Hundreds Swarm SDSU President to Protest David Horowitz Freedom Center Anti-BDS Posters (VIDEO)

At FrontPage Magazine:

A series of posters created by the David Horowitz Freedom Center targeting proponents of the Hamas-inspired and funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against the Jewish state have incited a storm of controversy on the San Diego State University campus where hundreds of students swarmed University President Elliot Hirshman to claim that he did not condemn the posters forcefully enough and demanding an apology.

The Freedom Center’s posters identified by name a number of prominent student and faculty BDS activists on the campus and described them as having “allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists to perpetrate BDS and Jew Hatred on this campus.” The posters also contained the hashtag #StopTheJewHatredonCampus, the slogan of the Freedom Center campaign which seeks to confront the agents of campus anti-Semitism and refute the genocidal lies spread by Palestinian terrorists and their campus allies. These lies include the claims that Israel occupies Palestinian land and that Israel is an apartheid state.

Protestors were also incensed by a print ad taken out by the Freedom Center in the Daily Aztec.

The ad states:

There is an epidemic of Jew hatred on American campuses and at San Diego State University. This Jew hatred is incited by Students for Justice in Palestine, the Muslim Students Association and assorted leftist groups, all of whom support the terrorist organizations Hamas and Fatah.

The ad goes on to explain that both SJP and MSA were created by operatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and that both groups “disseminate genocidal lies about Israel whose purpose is to weaken and destroy the world’s only Jewish state.”

Posters for the campaign appeared on five California campuses, including at UCLA and UC-Berkeley, where they also sparked protests from anti-Israel activists, as well as university administrators who falsely characterized them as “hate speech.” Images of all the posters may be viewed here. Accounts of the protests and administrator responses can be read here.

In an email sent to San Diego State’s entire student body on Tuesday, Hirshman criticized the posters but also defended the importance of free speech: “First, we recognize and fully support the rights of all parties to voice their positions on political issues, whether supportive or critical. We also understand that when parties adopt a specific political position they become responsible for their actions and these actions may produce criticism.”

Hirshman’s failure to outright condemn the posters did not sit well with SDSU’s anti-Israel activists and the campus left...

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New from David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left — Volume VI: Progressive Racism

At Amazon, The Black Book of the American Left — Volume VI: Progressive Racism.

And from the book's website, "Introduction to Volume VI: Progressive Racism":

This is the sixth volume of my writings called The Black Book of the American Left. It is also one of the most important, as its subject—race—goes to the heart of the most problematic aspect of America’s history and heritage, and is thus the focus of the progressive assault on America and the American social contract. For obvious reasons, progressives have largely concentrated on one race in particular—American blacks, or “African-Americans” as they have come to be known through at least five permutations of political correctness in my lifetime: “coloreds,” “Negroes,” “blacks,” “persons of color” and—only then— “African-Americans.” The injustices of slavery and segregation and the historic sufferings of this community form a factual basis for the progressive indictment, which systematically ignores the historic gains—unprecedented and unparalleled—of this community because of America’s tolerant and liberating social contract.

The first essay in this volume, “The Reds and the Blacks,” explains how this indictment fits the left’s melodrama of “oppression” and “social justice,” and is merely an extension of Marx’s discredited formulas of “class oppression.” Parts I & II of the text that follows address the falling-away of the civil rights movement from the mission and values championed by Martin Luther King. An introduction, “Memories in Memphis,” is the account of my visit to the “National Civil Rights Museum” housed in the motel where King was murdered. This visit provided a summary moment in my efforts to understand these historic events. “Memories in Memphis” first appeared as the opening chapter in Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes. The original title of this book published in 1999 was “Hating White People Is a Politically Correct Idea.” This was an accurate description of the culture promoted by the new leaders of the civil rights movement, and—equally important—was the undeniable thrust of what was being taught in university curricula devoted to the malevolent race, gender and class “hierarchies,” which tenured leftists falsely claimed as structures of American society. The book was rejected by my publisher, Basic Books, whose editor told me, “We will never publish a book with that title.” His response indicated how completely the literary culture had succumbed to the new dispensation. I had to find an obscure publisher in Texas to get the book in print, and thus the upshot of trying to right an injustice was a dramatic diminishment of my career as an author.

