At 12:16 p.m. Monday, the rumbling began. Across a stretch of Coney Island Avenue known as Little Pakistan, store owners began pulling down their shop gates to show their solidarity with striking immigrant workers across the country, along with their disdain for HR 4437, the draconian anti-immigrant legislation that passed the House on December 16.

More than 100 businesses from this neighborhood that borders the Midwood and Kensington sections of Brooklyn closed down for about 40 minutes. Among them were Pakistani-, Russian-, and Mexican-owned restaurants, pharmacies, barbershops, beauty parlors, travel shops, call centers, and cell phone stores, a Bangladeshi wholesale distributor, and a Muslim bookstore.

The initial plan was just to shutter their stores, but then a group of about 50 Mexicans and Central Americans who work in the neighboring Parkville section of Brooklyn marched over to protest with them.

"Si, se puede!" they chanted in unison as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis linked arms with the Latinos and whites from the neighborhood, among them the Irish American owners of a plumbing supply store on Coney Island Avenue that also closed down.

They were cheered by passing drivers and big rigs blasting their horns in support.

It wasn't the biggest demonstration on May 1. But the decision of so many South Asians here to step out of their stores was significant, since this is a community which has already experienced firsthand the impact of mass deportations.

Following 9-11, the Department of Homeland Security set up a special registration program requiring immigrants from 25 countries -- 24 of them Muslim -- to register with the FBI and immigration officials.

More than 13,000 Muslims were put into deportation proceedings. Many others left for fear of being locked up in detention centers.

"We've already taken the hit," says Mohammed Razvi, executive director of the Council Of Peoples Organization (COPO), a social service group that serves South Asians and other immigrants in the community. In Brooklyn alone, Razvi estimates some 20,000 South Asians have left since the special registration program was implemented.

"If you go though my neighborhood you see Russian stores opening up because there were vacancies. That's the demographic shift that's happened here.

"People were afraid to go to the police to report crimes or the hospitals because they were undocumented. If they pass this new legislation, that is going to affect 11 million undocumented people, what will that do?" Razvi asks. "That would be devastation for the whole country."

"They're talking 'bout us lying, but look at this," complained Army Staff Sergeant Blanco (he declined to give his first name), holding up one of the flyers a group of anarchists was distributing recently outside the Armed Forces Recruiting Center in Brooklyn. "It says we work on commission and get paid more the more recruits we sign up. If that was true, I'd be driving a Lexus. We'd set up a tent and be out here 24-7."

Billed on NYC Indymedia as a chance to "strike at the Achilles heal of the war machine!", the small street demo drew far more cops than anarchists. But for the Army and Marine recruiters milling outside their empty offices on Flatbush Avenue, it was yet another hurdle in a job that's getting tougher by the day.

From San Francisco, where voters just passed a measure aimed at kicking recruiters out of public schools and off college campuses, to East Harlem, where about 75 people gathered to protest the opening of a new recruiting office on East 103rd Street, recruiters are finding themselves in the crosshairs of the anti-war movement.

Buoyed by falling enlistment rates, peace activists of all stripes now see draining the supply of new soldiers as a more hands on way to stop the war in Iraq.

"It's better than marching around in circles," said Brian, a dumpster-diving squatter from Brooklyn as he pressed leaflets and pamphlets on high school kids and other passersby in hopes of dissuading any potential new GIs.

In the past year, Army enlistment has fallen off target by more than 6,600 soldiers, the biggest shortfall since 1979. Recruiting for the National Guard and Army Reserves has been worse.

Among African Americans, Army enlistment has dropped by 40 percent since 2000, a fact not lost on the recruiters posted in Flatbush. "We don't have the revolving door any more," said Army staff sergeant Arrindell, a Brooklyn native who also declined to give his first name. "Before a lot of people were walking in. Now you really have to go out and hustle."

Arrindell shrugged. "Nobody in New York has anything good to say about the war," he said.

"If we continue at this pace, guess what's next: a draft," an African American sergeant sitting at the desk next to him chimed in. "What are we going to do then as a country -- are people going to Canada? Then you've actually forced the government to do that, because you've stopped the people who want to voluntarily serve by giving them a lot of flak for it. What kind of democracy would we have then?"

