Ultimately, whether Lerner takes the stage on Sunday means little to the fate of the peace movement. But ANSWER's treatment of him has given many progressives a focal point for their anger at the group, which they feel discredits the left with knee-jerk anti-imperialism and unqualified support of killers like Kim Jong Il, Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.

"It was a moment waiting to happen," says Gitlin, a Columbia University journalism professor and historian of the 1960s. "Lots of people had been grumbling, muttering and barking about the usurpation of the platform by ANSWER."

Says Berube, "Lerner is a guy who has really gone out of his way to build coalitions with groups like Not In Our Name and ANSWER. When he sent out that press release, I felt this is really too much. If they can't work in a coalition with Lerner, I don't see any hope that a group like this is going to build a coalition of grandmothers, cautious conservatives, liberals, students and people taking time off from work to go a rally."

Of course, many such people have gone to ANSWER-sponsored rallies in the past, and many are likely to go again, but Berube believes that with war imminent, the pressure on dissenters to back the military is going to increase, and the integrity of their message will become more important.

"I really do think the bombs are going to be dropping within weeks," he says. "Now the question is going to be what kind of protest is there going to be against this war once it begins. There's a lot of pressure to rally around the flag once troops are in conflict. This antiwar movement, which has such a groundswell, will either dissipate and the left will become even more irrelevant, or there will actually be some traction."

Among the antiwar intellectuals who signed Berube and Cooper's petition, there's an overwhelming sense that a principled, intellectually consistent movement is urgently needed. "What we need right now is a pro-democracy movement that's attacking on all fronts the drift of the U.S. towards authoritarianism domestically and towards this lunatic adventurism overseas," says Ellen Willis, a veteran feminist organizer and professor at New York University.

ANSWER's critics say that such a movement can't be built on a delusional, tyrant-venerating ideology. "One of the arguments against me and people like me [who criticize ANSWER] is that the left now is doing its own dirty work," Berube says. "My counter is that ANSWER's politics are not going to be ignored forever. It's not as if these kinds of associations will delegitimate the antiwar movement only if the right finds out about them. They'll delegitimate it if a lot of the attendees find out about them."

According to Willis, the problem isn't just a tactical one of whether ANSWER will alienate potential mainstream marchers. It's a moral and political one. ANSWER, she says, "is pernicious and just as much my enemy as the Bush administration is. Thankfully, they don't have the power the Bush administration does, but if they did I'd be one of the first ones they would get rid of."

Willis is still debating whether she's going to march this weekend. Lerner isn't. Despite it all, he's still telling whoever will listen to add their bodies to the throng while adding their voices to the growing chorus disavowing ANSWER. "I believe the right approach is to both oppose the war and oppose anti-Semitism in the antiwar movement," he says.

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