Both essays, “The Red and the Black” and “Memories in Memphis,” were written in 1999, and the opening chapter of Part II, “The Race Card,” two years earlier. All the other chapters in this volume are organized in chronological order to form a running journal of the conflicts that followed the transformation of the civil rights cause. Until then it had been a movement to integrate African-Americans into America’s multi-ethnic democracy. In less than a decade it had become a movement led by demagogues to refashion racial grievances into a general assault on white people and on the country they were said to “dominate.” In its core agendas, the new civil rights movement was an assault on the basic American social contract, and in particular the 14th Amendment, with its commitment to equal rights under the law and thus to race-neutral standards and race-neutral governmental practices. Post-King civil rights became a movement to institutionalize racial preferences—the same kind of discriminatory practices that characterized segregation—and to recreate a race-conscious political culture in which blacks and a handful of designated minorities were singled out as the groups to be racially privileged. On other the side of the coin, whites were made targets of exclusion, suspicion and disapprobation.

Part III recounts an effort I undertook in the spring of 2001 to oppose a campaign by the left to gain reparations for slavery. This was a cause that had been first proposed in 1969, during the civil rights era, and rejected by every major civil rights organization. At the time of the proposal there were no slaves alive to receive reparations, while the vast majority of Americans who would be forced to pay reparations were descended from immigrants who had arrived in America well after slavery had been abolished. The clear goal of the radicals who launched the reparations campaign was to indict America as a racist society, and to sow the seeds of racial conflict. It was also an obvious shakedown effort of the kind that had come to characterize the civil rights leadership of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. In the winter of 2001, I published an account of these battles titled Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery, which explained why the issue of race was at the heart of the left’s assault...

Keep reading.

David Horowitz Replies to Slander

At FrontPage Magazine, "REPLY TO SLANDER":

Being defamed by a UCLA Vice Chancellor for defending the Jews.

Today a letter attacking me was sent to all members of the UCLA community – that would be nearly 50,000 people I think – by Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Jerry Kang. The Vice Chancellor’s letter attacked me as a “provocateur” who last year “put up hostile posters accusing two student organizations — the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) — of being murderers and terrorists.” This is a lie.

Actually it is two lies. First, the posters posted last year targeted only Students for Justice in Palestine – not the Muslim Students Association. Kang obviously included MSA so that he could condemn me for employing what he called a “tactic of guilt by association, of using blacklists, of ethnic slander, and sensationalized images engineered to trigger racially-tinged fear.” (Calling people you don’t agree with racist seems to be a favored gutter tactic of activists on campuses like UCLA these days.)

Second the posters did not accuse SJP of being an organization of murderers and terrorists, as the Vice Chancellor claims. They accused SJP of being “Jew-haters” because they support the murderers and terrorists of Hamas, which they do. That is why the only words on the posters were “Students for Justice in Palestine” and “#Jew Haters.” In a public statement I also called on UCLA to remove the campus privileges and university funding of SJP because they are a hate group and their activities routinely violate UCLA’s “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance,” which Vice Chancellor Kang professes to champion.

Kang then accused me of compounding these sins by conducting a new poster campaign – launched yesterday - called “Stop the Jew Hatred on Campus.” The new posters listed the names of UCLA student and faculty activists who support SJP and BDS – the Hamas-inspired boycott movement, designed to strangle the Jewish state. Kang’s letter calls the posters “a focused, personalized intimidation that threatens specific members of our Bruin community.” There is no intimidation on the posters, just a list of names of activists who support SJP and BDS. Nonetheless, Kang went on to elaborate “if your name is plastered around campus, casting you as a murderer or terrorist, how could you stay focused on anything like learning, teaching, or research?” But the posters don’t cast those listed on them as murderers and terrorists, just activists from Students for Justice in Palestine who supported the BDS boycott campaign. BDS has been denounced by figures as liberal as Alan Dershowitz and Larry Summers as anti-Semitic. Kang sent a personal letter of support to all those named as activists in behalf of these anti-Semitic campaigns. He then went on to lecture everybody about diversity, tolerance and inclusion.

This disgraceful performance by a top university official demands a retraction and apology from the University of California and some serious reflection by Vice Chancellor Kang about the hateful content of his letter and the focused, personalized intimidation directed at myself and all those involved in putting up posters he happens to disagree with.

More.