Talk of crisis within the ranks only heartened the anarchists demonstrating outside. "Bring it on -- I would love a draft," said Wesley Everett, a 31-year-old from Queens who helped organize the protest. "It would expose how pathetic their war agenda really is.

"People sign up for two years' service but they can be called up for eight under the stop-loss program -- so that already is a draft. Poverty is a draft," he continued, echoing a complaint by Harlem Congressman Charlie Rangel, who has advocated reinstating a universal draft as a means to check the Bush Administration's militarism.

As Rangel and others have argued, the U.S. would be out of Iraq already -- or might never have gone in -- if children of the middle and privileged classes were forced to serve.

Helping the Enemy?

Of course, the thought that the military could be backed into a corner like this has alarmed war supporters, who have echoed President Bush's charge that the anti-war movement is helping the enemy.

On Tuesday, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly went so far as to suggest that al Qaeda should bomb San Francisco for its relatively mild ballot proposition urging educators at public schools to discourage recruitment and provide students with info on scholarships and alternatives to the military instead.

Counter-recruitment protests have become a flashpoint in the debate over the war in Iraq, and right now the protest crowd has the momentum.

"In the past year, there's been an explosion in this kind of work across the country," says Steve Theberge, a youth organizer with the War Resisters League. "A lot of people felt really powerless after the last election. But this is something people can grab on to. You can see concrete results, and there's real power in not feeding the war machine. For a high school student to say no to the military and speak out against recruiters at their school -- or an entire community to say no to recruitment -- that's very empowering."

Last Thursday, students were out picketing and protesting at high schools and colleges across the country as part of a nationwide "Not Your Soldier" day of action called by the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition. Actions were slated in more than 30 towns and cities, including Hicksville, Long Island, where high school students staged a lunchtime walkout to demand and end to military recruitment on campus, and Washington, D.C., where area students planned to besiege Pentagon employees at rush-hour with the demand of "Stop the Assault on Youth!"

In New York City, activists worked outside of high schools including Washington Irving in Manhattan and Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn. They offered forms explaining how students can opt-out of the recruiting lists compiled from enrollment data that schools are now required to turn over under the Leave No Child Behind Act. And they circulated petitions in support of the Student Privacy Act, which could bar the military from getting names and contact information for students from schools without parental consent.

On Friday, the Iraq Pledge of Resistance put out a call for "non-violent resistance" outside recruiting stations. Demonstrations were announced in 15 cities, including New York, where the War Resisters League held a funeral march from Washington Square Park to the U.S. Navy Recruiting station at 207 West 24th St Street at 7th Avenue.

While the New York event is intended as a solemn procession with mock coffins, in Eugene, Oregon, and Madison, Wisconsin, and Lakewood, Colorado, there are plans for sit-ins and blockades outside recruiting centers. In Pittsburgh, anarchists and other anti-war activists plan a noisy picket outside the same recruiting station where police responded with tasers, pepper spray and police dogs at a protest-turned-melee in August.

Dubbed "National Stand Down Day," Friday's protest takes its name from the "stand down" day called by Army brass in May. That's when recruiters were ordered to halt their outreach and review legal and ethical guidelines after a rash of reports of overly aggressive and abusive recruiting practices. Among the troubling incidents, recruiters in Golden, Colorado, were caught advising a 17-year-old to lie about his high school diploma and fake a drug test in order to enlist.

Stepping up Recruitment Tactics

As public support for the war withers (63 percent of Americans now disapprove of the situation in Iraq, according to the latest CNN/ Gallup/ USA Today poll) the Pentagon is upping the ante with boosted sign-up bonuses, video games, and slick ads to woo parents. Recruiters are also aggressively going after poor rural and minority youth.

Counter-recruiters say the government is closing off choices for underprivileged kids. "People see the money that would be going to education and CUNY schools for funding and scholarships so they could go to college is just going to the war," says Gloria Quinones, a mom who helped organize the demo in East Harlem. "It's like they're being backed up against the wall so they have no other options."

The House of Representatives just voted to slash student loans by more than $14 billion; if the language stays in the final budget bill, that would be the biggest cut in the history of the federal loan program. Yet the Pentagon is spending $7 billion a month to maintain the Iraq occupation.

