The Problem For Our Country

By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | 11/22/2007

I guess it's noteworthy when George Soros singles you out for attack.
[1] On the other hand, when you have been targeted by as many leftists
as I have, one more billionaire doesn't make much difference. These
assaults have been inspired by my efforts to organize an "Islamo-
Fascism Awareness Week," whose goal was to identify America's enemies
as more than just "terrorists," and specifically to link them to a
radical movement within Islam, which has declared war on the West. One
salutary aspect of the Week is to have exposed the breadth of the
coalition that now functions as a frontier guard for our enemies.
Members of this coalition are apparently determined to run
interference for America's enemies, because, in their view, a greater
danger to America is posed by conservatives such as myself and George
Bush.

According to Soros, Bush has made up the war on terror, and thereby
created the terrorist threat. In a notable article titled "A Self-Defeating War," Soros wrote: "A misleading figure of speech applied

literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts -- Iraq,
Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia -- a war that has killed thousands
of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world.... We can
escape it only if we Americans repudiate the war on terror as a false
metaphor."[2] As a principal funder of the Democratic Party, Soros is
probably the inspiration for Nancy Pelosi's claim that the terrorists
are only in Iraq because we are there and will leave when we do, and
is certainly behind John Edwards' suggestion that the war on terror is
a "political bumper sticker" and the way to fight the terrorists is to
treat them as individual criminals rather than members of a fanatical
religious movement with tens of millions of adherents.[3]

Even as leftists project onto America responsibility for the war
against us, so they seek to blame conservatives for the scorched earth
politics they have adopted at home. Thus Soros describes me as a
political manipulator who is unwilling to argue issues with my
opponents, and instead focuses on destroying them: "Another technique
[of conservatives] is transference: accusing opponents of having
motives or using methods that characterize the accuser himself. For
example, David Horowitz, who accuses me of being 'the Lenin of the
anti-American conspiracy,' is a former Trotskyite for whom opponents
are never adversaries to be debated, but rather enemies to be
crushed."[4]

For the record, I was never a Trotskyite, nor have I ever accused
Soros of being the Lenin of a "conspiracy."[5] More to the point,
Soros' claim that I never debate my adversaries on the issues is
refuted by my writings and actions in the twenty-five years I have
been a conservative. Few public figures have answered the arguments of
their critics more copiously than I have. I have written hundreds of
thousands of words of specific argument, which can be found in my
articles archives titled "Replies to (Leftwing) Critics" and "Debates
With (and About) the Left," at Frontpagemag.com, and in published
works such as Radical Son, The Politics of Bad Faith, Left Illusions,
Hating Whitey, Uncivil Wars, Indoctrination U, and Unholy Alliance.
Contrary to Soros, my entire intellectual work can be seen as an
extended argument with the left, not an attempt to dismiss it with
labels.

The basis for Soros' claim is a passage in my work, which has been
frequently mis-quoted by leftists, and which is actually a description
of how the left itself deals with political opponents. A recent
reference to this passage by one of my critics, Michael Berube,
illustrates the point. "Here's Horowitz in his 2000 book The Art of
Political War and Other Radical Pursuits: "you cannot cripple an
opponent by outwitting him in a political debate. You can only do so
by following Lenin's injunction: 'In political conflicts, the goal is
not to refute your opponent's argument, but to wipe him from the face
of the earth.'"[6]

People who have actually read The Art of Political War, which was
written as advice to Republicans, will recognize that that this is a
description of how I believe Democrats (and leftists like Berube)
fight their political wars. It was not my recommendation of how
conservatives and Republicans should fight them. Moreover, I said so,
in so many words, and in the very next sentence, which Berube
deliberately omitted: "Well, we needn't go as far as Lenin. After all,
we're not Bolsheviks. But destroying an opponent's effectiveness is a
fairly common Democratic practice. Personal smears accomplish this.
And Democrats are very good at it."[7]