Way Stations on Marxism's 'Long March Through America's Institutions' in the 20th Century

Barbara Kay has a review of David Horowitz's latest installment, The Black Book of the American Left — Volume 5: Culture Wars, at FrontPage Magazine, "CULTURE WARS: VOLUME V OF THE BLACK BOOK OF THE AMERICAN LEFT":

Some months ago, joining an online discussion initiated by a gay Facebook friend on the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, I countered a bitter remark about Ronald Reagan’s “homophobia” and his primary role in causing so many deaths by (as tactfully as possible) observing that gay activists had to bear their share of the blame for the epidemic in having obstructed public health measures to curtail its spread.

The hostile blowback to this remark startled me in its denialist fury, but the salient point here is the sneering tone in which more than one critic on the thread accused me of merely reiterating talking points raised by conservative polemicist David Horowitz. I was taken aback by the rapidity of the redirect to Horowitz in particular, as though nobody else at that time had raised the question of gay-liberationist complicity in maintaining a cone of silence over the elevated HIV risks inherent in unprotected, promiscuous anal intercourse. (Others did, but nobody else with the persistence, straight-talking candor and politically incorrect judgmentalism of Horowitz).

I conceded that my information about the role played by the gay liberation movement in the AIDS crisis was indeed based in Horowitz’s many public criticisms; but since, like all his writings, his accusations were evidence-based, what difference did it make, so long as his information was accurate? This question elicited anger of an even greater ferocity, and my original Facebook friend finally intervened to end the debate.

That was the last time I ever posted a remark on my friend’s page about anything (he didn’t “unfriend me,” a testimony to our real friendship, even though he expressed private sorrow about my reference to Horowitz), but it remains a sobering reminder of the tenacity of ideology over fact on the Left, and the demonization that is the truth-teller’s lot when attempting to set the record straight on identity-politics myths. When stakeholders in one of our culture’s official victim categories have invested themselves in a self-serving narrative, the last thing they want to think about are facts and statistics that threaten the comforting duvet of the rewritten past in which they have chosen to wrap themselves.

Such historical amnesia, arguably the single greatest besetting sin of the Left and the reason leftist illusions are so difficult to dislodge, is only held in check by the dogged, often thankless determination of objective witnesses to history who record unpalatable truths, and then patiently insert them at regular intervals into the slow-grinding mills of the historical archive until a Day of Reckoning forces respectful attention on them.

That day has not yet arrived. The illiberal liberalism known as progressivism remains ascendant in the West, winning battle after battle in the Culture Wars. Every day, more precious freedom to express one’s opinions is lost, as convenient ideological narratives are privileged on university campuses and in the media, while inconvenient truths are fed into the oubliette of Political Incorrectness.

As the little Facebook fracas I unwittingly set off demonstrates in microcosm, there has been no more determined witness to America’s ideological history in the last half century than David Horowitz, a superior intellect and skilled investigative journalist, whose most formidable weapon is his own history as a hard-left political insider turned apostate, and forensic specialist in the pathogens of his own childhood disease.

Or, for another metaphor, Horowitz might be compared to a political archeologist for whom no potsherd, no coin, no amulet is too imperfect or humble to warrant respectful assessment as a clue in reconstruction of a culture. Horowitz has excavated his life and times with a patience and thoroughness that gives new depth of meaning to the words “second thoughts” in exposing the irrationality, hypocrisy and self-righteousness that characterize the intolerant and punitive mindset that dominates our culture.

Now aging, but with his passion for exposing the Left’s sins undimmed, this happy heretic has for the past few years been re-issuing his essays, speeches and newspaper columns in a series of 10 books under the general title of The Black Book of the American Left: the Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz.

With the comprehensive Index that will fill the last book, the series will endure as the definitive prosecution of the Left’s subversion of American freedoms, ideals and willingness to lead in spreading the blessings of democracy that have been the greatest, and sometimes the only, hope for a world struggling to emerge from a variety of totalitarian regimes, from godless Communism to God-drenched Islamism.

Volume Five, Culture Wars, amasses Horowitz’s writings from the 1990s and very early 2000s that explore the Left’s transmogrification of American culture in the second half of the 20th century by means of “the long march through the institutions.” This phrase, coined by Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, references a dramatic change in Marxist tactics that was conceived in the 1930s, but only took root with a vengeance in the 1970s and ‘80s...