And still recruiters are scrambling to meet their quotas. The increased pressure on young people is only provoking more resistance, anti-war activists say. "These days it's pretty hard to find anyone who supports what the military is doing," says David Tykulsker of Brooklyn Parents for Peace, which has been hosting tables outside Brooklyn high schools to inform students of their right to opt out of the Pentagon's recruitment lists.

Under the Leave No Child Behind Act, schools are required to turn over the names, phone numbers, and addresses of all students -- though students can remove their names if they request that.

Tykulsker claims that a member of the city's Panel for Educational Policy recently told him as many as half of New York City students have chosen to remove their names from the lists -- a number that if true would top the 19 percent opt-out rate recently reported in Boston.

A spokesperson with New York's Department of Education said no overall figures exist because the city is not required to keep such data.

Yet even as some students opt out of the lists that schools are mandated to provide, the Pentagon has hired a direct marketing firm to amass data on young people aged 16 to 25 -- including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, ethnicity, religious affiliation, grade-point averages, school interests, and other info pulled from motor vehicle records, commercial data vendors, Armed Services aptitude tests, and scholarship survey forms -- possibly even medical lists.

Unlike the student lists compiled by schools, there is no opt-out form for the Pentagon's Joint Advertising and Market Research Studies (JAMRS) Recruiting Database. Last month a coalition of parents, anti-war, and privacy groups wrote to the Department of Defense demanding that the $343 million program be dismantled.

"Initially I think people were shocked at the privacy issues involved with turning over student records. Now I think people are more shocked at what the military is actually doing," Tykulsker says. "This is a military that's engaged in serious illegal acts, ranging from torture and illegal detentions to the use of chemical warfare," he adds, referring to reports that the Army used white phosphorus in the siege of Falluja. "The idea that we would be subjecting our children to this is ludicrous."

The recruiters whose job is to enlist new troops hear the dissent -- and argue they're part of protecting it. "We're so quick to voice our opinions, but why do you have the right to do that? Because of the men and women in uniform who protect our freedom," says the African American Army sergeant working the desk in Flatbush. "You might not support the reason for the war, but all of us are Americans. I've been in the Army for 18 years -- for me, this is a livelihood. This is my career."

Thirty-six years ago, on April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King stood in the pulpit of New York's Riverside Church and delivered his first major address against the Vietnam War.

"The Americans are forcing their friends into becoming their enemies," King warned. "It is curious that Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of freedom, democracy and revolution, but the image of militarism and defeat."

It was a controversial speech; King was called a traitor and a foreign policy naïf. But he argued that the fight for social justice could not be won without ending an unjust war abroad.

That's an important legacy for the anti-war camp to remember, faced with a USA PATRIOT Act II backlash worthy of "Fahrenheit 451." As mobs burn Dixie Chicks CDs and Fox talk-show host Bill O'Reilly labels demonstrators "terrorists" and calls for their arrest, anti-war activists are reaching back into communities to denounce the assault on civil liberties, and to bring home the costs the war in Iraq will have on already crippled state and city budgets.

"We think it's an appropriate time for the peace movement to start focusing on the social justice part of this war: Where is the money coming from?" says Leslie Cagan of United for Peace and Justice.

Instead of mobilizing another national march, the group is calling for an extended weekend of local actions -- everything from teach-ins to rallies and nonviolent civil disobedience, starting Friday and continuing through Monday. "We need to keep nurturing the local and community-based parts of this movement, because that's really the backbone," Cagan says.

Many of the events will pay tribute to King, who was assassinated exactly a year after his Vietnam address, on April 4, 1968.

Friday in New York, religious leaders will lead a funeral procession to honor King and the "dead and not yet dead" in Iraq. Bearing coffins, the group will march from Grant's Tomb uptown to Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan.

On Saturday, the recently formed Black Solidarity Against the War Coalition is organizing a march through Harlem.

"We want to give voice and visibility to the large percentage of African Americans who are against this war, and who have been largely overshadowed by the so-called 'mainstream' peace movement," says Nellie Hester Bailey, a longtime tenant organizer from Harlem who is helping to spearhead the group.

The coalition is also urging blacks to stay home from work and school on Friday as part of a nationwide "Black Day of Absence" in honor of King and to protest the war. Their call has been backed by several black politicians and labor leaders in New York City.

