The past two weeks have brought Americans together as never before. Across the country, we have gathered in public and in private, in churches, synagogues and mosques as well as in stadiums, squares and theaters to express our grief and find solace in community. For the time being at least, the differences which so bitterly separated us just a few weeks ago have been set aside. For the time being at least, the nation is unified in the solidarity of mourning and the determination to see that justice is done.

Well, not the entire nation. For a small but vocal group of college activists, Sept. 11 has proven just another opportunity to play politics.

Within hours of the attacks on Washington and New York, student activists were busily engaged in an e-mail campaign to create a new anti-war movement. Now, that movement has taken definite shape as well as its first, awkward steps:

* On Friday, Sept. 14, U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, a liberal Democrat who represents Berkeley and Oakland, Calif., cast the sole dissenting vote among the 519 members of Congress who voted on the war powers resolution. Shortly thereafter, Lee urged her Berkeley constituents to "rise up" and lead the nation in a new pacifist movement.

* By the following Monday, Sept. 17 the UC Berkeley Stop the War Coalition (SWC), a loose collection of the campus' identity-based and radical-political student organizations, began handing out green ribbons (green is the symbolic color of peace in Islamic cultures) on campus.

* By Thursday, a rally led by the SWC drew as many as 2,500 demonstrators to the campus' main square, Sproul Plaza, from where they set off on a march through the city chanting the slogan, "1-2-3-4 We Don't Want a Racist War! 5-6-7-8 Stop the Violence, Stop the Hate." The Berkeley protest was the largest in a day of coordinated protests across the nation (altogether, 140 campuses were involved). At the institution I attend, Stanford University, 50 students showed up to demonstrate against the war.

* By the weekend, the SWC movement had spread to other campuses. On Saturday at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, student protesters held a day-long "tent encampment" to voice their opposition to US retaliation and dramatize the plight of the thousands of refugees now attempting to flee Afghanistan. And, on Sunday, 600 demonstrators staged an anti-war rally at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. This is, to be sure, only the beginning.

So who are the protesters and what do they want? Judging by the crowd that turned out for last Thursday's rally at UC, Berkeley, they are a familiar bunch. I made my way through the line of policeman who had surrounded the campus' south side and emerged onto the campus' main square, Sproul Plaza. There, several thousand students, standing shoulder to shoulder, looked on as African-American studies professor and radical activist June Jordan addressed the audience. Nearby stood Rep. Barbara Lee, flanked by groups of placard-waving students. Most of the audience consisted of people like myself, bystanders on their way somewhere else who had got caught up by the spectacle. And then there were the event's organizers, many of whom were busily canvassing the crowd with fliers as the rest of us listened to the speeches.

The organizers can be divided into three groups. These include the usual cast of professional radicals -- in the main, disheveled San Franciscans in their late 20s -- as well as a large contingent of students drawn from the principal Arab-American organizations. One can forgive the latter, perhaps, for their interest in stopping US military retaliation: faced with a campaign which shall be waged for the most part against co-ethnics (and, in some cases, family members) on the other side of the world, they can't help but experience the present moment as one of extreme insecurity. As for the San Francisco radicals, they are as much a part of the local scenery as eucalyptus trees and low slung tract housing. Forming the hardcore of every local protest movement, their thin ranks are of little account and even less interest except in moments of crisis.

But as anyone in attendance could have seen, the driving force behind the protest was a large turnout of politically minded undergraduates. Berkeley has long been proud of its radical tradition and each year's entering class contains several hundred students intent on upholding it. These are the ones who join the principal minority identity groups, who for years now have agitated to reverse the statewide ban on affirmative action, who turned out in force to condemn David Horowitz' anti-reparations ad, and who bullied the administration into backing down when it proposed to curtail funding for the University's Ethnic Studies Department (sometimes derisively referred to as the Department of Grievance and Retribution). They tend to take majors in the more politicized departments on campus (Asian Studies, American Studies, Sociology, Ethnic Studies, African-American Studies, etc.) where they are supplied with arguments and evidence to support an already fully formed worldview: that America and American history is a daily outrage perpetrated against gays, women, and most of all, ethnic minorities. These are students, in other words, who share little besides a common enemy and an overriding desire to make their presence felt on campus.

Listening to the protesters last Thursday, four lines of argument against the war stood out. According to the first, any U.S. retaliation against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime would only lead to further violence, both at home and abroad, and to that degree should be avoided. In this respect, at least, the protesters present themselves as pacifists. Theirs, however, is a curious type of pacifism. On the one hand, many of the groups participating in the Stop the War Coalition have in the past shown themselves more than willing to engage in violence. Students for Affirmative Action by Any Means Necessary, urged violence as a legitimate strategy of resistance to Proposition 209, the California ballot initiative which ended affirmative action in state institutions. Then there are the numerous anarchist groups which, in Seattle and Genoa alike, advocated and practiced violence as a response to economic globalization. But the pacifism of the SWC is curious for another reason as well. Unlike the anti-war pacifists of the 1960s on whom they are now modeling themselves, last Thursday's demonstrators disapprove not only of wars of aggression but apparently also of wars of self-defense.