Keep reading.

And don't miss Horowitz's The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America's Future, of which Chapter Five covers the radical left's extreme politicization of the AIDS crisis, "A Radical Holocaust."

Treasons of the Democrats

From David Horowitz, at FrontPage Magazine:

The Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky once described Stalinism as “the perfect theory for glueing up the brain.” What he meant to dramatize was the fact that a regime as monstrous as Stalin’s, which murdered 40 million people and enslaved many times more, was nonetheless able to persuade progressives and “social justice” advocates all over the world to act as its supporters and defenders. These enlightened enablers of Stalin’s crimes included leading intellectuals of the day, even Nobel Prize winners in the sciences and the arts like Frederic Joliot-Curie and Andre Gide. Brilliant as they were, they were blind to the realities of the Stalinist regime and therefore of the virtues of the societies they lived in.

What glued up their brains was the belief that a brave new world of social justice – a world governed by progressive principles - existed in embryo in Soviet Russia, and had to be defended by any means necessary. As a result of this illusion, they put their talents and prestige at the service of the totalitarian enemies of democracy, acting, in Trotsky’s words, as “frontier guards” for the Stalinist empire. They continued their efforts even after the Soviets conquered Eastern Europe, acquired nuclear weapons and initiated a “cold war” with the West. To the progressives seduced by Stalinism, democratic America represented a greater evil than the barbaric police states of the Soviet bloc. Even half a century later a progressive culture still refers to the formative phase of the Cold War as years of a “Red Scare” – as though the fifth column of American progressives whose loyalties were to the Soviet enemy, whose members included Soviet spies, was not a matter of serious concern, and as though a nuclear-armed, rapacious Soviet empire did not pose a credible threat.

How were these delusions of otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people possible? How were otherwise informed individuals able to deny the obvious and support the most brutal and oppressive dictatorship in history? How did they come to view a relatively humane, decent, democratic society like the United States as evil, while regarding the barbarous communist regime as its victim? The answer lies in the identification of Marxism with the promise of social justice and the institution of progressive values, which will take place in a magical socialist future. Defense of the progressive idea trumped recognition of the reactionary fact.

Once the Stalin regime was identified with the imaginary progressive future, everything followed – its status as a persecuted victim, and its adversary’s role as a reactionary force standing in the way of the noble aspiration. Every fault of the Stalin regime, every crime it committed if not denied by progressives was attributed to the nefarious actions of its enemies, most glaringly the United States. Once a promise of redemption is juxtaposed to an imperfect real world actor, all of these responses become virtually inevitable. Hence the glueing of the brain.

The Soviet Union is gone, and history has moved on. But the Stalinist dynamic endures as the heritage of a post-Communist left, which remains wedded to fantasies of an impossibly beautiful future that bring it into collision with the flawed American present. This left is now the dominant force in the Democratic Party. Its extreme disconnect from real world realities is encapsulated in its support for the transparently racist movement called Black Lives Matter, which attacks law enforcement and defends street predators, excusing their crimes with the alibi that “white supremacists” create the circumstances that make them commit criminal acts. This extremist movement has the “strong support” of the entire spectrum of the “progressive” left (including 46% of the Democratic Party, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll).

Black Lives Matter is a movement built on the fiction that police have declared an open season on innocent blacks. According to progressive fictions, police are the agents of a “white supremacist society” – a claim alone that should make one wary of the sanity of those who advance it. Facts belie the very basis of the claim that there is open hunting season on African Americans. African American males, accounting for 6% of the population are responsible for more than 40% of violent crimes. But a Washington Post report on all 980 police shootings of 2015 reveals that only 4% of fatal police shootings involved white officers and black victims, while in three-quarters of the incidents, cops were either under attack themselves or defending civilians,” in other words,” as Michael Walsh observed in the NY Post, they were “doing their jobs.”

One such job done by Officer Darren Wilson in the suburb city of Ferguson, Missouri, became the launching point for the Black Lives Matter movement and its malicious claim that innocent blacks were being wantonly gunned down by racist police...

Still more.