My thirty-year effort to engage an argument with the left has not been
reciprocated. Except on occasions when I have invited leftists into
the pages of Frontpage or onto my public platforms for the specific
purpose of debate, few on the left have considered it necessary to
engage my work except to ridicule and slander me, as a way of warning
others not to take the issues I raise seriously - in short, to "crush"
me (as Soros puts it), and eliminate me from the discussion. In a
typical encounter, during a debate at Reed University, the Dean of the
Faculty opened his remarks by describing me thus: "So, I hypothesize,
engaging in political warfare, doing and saying whatever it takes to
win, this is what Mr. Horowitz does for a living. It's his job, it's
his way of life. And, of course, if this is true, then clearly what it
means is that it's simply impossible to take anything he says or does
seriously, including anything he says today." [8]The Dean was
hypothesizing from the same mis-represented Lenin quote used by Soros
and Berube.

In discussing my book The Professors, on the blog Crooked Timbers,
Berube recommended the crush-them-and-dismiss-them strategy to other
leftists. "My job is to contest [Horowitz's] legitimacy," he wrote. To
implement such a strategy, progressives should resort to "mockery and
dismissal."[9] Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of
University Professors, was more direct. In a review that appeared in
Academe he advised: "Please ignore this book. Don't buy it. Don't read
it. Try not to mention it in idle conversation."[10] I am not the only
conservative to be treated this way in "liberal" venues.

In academic circles, Berube's strategy of mockery and dismissal might
be an effective tool for crushing an opponent, but in the political
arena rougher methods are the order of the day. These will also be
familiar to most conservatives, but here is a sample of some recent
attacks directed at me, which are taken from the Google index: "Fat-
assed," "faux-intellectual," "a quintessential slobbering lackey,"
"neo-con," "insane," "Trotskyist turned neo-con scumbag," "Stalinist,"
"Maoist," "former communist," "brimming with self-hate,"
"hyperventilating about commies," "traitor,""anti-education fanatic,"
"witch-hunter," "far-right fanatic," "far-right wacko," "Ahmadinejad's
double," "little Fuehrer," "right-wing nut," "Grand Wizard," "anti-
Muslim," "religious bigot," "arch- racist," "Zionist neo-
conservative," "racist Zionist Jew," "extremist racist Zionist Jew,"
"a Nazi mind with a Zionist face," "a notorious icon of Zionist
Islamophobia," "a blatant Judeo-fascist crusader of Zionism and social
regressivism," "Zionist poof."

Some of these sobriquets have appeared on widely trafficked "liberal"
sites such as HuffingtonPost. Others can be found on Islamist websites
and venues of the radical left. Here is how I am described in a
broadside by the Revolutionary Communist Party, which appeared on
Indymedia.org: "[Horowitz] is a vitriolic defender of everything from
the extermination of the Native Americans and the enslavement of Black
people, to the savage and criminal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan
and the torture of those whom this regime deems to be terrorists. He
has set up a website that clamors for the arrest and imprisonment of
revolutionaries, radicals, dissenters and liberals and reports every
slander, rumor, lie and innuendo that comes his way....In short,
Horowitz defends every crime that this system has ever committed and
is now preparing to justify even more, and to intimidate and silence
any who would question or resist this."[11] In my speech at Columbia
University, during Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, I observed that
malicious lies like this were a form of hate speech -- the equivalent
of nooses, or targets painted on one's back.

In fact, such attacks are entirely representative of the wall of hate
that greeted students on a hundred campuses who invited speakers to
address the issue of Islamo-Fascism in the last week of October. Yet,
when I described this as a hate campaign, Time magazine blogger Andrew
Sullivan was inspired to add another epithet to my list, as he accused
me of "turning [the event] into polarizing McCarthyism."[12]

Nor did any "liberals" step forward to defend the students or the
speakers, whose only crime was attempting to start a discussion about
an issue that affects us all. When liberals did come forward, it was
to attack us and run interference for the left. As political
sophisticates, they naturally gravitated to Berube's strategy of
"mockery and dismissal," rather than the slash and burn tactics of the
radical street. But their commitments were unmistakeable all the same.

