Celebrating treason.

ITEM: On the 50th anniversary of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, reported the Associated Press on June 17th, "[Pete] Seeger, Susan Sarandon, Harry Belafonte and other show business activists will appear at a benefit for the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which assists children of people imprisoned, attacked or fired for taking a public stand."

CORRECTION: Unmentioned in the above piece is that Sarandon and veteran communist Pete Seeger are advisory board members of the Rosenberg Fund--which boasts a plethora of other radicals, Marxists, and Reds, including convicted murderer Leonard Peltier and longtime Communist Party leader Dorothy Healey. To gauge the kind of "public stand" the fund supports, note that the anniversary party featured a "special appearance" by the son of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Black Panther murderer who killed a police officer in cold blood.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were rightfully convicted for atomic espionage activities on behalf of Stalin's dictatorship. Nevertheless, says the AP, their supporters say nothing the Rosenbergs did warranted the electric chair.

Even Nikita Khrushchev (in his memoirs) and Julius Rosenberg's Soviet controller (Alexander Feklisov) publicly praised the Rosenbergs' vital assistance to Moscow's atomic-bomb program. Publication of previously secret Soviet cable traffic further cemented their guilt.

Julius vowed to a cellmate (a former Young Communist League member named Jerome Tartakow) that he and his wife would never confess and would rather go to the electric chair than reveal their activities (as detailed in The Venona Secrets by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel). As Tartakow told the FBI: "Rosenberg is fanatically devoted to the cause of Communism and is prepared to die for it."