'With Trump's call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, several of the nation's most esteemed journalists and influential news outlets have set aside traditional notions of balance and given themselves license to label the Republican front-runner a liar, a demagogue, a racist and worse…'

The quote's from Politico's Dylan Byers, at Jay Rosen's PressThink, "Something happened in journalism two weeks ago that I want to examine before we all forget about it and election season rolls on."

"Traditional notions" of media objectivity went out the window decades ago, if there were any such notions in the first place.

Let's face it: the U.S. has descended into a miasma of leftist political correctness, with the Democrat Media Complex leading the crash all the way down.

In case you missed it, go back and read the much-too-clear David Horowitz essay from yesterday, "Donald Trump and the American Future."

Muslims are not like any other minority group. They want to kill us. And leftists will be among the first of those slaughtered, which I suppose is poetic justice.

Donald Trump and the American Future

From David Horowitz, at FrontPage Magazine:

I have to confess that of late I have become increasingly pessimistic about the future of our country. For awhile I was hopeful that the electorate would finally cut through the fog of political correctness: the racist, collectivist, America-and-white people-are-guilty party line of the Democratic Party. Not so any more. Both the conservative punditry (with a few notable exceptions) and the Republican establishment are proving as feckless in resisting the left’s attacks, and as unfocused on the Democratic adversary as the Republican congress. The Democrats are at it full bore. Having gotten away with disarming the nation in the face of its enemies, and with promoting systematic racial discrimination, along with racist lynch mobs in the streets, the Democrats are busy on the attack. In their election campaign year, they are accusing Republican candidates of being racist and recruiters for ISIS. The only serious - i.e., bloody-minded - fire coming from the Republican side is directed at Donald Trump.  (Think about it – all the Democrats need is a damaged Trump. Then they can condemn Republicans for merely associating with him.) If Republicans want to join Democrats and match their viciousness in taking down the Republican front-runner, Hillary Clinton is going to be our next president.

The most recent explosion of outrage at Trump is his proposal for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration “until we figure it out” – i.e., figure out how to vet Muslim immigrants so that we don’t allow anymore Tashfeen Malik’s into the country where they are determined to kill innocent Americans. Otherwise perfectly intelligent conservatives have joined the Democrat smear squad in denouncing Trump’s suggestion as unconstitutional, illegal, and un-American. In fact, as a cursory Internet search should convince anyone free of anti-Republican bigotry, Trump’s proposal is not only constitutional (foreigners seeking entry into the country have no rights under the US Constitution – only US citizens do. It is also perfectly legal. There is an actual U.S. code that says the president has the authority to ban “any class” of individuals he deems a threat to the American citizens.

Moreover, Trump’s proposal is obviously sensible – i.e., is justified by a realistic confrontation with the facts. According to a Pew Poll, 64% of Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan believe that leaving the Muslim faith should be punished by death. In Afghanistan the figure is 78%. While 64% of Muslims are not active terrorists, there was not a single member of the Muslim community in San Bernardino willing to alert authorities to the hateful, indeed murderous ideas of the shooter couple. Punishing apostasy by death is only a crystallization of the jihadists’ belief that all non-Muslims who refuse to submit to the Islamic faith should be killed. That is what the war that Islamists have declared on us is about. Donald Trump has done the country a service by putting this issue – previously unmentionable – before the American public. Thus far he is the only candidate with the guts to do this, and that is why he is leading in the polls by a wide margin.

According to a 2009 “World Opinion Poll” conducted by the University of Maryland, between 30% and 50% of Muslims in Muslim countries approve of the terrorist attacks on America. If 64% of Muslims think that infidels deserve death – and an impressive percentage approve of the attacks on America and the West – that amounts to between 500 million and 800 million sworn enemies of our country and our culture.  Say it’s only a tenth of those numbers. That’s 50 million or more potential killers for Allah, and supporters of killers for Allah. Keep in mind that these terrorists already have chemical and biological weapons. Is there any person not blinded by leftwing ideas that doesn’t think this presents a vetting problem for us in dealing with Muslim immigrants and visitors? Moreover, a vetting problem that we obviously haven’t begun to solve? However, perhaps Trump’s blanket ban, though constitutional, legal and temporary - is also impractical. The details as Trump himself would be the first to admit are still negotiable. A practical plan even one of reduced scope is better than none.

