Radical leftist group in Penn's backyard

It's June 27 at about 6:45 p.m., and it's movie night in the un-air conditioned basement of the Calvary United Methodist Church on the corner of 48th Street and Baltimore Avenue.

This is no ordinary movie night, however. Instead, it serves as a time and place in which the radical left of West Philadelphia can meet and talk shop.

While the majority of Penn students would describe themselves as politically left-leaning, they are not nearly as extreme in their views as the group gathered in this church basement.

"We chase down the Nazis and make them stop," is how Daryle Jenkins describes what the organization he works for aims at doing.

But his organization, One People's Project, has an expansive enough definition of "Nazi" to include most members of the Republican political establishment.

Jenkins, of Jersey City, N.J., wasn't the only activist present. Indeed, a majority of the 15 or so attendees seemed to hold views that could only be described as very left of center.

Take the teenager from a suburb of nearby Camden, N.J., who is affiliated with the Philadelphia Red and Anarchist Action Network and is wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.

Going only by the nickname "Scrib" and fresh out of high school, he is able to rattle off complex political rhetoric in a fast and seemingly unending stream of words, describing himself as an "anarcho-Communist" who has moved away from more vanilla forms of socialism thanks to disillusionment with Marx and Lenin.

His organization describes itself on its Web site as an attempt to "bridge the artificial gaps between segments of what might be described as the 'anti-political left' and dismantle the elitist 'sceneism' that has governed portions of the revolutionary movement for far too long."

Talk like that fits in well with the political paraphernalia spread out along one side of the room. On a table are books, yellowing with age, that praise Fidel Castro's Communist revolution along with buttons that decry the current military draft in the United States.

When asked how one could protest a draft when American has an all-volunteer military, Berta Joubert-Ceci explains that a hidden draft does exist that aims to get young members of minority groups killed in oversees wars. "It's just genocidal," she says.

Joubert-Ceci, originally from Puerto Rico, lives in West Philadelphia, and is currently taking a leave of absence from her job as a psychoanalyst to more fully devote herself to her crusade against the economic policies of the United States and its allies in South America.

Joubert-Ceci helped to organize the event, which is held every week by the International Action Center, a self-described "anti-imperialist" group based in New York with a chapter in Philadelphia whose founder, Ramsey Clark, was a former U.S. attorney general in the Johnson administration and is currently on the defense team of Saddam Hussein.

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