Michelle Goldberg responds: It's curious that while Kissinger and company consider my article an "attack," they can't point to a single line that's false or even exaggerated. Instead, they avoid the main point of my piece altogether, which is that opposition to mass murder should be a minimum qualification for someone presuming to lead a peace movement.

I certainly never set out with any animus toward the burgeoning antiwar movement. However, I soon learned that Kissinger, the primary organizer and spokesman for Not In Our Name, also leads an organization, the Revolutionary Communist Party, that supports the fanatically brutal Shining Path terrorists in Peru, lauds the Maoist "liberation" of Tibet and publishes impassioned defenses of Pol Pot. An article in the RCP's house organ informs us: "'Traditional' Cambodia was a brutal feudal society that needed a revolution ... Pol Pot kicked the U.S. imperialists out of Cambodia. And that's why they hate him."

I admit to some strong feelings about this. I've spent time in Cambodia and lived in a Tibetan refugee community in India for several months, working as a volunteer in one of their schools, learning their language and listening to their dreams of freedom and tales of torture at the hands of their Maoist "liberators."

Clearly, it would have been dishonest to write the piece without assessing the contradictions of a group like the RCP leading an antiwar effort. And while I have tremendous respect for Russell Banks, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Jeremy Pikser and especially Michael Ratner, I'm baffled by their implicit suggestion that, having learned what I did, I should have kept it to myself for the sake of the movement. That's not journalism, it's propaganda.

Nowhere do they deny anything I wrote about Kissinger's role in Not in Our Name or his devotion to some of the world's most brutal killers, because it's true. Rather, they skirt the issue by saying, "We fully acknowledge that the writers and organizers of the Not In Our Name statement come from quite divergent political philosophies and programs," as if his support for genocide was merely a recondite doctrinal difference.

The only way to defend his leading role in the antiwar movement is to argue that ideology doesn't matter -- a rather troubling position for intellectuals to take. KKK sympathizer David Duke also opposes the war with Iraq. However, if he had a prominent role in organizing against it, it would be considered scandalous -- even though the KKK is nearly as powerless in America as the RCP is. The point isn't that the RCP is going to insinuate itself into the mainstream. It's that Kissinger, a leader of the nascent antiwar movement, also leads an organization that sneers at human rights, pluralism and democracy -- precisely the values an antiwar movement would presumably champion.

I fail to see how merely pointing out his political affiliations constitutes an attack on the peace movement. That the writers' interpret it as such suggests they know how shameful his positions really are.

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