• Celebrated film star, Trotskyist  activist, supporter of Palestinians radicals

• Co-founder of the Guantanamo Human Rights Commission

• Co-founder of the Marxist Party

• Supporter of the Communist Workers' Revolutionary Party

•  Anti-Israeli activist ("The State of Israel must be overthrown…")

Born January 30, 1937 in London, England, Vanessa Redgrave has been one of America's most celebrated film stars for several decades. Her acting career began in 1958 when she played the role of Pamela Gray in the movie Behind the Mask. Since then, she has played roles in nearly 90 films, including As You Like It (1963), A Man for All Seasons (1966), Camelot (1967), Julia (1977), and Mission: Impossible (1996). Over the years, Ms. Redgrave has also developed an off-screen reputation as a self-proclaimed "human rights activist," although her true ideological commitment is to an extremist Marxist-Leninist sect, a Trotskyist splinter group led by her late mentor Gerry Healy. Redgrave was a co-founder of the Guantanamo Human Rights Commission, which partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the National Council of Churches USA (NCC) to pressure the U.S. government "to treat the Guantanamo Bay prisoners according to the standards of American and International law." In June 2004, Redgrave charged that President Bush was operating a "concentration camp" in Guantanamo, where prisoners are routinely subjected to "torture."

An open supporter of the Communist Workers' Revolutionary Party, Redgrave is a longtime, outspoken hater of Israel, condemning the Jewish state for its alleged crimes against the Palestinian people. In 1977, she filmed a "documentary" titled The Palestinians, which showed her in a PLO training camp, dancing as she waved a rifle over her head. In her acceptance speech for an Oscar award for the film Julia (1978), Redgrave railed at Israel's "Zionist hoodlums" (an expression Soviets propagandists applied to those protesting the treatment of Russian Jews).

In 1980, Redgrave proclaimed, "The State of Israel must be overthrown, there is no room for such a state." In December 1981, she told the publication Arab Perspective, "The Zionist state is the cause of conflict and violence in the Middle East." In the same interview, Redgrave declared, "I am against the racism and violence of the Zionist state of Israel," then adding (almost as an after-thought), "but I also oppose anti-Semitism." However, she is not on record actually condemning a specific act of anti-Semitism in the Arab world, or anywhere else.

In early July 2004, the Communist Ms. Redgrave was in Jerusalem as a UNICEF "Goodwill Ambassador." After making the standard propaganda tour of the West Bank, Redgrave told reporters that Israeli soldiers use the skulls of Palestinian children for target practice. "An Israeli sniper will shoot at a classroom full of Palestinian children who are in their uniforms and scarves," Redgrave informed the press. "Any Palestinian mother or schoolchild knows that a schoolchild who is dressed in a uniform can be and is frequently shot in the head - not in the chest, not in the legs, in the head." Redgrave was not talking about collateral damage. She was charging the Jewish state with deliberately engaging in infanticide.

When asked for her source on this updated Blood Libel (stories of Jews murdering non-Jewish children), Redgrave cited a documentary by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Huda's Story. The film's featured child, who lives in Gaza, "was indeed wounded in the head, but by a ricochet bullet," according to UNWRA's spokesman in the Gaza Strip. No one knows whether the shot was fired by Israeli forces or Palestinian gunmen. From this, Redgrave concocted a lurid lie of Israeli snipers peering through their scopes at rooms full of little girls in uniforms, trying to decide which of the kids they should kill for fun.

A longtime member of Britain's Workers Revolutionary Party - which proclaims on its website, "We are Marxists and fight for the principles founded by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky" - Redgrave left the Party in the course of a Trotskyite split and helped found another proletarian-vanguard, The Marxist Party.

True to her principles, Redgrave has never been critical of a Communist butcher, and never encountered an act of Western self-defense that she was not prepared to denounce.

In 1962, she became one of the first celebrities to visit Communist Cuba, where she was rumored to have had an affair with Fidel Castro. In 1967, she took out a full-page ad in a United Kingdom publication, denouncing the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.

In the 1980s, Redgrave was active in the nuclear freeze movement and protested American policies in Central America, especially U.S. opposition to the Communist Sandinistas.

Prior to the 1991 Gulf War, Redgrave demanded the "withdrawal of U.S., British, and all imperialist troops from the Gulf." In fairness, she also called for the withdrawal of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait - but was prepared to allow that occupation to continue indefinitely rather than apply force.

In 2003, she was a regular at antiwar protests in London. (Said she of the effort to remove Saddam Hussein: "The British and American governments are about to destroy all hopes for peace anywhere in our world, forever.") She also posted 50,000 pounds bail for a Chechen accused of complicity in the 2002 Moscow theater siege, where 116 died.

There is no record of Redgrave ever denouncing Islamic terrorism (other than the pro forma, "of course I don't support terrorism, but…") or condemning the Cambodian genocide, Vietnamese re-education camps, North Korean nuclear blackmail, or Castro's treatment of political prisoners. Such would not have served the interests of the revolution.

Besides accusing Israel of infanticide, Redgrave condemned its security fence, derisively calling it "a barrier higher than any wall I've seen and even higher than the Berlin Wall." Ironically, the Berlin Wall was the enclosure built by Marxists - Redgrave's ideological bedfellows - to keep their slaves from escaping.


This profile is adapted from the article "Tinseltown's Marxist Anti-Semite," written by Don Feder and published by FrontPageMagazine.com on July 14, 2004.