Though only announced this week, these calls from the black community point to a largely untapped vein of opposition to the war. Polls show that twice as many African Americans oppose the war than do whites. Many are angered that a disproportionately large number of blacks are being called to serve in what they view as an unjust ploy for U.S. domination in the Middle East. (African Americans count for about 12 percent of the U.S. population, but they constitute 21 percent of the armed forces, including 15 percent of combat troops and about 29 percent of the Army.)

"We can't talk about this war without talking about the war on us at home," says Bailey. "Every opportunity for higher education is being cut for our sons and daughters, and now they want them to go over there to die for U.S. hegemony and for oil."

Beyond this weekend, the group is urging blacks nationwide to boycott Exxon/Mobil as one of the oil companies that stands to profit from the war. "We picked Exxon because they have gas stations in every state where black people live," says organizer Sam Anderson. "And its board has given millions to Bush's presidential campaign."

The big business of war is also the theme for nationwide protests on Saturday called by Ralph Nader's Citizen Works. Demonstrators across the country will target corporations like Halliburton and Kellog Brown and Root for "profiting off the tragedy of war."

The war at home is a theme that students are latching onto as well. On Saturday, members of the Campus Action Network, which represents more than 100 high schools and colleges nationwide, will hold rallies and marches in Washington D.C., Chicago and Oakland.

"We're trying to partner with local teacher unions, which are facing massive job cuts," says CAN member Kirsten Roberts.

In California, students will march through Berkeley to downtown Oakland, where 1,000 teachers just received layoff notices. There they will join a larger anti-war march organized by a broad coalition of community, religious and labor groups.

The role of labor groups at this weekend's protests is significant, a sign that support for the war may be more shallow than it appears. While AFL-CIO President John Sweeney issued a statement at the start of the war voicing his "unequivocal" support for the troops, in a March 20 letter addressed to state and local unions, he remained sharply critical of the Bush Administration's rush to war. "I do not believe that President Bush's insistence on military action rather than further diplomatic efforts serves our nation well," Sweeney wrote, adding that he fears America's "respect and goodwill have been squandered."

"We have to organize against what's looking like a permanent war economy," says Bob Muehlenkamp of U.S. Labor Against War. "Unions can no longer afford to talk about jobs and benefits without addressing issues of war and peace."

Other activists want to target war makers more directly. The Bay Area-based Direct Action to Stop the War is calling for a nationwide day of civil disobedience protests on Monday aimed at "war makers and war profiteers." The loosely knit collective coordinated the thousands-strong street blockades and marches that shut down the financial district in San Francisco for two days last month. Now its members are honing their tactics, moving from a strategy of widespread disruption the day the bombing started to more narrowly focused protests on government, military and corporate targets. In the San Francisco Bay Area, affinity groups plan to go after the Concord Naval Weapons Station and shipping lines used to ferry munitions from Oakland's docks.

In New York, members of the M27 Coalition, which staged last week's traffic-stopping die-in in front of Rockefeller Center, plan to converge on the midtown offices of the Carlyle Group, a well-heeled investment firm (George Bush Sr. is an advisor) with strong ties to the defense industry. One of its holdings is United Defense Industries, a maker of armored vehicles, missile launchers and other advanced weaponry.

The Iraq Pledge of Resistance, is mobilizing for another national wave of civil disobedience at tax time (April 15), aimed at underscoring the growing imbalance between military and social spending.

So far organizers with more mainstream anti-war groups such as MoveOn.org and the celebrity-backed Win Without War have shied away from directly backing civil disobedience protests. The fight now, they argue, is not to stop this war, but to prevent the Bush Administration and its neoconservative backers from extending their battle plans to Iran, Syria and beyond.

But other activists say it's important to make their dissent heard on the streets now.

"Nationally there's been a tremendous pressure to silence criticism and support the troops," notes Roberts. "But because the war is not going well for Bush, I think people are beginning to find their voice again. And I think that once people start to look at the long-term costs of this war at home and abroad, their views could change."

Opposing this war may not be a popular position. But like King, today's peace activists may ultimately be vindicated for taking a principled stand against a war that may not end until long after Baghdad's "liberation."

Sarah Ferguson is a freelance writer in New York who writes frequently about activism.