So why are conservatives treating Trump as a pariah? Clinton and Obama have the blood of hundreds of thousands of Christians and non-ISIS Muslims on their hands not to mention the American victims of their rules of engagement. It is they and their party who have undermined the war on radical Islamists for 22 years since Bill Clinton refused to visit the thousand victims of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Democrats have fought to try terrorist soldiers in civil courts where they would be given the rights of American citizens; they have fought to close Guantanamo, and have deliberately released terrorist generals to return to the battlefield and kill more Americans; Democrats have fought to abandon our military presence in Iraq, surrendering a hard won victory to ISIS and Iran; Obama and Hillary overthrew – illegally, immorally and unconstitutionally – the anti-al Qaeda government of Libya and turned that country into a terrorist hunting ground. Where are the Republican litanies high-lighting these betrayals?

In the meantime, jihadist mosques protected by Democrats continue to function – including the one attended by the San Bernardino shooters – the city of New York continues to bar first responders from monitoring mosques to see what they are preaching, 350 Sanctuary cities still refuse to cooperate with Homeland Security. All under the enemy-friendly doctrine that all Muslims belong to a protected species that cannot be scrutinized about their commitment to a religion that preaches hatred of non-Muslims, particularly Jews, and whose avowed goal is the political submission of the entire world to the Islamic faith.  On the other side, a Republican/conservative chorus has so tarred and feathered the Republican front-runner who is doing by default the work that they should be doing, that they have made it virtually impossible for him to win a general election. And make no mistake, they have also made it virtually impossible for any Republican candidate to speak frankly about the Democrats’ perfidy and the danger it poses to our country.

How much innocent blood do Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have on their hands? How much innocent blood will be spilled in the next four years if Clinton is elected? These are the questions Republicans should be asking, not whether Donald Trump is a bigot. He obviously is not.  Impolitic yes. Racist no. Donald Trump has many faults but lack of political courage is not one of them. He seems motivated by concern for the pit into which this country has fallen under an administration with catastrophic priorities and uncertain loyalties. That is what Republicans need to think about when framing their next attacks. Otherwise the future is dim indeed.

New from David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left — Volume 5: Culture Wars

At FrontPage Magazine, "CULTURE WARS: VOLUME V OF THE BLACK BOOK OF THE AMERICAN LEFT."

And at Amazon, The Black Book of the American Left — Volume 5: Culture Wars.

The Black Book of the American Left — Volume 5: Culture Wars

The new volume's out from David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left — Volume 5: Culture Wars.

Black Book of the American Left Volume 5: Culture Wars

The new volume in David Horowitz's "Black Book" series it out December 10th. Pre-order today.

At Amazon, The Black Book of the American Left Volume 5: Culture Wars.

The basic facts of David Horowitz’s political odyssey, one of the most significant of the last forty years, are well known. A “red diaper baby” who grew up in what he has called “the ghetto of communism,” he became a leading Marxist “theorist” in the early 1960s and one of the godfathers of the New Left. But following America’s defeat in Vietnam, Horowitz began to reevaluate the damage these commitments had done to the country, in the process becoming one of the most important thinkers in the contemporary conservative movement.

The Black Book of the American Left is the result of those years, all that concerted intellectual effort. It collects all of Horowitz’s conservative writings over the past three decades—at once a sharp incision of the left’s agenda, an exploration of the routes conservatives might take in response to its permanent assault on America, and a unique trip log showing the evolving intellectual journey of one of our bravest and most original thinkers.

In the current volume, “Culture Wars,” Horowitz shows how today’s left uses culture as a battleground the way the old communist left used the economy. He focuses on the attacks on American values that began in the 1960s and have continued since—in Hollywood, in the “mainstream” press, and the publishing world--an effort at a wholesale reshaping of the national culture to reflect the agendas of the liberal political elites.

The triumph of “political correctness,” Horowitz believes, is merely an updated version of the communist “party line.” Today’s radical leftists who smuggle their opinions into everything from the Oscar ceremonies to the editorial pages are updated versions of the “useful idiots” (as Lenin called them) who parroted the propaganda of the Politburo in the past.

He analyzes in detail the other ways in which the left has prosecuted its culture war—by pushing multiculturalism (a direct frontal assault on the principle of e pluribus unum); by rewriting American history, at the high school and college level, to transform it into a narrative of violence and victimhood; by conquering and controlling the mainstream media; and by making “identity politics” and “gender” into weapons of cultural aggression.

