Of course, I started out saying we deserved it. I rattled the shibboleths and evoked the totem of roosting chickens. I suddenly reversed my support of the Kurds and the Afghans and the Sudanese, all to blame George Bush. But I knew it was a lie.

See, like any progressive, I knew that true people's movements don't, as the terrorists do, boast of their love for death, or target the innocent, or espouse Jewish conspiracy theories, or reject democracy on principle, or enslave women ... especially all at once. I'd seen this foe before, and it's name wasn't America. It was fascism, trading in jackboots for keffiyahs and merging Mein Kampf with Qur'an. In this fight as any other, I knew I had to stand where I'd always stood... with the heretics, the hebes, the homos and the harridans.

Be they the slaughtered mothers of the Sudan, the roasted innocents of Manhattan or the pulverized cosmopolitans of London or Bali or Tel Aviv, I therefore announce my solidarity with the victims against this rising fascist tide. We have met an enemy that is not us, who hates us for our good ideas, not our bad policies. Fighting it requires no apology.

Robert F. Mason
Los Angeles, CA