Michael Benge on The Real Kerry

As Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, [consolidates his]…bid for
the White House, Americans should know a few things about him that he
might prefer go unmentioned and I don’t mean his $75 haircuts.

When Mr. Kerry pontificated at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Veterans’
Day, a group of veterans turned their backs on him and walked away. They
remembered Mr. Kerry as the anti-war activist who testified before Congress
during the war, accusing veterans of being war criminals. The dust jacket
of Mr. Kerry’s pro-Hanoi book, “The New Soldier,” features a
photograph of his ragged band of radicals mocking the U.S. Marine Corps
Memorial, which depicts the flag raising on Iwo Jima, with an upside-down
American flag.

Retired Gen. George S. Patton III charged that Mr. Kerry’s actions as
an anti-war activist had “given aid and comfort to the enemy,”
as had the actions of Ramsey Clark and Jane Fonda. Also, Mr. Kerry lied
when he threw what he claimed were his war medals over the White House
fence; he later admitted they weren’t his. [The ones he received are]
now…displayed on his office wall.

Long after he changed sides in congressional hearings, Mr. Kerry lobbied
for renewed trade relations with Hanoi. [Interestingly] at the same time,
his cousin C. Stewart Forbes, chief executive for Colliers International,
assisted in brokering a $905 million deal to develop a deep-sea port at
Vung Tau, Vietnam – an odd coincidence.

As noted in the Inside Politics column of Nov. 14 (Nation), historian
Douglas Brinkley is writing Mr. Kerry’s biography. Hopefully, he’ll include
the senator’s latest ignominious feat: of preventing the Vietnam Human
Rights Act (HR 2833) from coming to a vote in the Senate, claiming human
rights would deteriorate as a result. His actions sent a clear signal
to Hanoi that Congress cares little about the human rights for which so
many Americans fought and died. [Of note], the State Department ranked
Vietnam among the 10 regimes worldwide least tolerant of religious freedom.

Recently, 354 churches of the Montagnards, a Christian ethnic minority,
were forcibly disbanded, and by mid-October, more than 50 Christian pastors
and elders had been arrested in Dak Lak province alone. On Oct. 29, the
secret police executed three Montagnards by lethal injection simply for
protesting religious repression. The communists are conducting a pogrom
against the Montagnards, forcing Christians to drink a mixture of goat’s
blood and alcohol and renounce Christianity. Thousands have been killed
or imprisoned or have just “disappeared.” [During the Vietnam
war] the Montagnards lost one-half of their adult male population fighting
for the United States; and without them, there might be thousands more
American names on that somber black granite wall at the Vietnam memorial.

As Mr. Kerry…[makes his] run for the presidency, people must remember
that he has fought harder for Hanoi as an anti-war activist and a senator
than he did against the Vietnamese communists while serving in the Navy
in Vietnam.