We are in a Cultural War. You can hear the sounds of battle all around you. You can arm yourself and begin to fight back by reading Culture Wars.

Neo-Communism

I took a break from my Civil War reading to wade back into David Horowitz's The Black Book of the American Left.

I particularly enjoy reading his essays on "neo-communism," available at FrontPage Magazine, "Neo-Communism" and "Taking on the Neo-Coms, Part II."

Also, "Are Communists (or Neo-Communists) Dangerous?"

Don't miss all of Horowitz's books at Amazon.

The Democrats' Great Betrayal on Iraq

At FrontPage Magazine:

Editor's note: GOP presidential primary candidate Jeb Bush is once again boldly telling the truth about the Iraq War and putting the focus on those who sabotaged it: President Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. In recent remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Bush not only highlighted the Democrats' indefensible abandonment of a once-stabilized Iraq, but explained how this disastrous decision gave rise to a new, formidable terror threat: The Islamic State. In light of Bush's statements, Frontpage is publishing David Horowitz's introduction to his book "The Black Book of the American Left, Vol. III: The Great Betrayal," which lays out the true history of the Iraq War and the Democrats' policy of defeat. Read the introduction below.

*****

The Great Betrayal is the third volume of my collected writings that make up The Black Book of the American Left. Its chapters focus on events beginning with the Islamic attacks of 9/11 and culminating in the Iraq War. They describe what can now be seen as a tragic turn in our nation’s history that has already profoundly and adversely affected its future.

The effort to remove the Saddam regime in Iraq by force was initially supported by both major political parties. But in only the third month of fighting the Democratic Party turned against the war it had authorized for reasons unrelated to events on the battle- field or changes in policy. This political division over the war fractured the home front with crippling implications for the war effort itself and, beyond that, America’s efforts to curtail the terrorist activities of other regimes in the Middle East, most pointedly Syria and Iran. The internal divisions were greater than any the nation had experienced since the Civil War, and the betrayal by the Democrats of a war policy they had supported was without precedent in the history of America’s wars overseas.

The internal divisions at the end of the Vietnam War were not at all commensurate with those over Iraq. The 1972 McGovern presidential campaign, which called for an American retreat from Vietnam, was launched after ten years of fighting with no result, when both parties had already conceded the war could not be won. The conflict between the two major parties was over how to end the war and over what the war had become, not—as in Iraq—over whether the war was illegal and immoral to begin with and should never have been fought. The Democrats’ opposition to a war they had authorized, represented a betrayal of the nation and its men and women in arms that has no equivalent in American history.

The domestic divisions over both wars were initiated by a radical left whose agendas went far beyond the conflicts themselves. In the decades that followed their efforts to bring the Vietnam War to an ignoble end, the left had made ever deeper inroads into the Democratic Party until, in 2008, the party nominated a senator from its anti-war ranks who became the 44th president of the United States. Of far greater significance than the successful candidacy of one anti-war spokesman, however, was the path the entire Democratic Party took in first abandoning a war its leaders had approved, and then conducting a five-year campaign against the war while it was still in progress.

I have written two previous books about this defection and its destructive consequences. The first, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam And the American Left (2004), documented the emergence of the post-9/11 anti-war movement, its tacit alliance with the jihadist enemy and its malign influence on the Democratic Party’s fateful turn. The second, Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America's War on Terror Before and After 9-11 (2008), was written with Ben Johnson and focused on the sabotage of the war effort by leaders of the Democratic Party, by progressive activists and by a left-leaning national media. This chorus of opposition took advantage of American missteps to conduct a no-holds- barred propaganda campaign worthy of an enemy, even going so far as to leak classified information that destroyed vital national secu-rity programs and put all Americans at risk. Political opponents of the war attacked the moral character of the commander-in-chief and the mission both parties had endorsed. This assault on America’s role in the war dealt a devastating blow to American power and influence from which they have yet to recover.

