CLEVELAND — Just one day after disrupting Senator Tom Cotton’s speech at the Republican National Convention and being subsequently escorted out of the event, Code Pink took to the streets of Cleveland, protesting on 4th and Prospect, outside of the designated protesting zones. The NGO, whose members traveled from around the world, donned eponymous pink bras, shirts, shirts without bras and, in some cases, bras without shirts.
“We represent many issues from freeing Palestine to busting up our military budget and cutting our military budget to bring our war dollars home and into our local peace economy,” said one protestor, Alice Newberry, describing Code Pink’s mission.
Newberry, who came to the RNC from Seattle, Washington, briefly elaborated on the previous night’s Code Pink disruption.
“Two of our members got into the RNC and decided, ‘this is ridiculous, I’m fed up with what I’m seeing and I’m going to speak out,’” Newberry said. Officers escorted Code Pink’s Alli McCracken out of the Quicken Loans Arena after a brawl occurred between her and another woman over McCracken’s banner, which stated, “Yes we can end war.”
Code Pink members made no effort to hide their hatred of Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump. Earlier on Monday, they led a walk of shame with a paper mache Trump. While most of the Code Pink members just wanted exposure for their signs ironically boasting, “Tax the poor” and “Invest in America Buy a Congressman,” a few seemed more hostile to press attention. One protester told me, “Talk to my lawyer before I take you out,” and another member calling me a certain gender-based expletive starting with a ‘b.’
Members of this female-led group passionately preached their desire to “free Palestine.” When asked what specifically that meant — a two-state solution? the expulsion of the state of Israel — the answers varied.
“It’s complicated, and I have a lot of thoughts around the issue,” Newberry said on her opinion of a satisfactory resolution to the conflict. When asked whether she would rather live in Israel — described by Newberry as an “apartheid state” — or Palestine, Newberry called the question “irrelevant” and “ridiculous.”
Susie Allen, another Code Pink protester who took the time to talk to me during Tuesday afternoon’s vitriolic protests in Cleveland’s public square, shed more light on the situation, loosely endorsing a two-state solution.
“It’s almost always Israel who breaks these fires. It’s not Palestine,” Allen asserted. “I would personally think that Israel is free to stay there, but they just have to stop the bombing.”
“My position on this is that Israel was given to the Rothschilds, who contributed heavily to the English war machine during World War II with the promise of Israel in return,” Allen said. “And so they stole land that was Palestinian land, and now they’re just harshly bombing them constantly.”
Despite citing a long-lived but unproven conspiracy theory routinely tied to anti-Semitism, Allen asserts that she is not a racist.
“I have nothing against Israel or Jewish people,” Allen said. “I love everybody. I love everybody on this whole planet. I think no one should be hungry. The world is big enough for us all.”
Between Israel and Palestine, Allen said that she would probably prefer to live in Palestine.
“I’ve read books that women feel really safe in their burqas and I can’t really say one way or the other,” Allen said. Allen currently lives as an American expat in Mexico, near Puerto Vallarta. She says she feels “freer there” than in the U.S.
Next to nearly every defaced dummy Donald and shirtless woman in pink was some mention of freeing Palestine, ending war, and bringing back our profits. While the Republicans are seen as the more hawkish of the two major parties, the RNC will not be alone in facing down scorn from Code Pink. Hillary Clinton, who will be officially nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate in Philadelphia next week, was derided by many of the protesters, who promise to stir a similar ruckus next week.
Allen, who will be writing in Bernie Sanders for president when she votes in the fall, lambasted Clinton with ferocity not unlike that of the RNC attendees on the convention floor.
“I feel like Hillary is hopelessly bad. She’s a hateful, lying, untrustworthy person,” Allen said. “That whole security system in her house — she’s not that stupid. She just didn’t want to get caught with anything. And putting sensitive information, security info, in her own private server is like reprehensible. Many people have pointed out that if they had done anything a tenth as bad, they would be in jail, and she’s still running for president.”