CODEPINK: What on Earth Happened?

From a feminist-based peace movement to supporting Russia and China

If you’re relatively new to the issues related to Kremlin propaganda and how it’s affecting other countries (including the United States), I recommend reading some background posts I wrote that explains things in more detail along with links to other sites where you can read more to educate yourself.

In some ways writing this post was hard. I remember when CODEPINK was originally formed around the time that then-President George W. Bush was proclaiming that the US needed to invade Iraq because it had weapons of mass destruction. He even managed to convince a few people that Saddam Hussein was allied with Osama bin Ladin, the leader of Al-Qaeda and the mastermind of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

CODEPINK was formed as a feminist-based antiwar group who protested Bush's advocacy for the US invasion of Iraq. The group's name was a play on the US Department of Homeland Security's color-coded alert system (which included Code Red, Code Orange, etc.) that was created shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks and the fact that pink had long been considered to be a traditional “girl color” since the Victorian Era. In fact one of the then-co-ministers of my Unitarian Universalist congregation was even involved in a few CODEPINK protest actions on Capitol Hill.

CODEPINK was ultimately vindicated after George W. Bush got his way and the US invaded Iraq. While it was true that Saddam Hussein was a brutal authoritarian dictator, it turned out that he was never allied with Al-Qaeda because Al-Qaeda was fundamentalist Islamic in nature while Hussein's Baath Party was secular and the two groups simply never got along. Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In addition there were no weapons of mass destruction ever found anywhere in Iraq.

For many years after the US ended its war in Iraq CODEPINK was a fixture at many protests that took place in Washington, DC. Here are a couple of photos I shot of CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin at last year's Poor People's Campaign mass rally event in Washington, DC.

There were times when CODEPINK members would disrupt various committee meetings in the US Capitol building, which would get them quickly evicted. One such example is at the Senate confirmation hearing for allowing John Brennan to become the director of the CIA back in 2013.

CODEPINK would disrupt other events outside of Capitol Hill as well, such as the time they disrupted this press conference that was held by the National Rifle Association in 2012 soon after the devastating school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

For years I felt that the people at CODEPINK were fighting the good fight for peace and their hearts were in the right place. I began to reconsider my opinion of them in 2022 when Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. CODEPINK started its protests that were aimed not at Russia (who did the invasion) but at those whom they chose to blame instead—the US and its NATO allies. In 2023 CODEPINK hosted this event in Washington, DC called “The Urgency For Pursuing Peace in Ukraine” whose participants included Lee Camp, who once hosted a show on the Kremlin media outlet RT, and Eugene Puryear, who once hosted a show on the Kremlin media outlet Radio Sputnik.

There was some serious cognitive dissonance in that it seemed like CODEPINK was doing everything it could to try to blame the invasion on the US and not on the actual invaders themselves—Russia. Yes, I know that the US has long had a less-than-stellar history on intervening in the intetnal affairs of other countries (such as Chile, Iran, and Nicaragua) under the guise of “fighting communism” during the Cold War. But Russia has an even longer history of intervening in Ukraine, with some of these interventions occurring long before the United States of America even existed as a separate country.

But then I fell down the proverbial rabbit hole doing research about CODEPINK and found some stuff about them that I had somehow overlooked during the years when I thought that they were fighting the good fight for peace and justice. CODEPINK is supposed to be feminist in nature yet in 2014 and in 2019 they visited Iran, the same country who requires women to wear hijabs and allows child brides. It is also the same country whose morality police killed a young woman named Mahsa Amini simply because they didn't like the way she wore her hijab. Those visits were criticized for meeting mainly with government officials and not with imprisoned female and minority dissidents. This has led CODEPINK to come under fire for its alleged connections with the Iranian government.

The trips to Iran and the group blaming the US and NATO for Russia's invasion of Ukraine has led to the group being added to the Vatnik Soup website, which also included the group praising the late Venezuelan authoritarian leader Hugo Chávez. It also revealed that one of the group's co-founders, Jodie Evans, is married to Neville Roy Singham, a tech entrepreneur who is connected with China, which is why you'll never hear CODEPINK denounce the Chinese government's persecution of its Uyghur minority nor other issues within Chinese society, such as press censorship and the operation of sweatshops manufacturing cheap goods for export while violating workers rights.

CODEPINK began to shift its focus after the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023. Now they are mostly focused on the Israeli bombing of Gaza while blaming the US for enabling it.

Medea Benjamin went after Taylor Swift when she released her latest album The Tortured Poets Department because Swift didn't mention anything about the plight of the poets in Gaza. She accused Swift of being silent and indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians and Benjamin used the occasion to promote poets who live in Gaza.

She seems to be concerned only with the bombings in Gaza and nothing else. She issued this tweet saying “Tell me this: I think Trump is awful but is there anything Trump did during his terrible 4 years as president that comes even close to the horror of Biden's support for genocide in Gaza?”

Yes. How about the complete mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic that left a whopping 1.1 million Americans dead. Or the fact that under Trump the US was involved in increasingly deadly conflicts in Yemen, Somalia, and Niger. While I think the huge loss of Palestinian lives is horrifying, so are the losses of American lives, Yemeni lives, Somali lives, and Nigerien lives.

Last year at a pro-democracy street protest in Tbilisi, Georgia a photographer caught a shot of pro-EU protester Ana Minadze using the reflection on a police riot shield to adjust her lipstick. That photo soon went viral.

CODEPINK appropriated that photograph for this illustration where the Georgian woman's ethnicity was changed to Palestinian while adding the slogan “Make Up Not War.”

CODEPINK has organized an online #BoycottNetflix hashtag movement against Netflix for taking down its entire Palestinian Stories catalog and releasing a movie about the life of Mary, the mother of Jesus that has an Israeli actress in the lead role.

Netflix has long been notorious for suddenly and arbitrarily removing movies and TV shows from its servers and they claim that they do it because of licensing agreements with the studios expire after a certain date so they are contractually obligated to remove them. It's possible that this is what happened with the Palestinian Stories catalog. As for the movie featuring Mary being played by an Israeli actress, it makes sense for an Israeli Jew to portray Mary. After all Jesus was born and raised as a Jew. Many events in the gospels depicted Jewish traditions, such as the Last Supper where Jesus and his disciples held what was basically a traditional Passover supper. Many Biblical and religious scholars also note that Christianity was originally created as a subset of Judaism and it later broke away from Judaism over the issue of allowing converts into the faith.

CODEPINK has also demanded the expulsion of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that is dedicated to fighting antisemitism, from schools on the grounds that “We need a curriculum that challenges colonial occupation and genocide, not one that denies or excuses it.”

Every now and then they put out a tweet about Ukraine where the US is to blame for the invasion, not Russia (which actually did the invasion of Ukraine).

“The US is pushing Ukraine to lower the conscription age.

Zelenskyy already used martial law to lower the age from 27 to 25. Now the Biden admin want it reduced to 18.

The US wants more Ukrainians to die fighting its proxy war with Russia, instead of a diplomatic resolution.”

The sad thing about all this is that I think that CODEPINK started off with good intentions back in 2002 but they became more radicalized as time went on. They are now at the point where they blame everything that's wrong in the world on the US and they seem to prefer authoritarian regimes in Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and China. They may claim to be feminist but there's nothing feminist about siding with authoritarian regimes.

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