A case in point was two videos that appeared on TalkingPointsMemo.
They were created and narrated by its editor, Joshua Micah Marshall,
who is a contributor to publications such as Salon, The New Yorker and
the Atlantic Monthly. The two fairly elaborate videos were designed
with the clear intent of denigrating our efforts, thus lending tacit
support to our campus enemies. The first was about my appearance at
Columbia and was billed as "the search for the true meaning of Islamo
Fascism Awareness Week."[13] As dramatized by the video, this turned
out to be the claim that the Week was concocted as a fund-raising
stunt built around the spurious, even ridiculous notion that there
might be any threat to the participants. The "bogeyman" of this threat
(the term actually used in the film) was the pretext for bilking
donors out of funds earmarked for security.

This theory was spelled out in a series of interviews with Max
Blumenthal, whom Marshall failed to identify as a young man with a
personal axe to grind and an obsessive interest in my comings and
goings. Blumenthal's father was a White House official who stalked
female critics of Bill Clinton. The son has made a small career out of
stalking me at events and then fabricating preposterous fictions about
what transpired. These fantasies are then given wide circulation on
Huffington Post.com, Alternet.org, the Nation.com and Blumenthal's own
blog. Among many other gross misrepresentations, Blumenthal has
"reported" in his columns that I was the "godfather" behind the ABC
miniseries "Path to 9/11," a film I was unaware of until it was
completed and didn't see until it was aired.

In honor of my Columbia appearance, Blumenthal created his own video
and wrote his own column -- "The Demons of David Horowitz." The flavor
of his reporting is suggested in this description: "Pacing the stage
like a drunken circus clown impersonating some bygone demagogue, and
standing beneath a massive image of a woman being shot in the head,
Horowitz launched into a long, frenetic rant about his own persecution
at the hands of a shadowy liberal conspiracy."[14] (The woman being
shot in the head was a Muslim victim of the Taliban, and the image of
my "frenetic rant" is even belied by the clips -- albeit maliciously
edited -- shown in Marshall's video.)

As it happens, I don't enjoy having to go to campuses under armed
guard any more than anyone else would. I first became fully aware of
the dimensions of the campus security problem in 2001, when I was
invited to speak at the University of California, Berkeley. The
chancellor (no fan of mine) assigned thirty armed guards to watch over
the speech. Thirty armed guards represented the university's judgment
as to the scope of the threat posed by the Berkeley left, not mine.
But I soon learned the utility of having them. Since then, I have been
physically assaulted on a number of occasions -- at Butler University,
Ball State, MIT and Princeton -- to the point where security officers
had to step in between me and the attackers or, in the case of
Bradley, where radicals smashed a pie in my face (it was not merely
"thrown" as some reports have it). I have been rushed on the stage in
such unlikely locations as the Pacific Design Center and the Regent
Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles - both times by members of the
Revolutionary Communist Party who were out in force during Islamo-
Fascism Awareness week. In both these cases, I had failed to hire
security and would have been beaten if members of the audience had not
tackled the would-be assailants and wrestled them to the ground.

By contrast, the Islamo-Fascism event at Columbia was peaceful, a fact
which is deceptively used by Marshall in his video to insinuate that I
am a charlatan, and that the threat of violence was fabricated as a
fund-raising tool. But the Columbia event was peaceful because of the
heavy security not in spite of it. The previous year, when such
precautions were not taken at Columbia, violent leftist thugs over-ran
the stage and shut down an event at which Minuteman founder Jim
Gilchrist was scheduled to speak. Gilchrist had been slandered in
advance as a "racist" and "fascist," which made the attack perfectly
justifiable to the "progressives" who staged it. Would they have
returned to attack our event if security had not been present? Would
any rational person on the receiving end of verbal attacks such as
those I have enumerated risk holding a public event without arranging
protection? Would any Jew, knowing that there are fanatics in our
midst who are incited by their religion to regard us as apes and
monkeys, and who see violence as a ticket to heaven, wish to test
their forbearance? What can Joshua Marshall be thinking when he
portrays me as an alarmist who fantasizes these dangers?

But, in the end, this is not really about me. It is about the state of
our country, and about students at our universities who are forced to
face down a hostile and sometimes violent mob in order to put on these
events. It is about the fact that a movement with fascist overtones
has developed within the American left. It is about the emergence of a
fanatical movement in Islam, really a death cult, which has declared
war on the West, and whose anti-American agendas have been adopted by
elements of the progressive left, as the attacks on Islamo-Fascism
Awareness Week demonstrate all too clearly.