The second argument commonly encountered at last week's protest was that any war against terrorism would necessarily be a "racist" war. For many students, calling what they don't like "racism" long ago became second nature. In the present case, however, this is nonsense. How can the U.S. be engaged in a racist war when it was bin Laden and his supporters who attacked us, not the other way around? The U.S. would respond in the same way if it had been an army of Timothy McVeigh's rather than one of Osama bin Laden's who blew up the Pentagon and World Trade Center two weeks ago.

Third, many of the protesters claimed that the US somehow "had it coming" and so has no right to complain, much less retaliate. Whatever else one wishes to say of September 11, it’s arguable that the U.S. has pursued an unbalanced policy in the Middle East, tilting excessively toward Israel. But even if one holds this view, that doesn’t, as many demonstrators have suggested, somehow excuse the attacks. Nor does it excuse our government from its obligation to defend us against further aggression of this kind. When a society is attacked in the way we were attacked on Sept. 11,Ê and no one should doubt that the terrorists were attacking us, not our government, it has no choice but to respond with force. Anything less would be a betrayal.

The argument which was most generally shared among the protesters concerns civil liberties. According to this argument, any U.S. military retaliation will have a disastrous effect on domestic politics. Civil liberties will be curtailed or in some cases altogether suspended, the protesters charged, and assaults on Moslems and other minority groups will increase. Of all the arguments deployed by the anti-war demonstrators, this has the most merit. Though it is an issue on which there is a range of legitimate disagreement, in my view we should indeed expect some checks to be placed on the liberties we enjoyed before Sept. 11 and should be on our guard to ensure that these checks don't go too far. We should also be resolute in our defense of the innocent and do everything possible to ensure that people are not senselessly scape-goated soley because they belong to the "wrong" racial or religious group.

All the same, the coming conflict will likely require emergency measures and we have no choice but to face up to this. To say we should not do so in order to protect our liberties is to trade both justice and safety for convenience. And to say that we should not do so in order to safeguard the well-being of Arab Americans is to suggest that we have learned nothing from history, that we are in the end no less barbaric than those who carried out the attacks. That, however, is a view denied by all but the most paranoid of today's academic race-baiters.

The new anti-war movement, in short, has no legs to stand on. Still, it may be useful to put ourselves in their shoes for a moment. Let's pretend, in other words, that these patently false arguments offered against U.S. military retaliation are in fact good arguments. What then? What would happen if the U.S. didn't respond with force to Sept. 11? One thing is certain. By not responding, we would effectively show terrorists the world over that audacious acts of violence are enough to control American policy. To that degree, we would not only be putting ourselves forever at their mercy but would also almost certainly succeed in inviting further attacks of a similar kind in the near future. Pacifism, in other words, is not a recipe for peace. It is in fact a recipe for more violence.

All of this should be — in fact, must be — obvious to the protesters themselves. After all, one would have to have a dim mind indeed to miss most of these points. But if those who are now organizing the new anti-war movement know that American interests require us to retaliate against those responsible for Sept. 11, if the arguments they've so far come up with are really only so much bad faith and crass opportunism, then why do they bother to oppose the war at all?

The answer to this question is almost as disturbing as the attacks themselves. It is simply that those now opposed to the war do not identify with the nation's interests — worse yet, they identify themselves against the nation's interests. For many radical students today, the U.S. can do no good in the world, only evil. For them, most Americans — but especially those of us who don't have the good fortune to be members of religious, ethnic or sexual minorities — are irretrievably racist, sexist and otherwise generally intolerant. Years of identity politics and the divisive rhetoric of "diversity" has prepared them for this moment and they are now proving that their training has not been in vain. Since their first commitment is to a never-ending narrative of grievance, they are incapable of recognizing the one instance in which their country has been truly blameless.

For those who have joined the new anti-war movement, it is a perilous moment. They cannot for a moment allow themselves to be in sympathy with the rest of the nation (to say nothing of the victims) for to do so would be to jeopardize the integrity of the position they've staked out over the past ten years: between them and us, they realize, there can be no sympathy. But sympathy, too, demands its right. Walking through Berkeley's Sproul Plaza last Thursday, I couldn't help but notice distress and a peculiar sort of concentration on many of the faces I passed. Unable to see the present conflict except through the lens of domestic cultural politics, these were faces at war with sympathy. It can't have been comfortable.