AMERICA AT LARGE / GEORGE KIMBALL: Manhattanville College is a small, liberal arts school located 25 miles north of New York City. Its basketball team plays in an arena with a seating capacity of 300, but Kennedy Gym was nearly full on Tuesday night when the women's team from Manhattanville played host to one from the United States Merchant Marine Academy at King's Point.

The media contingent on hand nearly outnumbered the spectators. There were seven television stations, including national crews from HBO and ESPN, and five newspapers, including the New York Times and USA Today. They weren't there to cover the game - most of them barely recorded the result in agate type - but the ceremony preceding it.

Toni Smith is a 21-year-old senior, a sociology major from New York and the captain of the the Manhattanville women's team. With the nation inexorably (if unilaterally, bar the Brits) hurtling toward a war against Iraq, she has chosen to express her displeasure with the policies of the Bush administration by turning her back to the American flag during the pre-game recitation of the national anthem.

Smith has been enacting this silent protest throughout the season, but only after her one-woman crusade drew national attention did it become a cause celebre. She has been subsequently vilified as unpatriotic and a menace to her country.

When Manhattan played at King's Point two weeks earlier, hundreds of midshipmen chanted, in unison, that Smith should "leave our country"; three nights earlier she was booed by the crowd at Mount St Mary's, many of whom waved miniature American flags throughout the game; and last week, when her team played Stevens Tech, a Vietnam veteran named Jerry Kiley ran onto the court and disrupted the game to confront her.

Kiley, who has subsequently been declared persona non grata by Manhattanville president Richard A Berman, was ejected from the premises, but not before loudly telling Smith that she had "disgraced herself and disgraced the flag".

A sports columnist as far away as Texas this week claimed to be addressing the issue when he wrote: "If brave men and women before us had not fought for that flag in World War II, we might all be speaking Japanese or German today."

TWO weeks ago millions of Americans filled the streets to protest the insanity of Bush's impending adventure. At the NBA All-Star game the weekend before, another prominent athlete, Dallas Mavericks guard Steve Nash, wore a T-shirt displaying an anti-war slogan. He was roundly vilified, and no sportswriter who bothered to mention his message at all neglected to point out that Nash was born in Canada.

Mike Murray, the coach of the Kings Point women's team, wore an American flag tie and an American flag pin on the lapel of his dark blue suit on Tuesday night, lest any of the media doubt just where he stood on the controversy, but Dr Berman, the college president, articulated Manhattanville's official position: "While Ms Smith is expressing her personal views and not necessarily those of the college, the First Amendment guarantees her right to do so," said Berman.

"It is irrelevant whether I, or anyone else, agree or disagree with Ms Smith's position. Her right of expression is fundamental, and we support her."

Although Berman's statement seemed entirely reasonable, it probably also labels him in the eyes of Smith's vocal legion of detractors what Bob Dylan once described as an "unpatriotic-dirty- doctor-commie-rat."

Whether they endorse Smith's position, her team-mates and coach support her right to voice her opinion, and the multitude of pro-Toni signs ("Peace is Patriotic" read one) at Kennedy Gym on Tuesday night suggests that a substantial segment of the Manhattanville student body agrees, although one voice greeted her pre-game introduction by shouting "you're an idiot!"

Most critics have taken the simplistic tack of equating Smith's lonely protest to support of the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, which is, of course, preposterous.

WHEN she initiated her protest earlier in the winter, Smith had issued a brief statement explaining her rationale. "The government's priorities are not on bettering the quality of life for all people, but rather on expanding its own power," she wrote then. "I can no longer, in good conscience, salute the flag."

Smith scored eight points and pulled down four rebounds in Manhattanville's 67-51 victory on Tuesday. Then, although she has preferred to allow her protest to speak for itself for most of the season, she bowed to the pressures of the unprecedented media attention and broke her silence to explain her position.

She intended no disrespect for the September 11th victims, she said, but noted that the American flag also represents, in her mind, "millions of indigent people who were slaughtered for it and people who were enslaved for it. Blindly facing the flag without knowing why hurts a lot of people."

Ms Smith voiced her concern that Bush's impending assault on Iraq would produce the deaths of many innocent people and would in all likelihood produce even more violent retribution against the United States, which, to our mind at least, ought to qualify her as even more patriotic than her blind detractors.

The only thing that's deplorable about this, in our view, is that so far she's had to go it alone. There's no good reason why her entire team, and other entire teams around the country, shouldn't be doing the same thing if they share her views.

When one of her inquisitors suggested the other night that her actions cast her love of country in doubt, Toni Smith responded.

"Love it? I'm glad I live here," she said. "But I feel everyone should be concerned about the loss of human life - no matter whose it is."

Go get 'em, Toni.