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Bringing
the war home
Oct. 19, 2001 | BERKELEY, Calif. -- The Berkeley City Council's call for a quick end to the bombing of Afghanistan sparked a wave of outrage across the country this week. The Berkeley resolution, which was passed on Tuesday, has drawn the kind of obsessive coverage from Fox News that it once lavished on Gary Condit's relationship with missing intern Chandra Levy. The conservative National Review denounced the ever-tolerant city for finding "something new to tolerate: the murder of 6,000 Americans by fanatical terrorists." Letters, phone calls and e-mails filled with fury and disbelief poured into Berkeley's city hall. "In my eight years working here, I've never seen this kind of outrage," says Susan Wengras, legislative aide to Betty Olds, a city council member who voted against the resolution. "Parents in other cities are calling to say that they've cut Cal off their children's list of potential colleges. Others are talking about a boycott of Berkeley businesses, and we've also gotten some letters from people saying, 'I lost three friends. How dare you do this?'" PSD To HTML conversion is important to webmasters because they cannot use the PSD file as it is for their web pages. if you need PSD To HTML conversion service save yourself some time, effort and money and send it in to the professionals. But while the media plays up the "only in Berkeley" radicalism of the measure, many local observers say the real surprise is how hotly debated it was and how relatively moderate was its wording. The resolution barely squeaked by, on a 5-4 vote, passing only after its language was softened; while the council's antiwar members favored an immediate cessation of the U.S. bombing campaign, the final resolution called on President Bush to stop the air raids "as soon as possible." In fact, the Berkeley resolution doesn't show a city united in its antiwar opposition, but a city divided. "Deeply split," in the words of Mayor Shirley Dean, a moderate Democrat, who opposed the measure. |