As for liberals who should properly be appalled at these developments
in the left, Joshua Micah Marshall's videos are instructive. Instead,
of being alarmed by the clear and present danger posed by these
radicals, they focus on mocking and dismissing those who are
addressing the threat. To explain our agendas in organizing Islamo-
Fascism Awareness Week, Robert Spencer and I wrote a statement called
"Why Islamo-Fascism?"which is available on our websites. Marshall
ignores it. Instead, in yet another gesture of derision and contempt,
he posts the following from one of his fans: "In honor of
Islamofascism Awareness Week I am busy rewriting all of my old history
books in order to properly show that the danger of some men in caves,
along with one moderate regional power are in fact a greater threat to
the United States than were the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the
secessionist Confederacy, and even the Redcoats from our founding
days."[15] Well, who would have regarded Hitler as a threat when he
was writing tracts in Bavarian beer halls? And, of course, the Islamo-
fascists are way ahead of him already.

There have been more than 9,000 terrorist attacks since 9/11,
including the murders of Western infidels such as Theo Van Gogh, whose
crime was attempting to warn others. A petition is currently being
circulated by leftist professors, like Eric Foner, at Columbia, which
among other things condemns its president for criticizing the Islamo-
fascist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when he was a guest at the school.[16]
There have been (and will be) no such petitions to condemn the campus
radicals who mounted a hate campaign against conservative students and
the speakers they invited to discuss the threat from Islamo-fascists
like Ahmadinejad. And therein lies the problem for our country.

Notes:
[1]http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2007/11/137_13501.html

[2] George Soros, "ASelf-Defeating War," Wall Street Journal, August
15, 2006.

[3]http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=51B9C338-F423-43D...

[4] Soros, op. cit.

[5] The word "conspiracy" is nowhere to be found without quotation
marks in the text I wrote with Richard Poe about Soros' activities. It
does appear in The Shadow Party on three occasions in references to
two authors -- NY Times reporter Matt Bai and Byron York -- both of
whom had written about "the Vast Leftwing Conspiracy. We did refer to
Soros as the "Lenin" of the Shadow Party, but added, "if one is
careful with the analogy." David Horowitz and Richard Poe, The Shadow
Party, p. 1; Matt Bai, "Wiring the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy," NY
Times Sunday Magazine, July 25, 2004, and Byron York, The Vast Left-
wing Conspiracy, NY 2005

[6] In Stephen H. Aby, The Academic Bill of Rights Debate, 2007

[7] Quoted from the original pamphlet. See also, The Art of Political
War, 2000, p. 24

[8] My debate with the dean is recounted in Indoctrination U.

[9]http://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/29/discipline-and-puzzle/

[10] Cary Nelson, "Ignore This Book," Academe, November-December 2006

[11]http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/09/29/18450453.php

[12]http://www.frontpagemag.com/blog/Read.aspx?guid=e4b2b646-3fab-41e8-b0...

[13]http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/057450.php

[14]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/the-demons-of-david-horo...

[15]http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/056780.php

[16]http://www.nysun.com/article/66314

David Horowitz is the author of numerous books including an
autobiography, Radical Son, which has been described as "the first
great autobiography of his generation."

radical activism in the '60s to his current position as the head of
the David Horowitz Freedom Center and who one journalist has called
"the left's most articulate nemesis." His book, The Art of Political
War was described by White House political strategist Karl Rove as
"The perfect guide to winning on the political battlefield." Left
Illusions is an anthology of 40 years of his writings. His latest
books are The Professors, which documents the debasement of the
academic curriculum by tenured leftists, The Shadow Party, which
describes the radical left's control of the Democratic Party's
electoral machine and Indoctrination U., which is an in-depth look at
how indoctrination has taken the place of education in today's college
classrooms.

The Problem For Our Country

By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | 11/22/2007

John Edwards' suggestion that the war on terror is
a "political bumper sticker" and the way to fight the terrorists is to
treat them as individual criminals rather than members of a fanatical
religious movement with tens of millions of adherents.