply that they’re not the main story here. On the other hand, the way some South Koreans (no, not all of them) treat our soldiers ought to turn your stomach. If you agree that South Korea ought to pass laws to prevent discrimination against our service members at public events and places, here’s a way to support our troops there.

The story, of course, is not really that people hold certain opinions. We are fighting for everyone’s right to have them, even if public opinion might negate some of the common strategic interests and goals that the U.S. and South Korea once shared. The story, where Korea is concerned, is that the left-wing administration refuses to hold its base of support legally accountable for political violence, including violence directed at U.S. soldiers. See Update 1 at this post.

By way of background for new readers, I served in Korea with the U.S. Army from 1998-2002, and today report from Washington D.C., where I practice law when I’m not blogging from the apex of America’s rapidly growing movement to bring freedom, dignity, and survival to the people of North Korea. I’ve even been to that statue of MacArthur in Incheon.

We’d love to have your help, by the way. Here are two links to organizations promoting human rights in North Korea, which is, despite what Amnesty International says, the real gulag of our time.