It is customary and natural for human beings to identify with the communities they inhabit, and on whose health and security their lives depend. This is the foundation of all patriotic sentiment. But once individuals become possessed by the idea that political power can be “transformative” and create a fundamentally different human environment, they develop an allegiance to the idea itself and to the parties and entities in which they see it embodied. Such individuals come to feel alienated from the societies they live in but are determined to replace, and finally to see their own country as an enemy because it is the enemy of their progressive dreams. This is how generations of leftists came to identify with the Communist adversary and its cold war against the democracies of the West. When the Communist empire collapsed, I was curious to see whether this progressive reflex would survive the fall. Lacking the real world instantiation of their dreams Soviet Russia had provided, would progressives continue to volunteer as frontier guards for America’s enemies, even the most reprehensible among them? The answer was not long in coming.

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, liberating hundreds of millions of captive people from their Soviet prison. The following August, Iraq’s sadistic dictator ordered his armies into Kuwait and erased that sovereign nation from the political map. Unlike the Soviet rulers who paid lip service to progressive ideals, Saddam Hussein was a self-identified fascist who did not pretend to advance the cause of “social justice” or liberal values. Even by 20th-century standards, Saddam was an exceptionally cruel and bloody tyrant. But he was also an enemy of the United States, and that proved enough to persuade progressives to lend him a helping hand. When America organized an international coalition to reverse Iraq’s aggression, the progressive left opposed the action as though America rather than the Saddam regime were at fault.

At the time, the only reason there were no large protests against the war over Kuwait was because progressives were freshly demoralized by the Soviet debacle and still in disarray. But their mood changed over the course of the next decade. As the millennium approached, leftists began to regroup, organizing a series of large and violent demonstrations against “globalization,” the term with which they re-labeled their old nemesis “international capitalism.” When Islamic fanatics attacked New York and Washing- ton in 2001, leaders of the globalization protests re-positioned their agendas to focus on the new American “imperialism” in Afghanistan and then Iraq. Eventually, millions of leftists at home and abroad participated in protests to prevent America and the coalition it led from removing Saddam Hussein. Without overtly supporting the Saddam regime as they had the Kremlin, progressives resumed their role as frontier guards for the enemies of the United States...

David Horowitz: 'Obama is a Traitor. It's a No Brainer' (VIDEO)

Heh, Alan Colmes "debates" David Horowtiz. Like that's some kind of contest, or something.

Obama's worse than Hitler!

Watch: "Alan Colmes vs. David Horowitz: Is Obama a 'Jew-hater'?"

How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America's War on Terror Before and After 9/11

With Obama's capitulation to Islamic State in Iraq, this book is more relevant than ever.

From David Horowitz and Ben Johnson, Party of Defeat.

Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future

From David Horowitz and Robert Spencer, the opening chapter to The Black Book of the American Left Volume 4: Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews, at FrontPage Magazine.

And at the post:

In the aftermath of the jihadist attack in Garland, TX, leftists and Islamic supremacists are moving swiftly to blame Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer for their American Freedom Defense Initiative/Jihad Watch Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest for supposedly “provoking” the violent attack. Once again, advocates of free speech are being slandered while any attempts to examine the real motives of the ISIS-linked terrorists who tried to slaughter them are being labeled as unjustified and “Islamophobic.”

To combat this pernicious tactic and the toxic delusion that impoliteness about the prophet, and not planned Islamic terrorism, is somehow the cause of the attack in Garland in particular and the global jihad in general, FrontPage is running the Freedom Center’s pamphlet, Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future, written by David Horowitz and Robert Spencer.

The authors reveal how the word “Islamophobia” is used by the Muslim Brotherhood to inhibit opposition to jihad terror, and detail how the portrayal of Muslims as victims after every Jihadist attack is a carefully planned and skillfully executed program with the ultimate goal of curtailing the West’s freedom of speech and allowing the jihad to advance unimpeded.

Keep reading.

And buy the book, at Amazon, The Black Book of the American Left Volume 4: Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews.

The Black Book of the American Left Volume 4: Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews

The new volume of David Horowitz's collected works is out: The Black Book of the American Left Volume 4: Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews.

Don't miss all of Horowitz's books at Amazon.

Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation

There's an enduring vitality to the work of David Horowitz. Folks may recall that in fact he's not popular among many on the right. And I take seriously the personal, professional repudiation of Horowitz by those among whom I count friends (including some very close friends from the right blogosphere). But be that as it may, when pondering the perplexing continued influence of the radical left in America, you're not going to fall astray by reading Horowitz's updates. I've read a number of his books, including those written with his long time colleague Peter Collier. The combination of personal bitterness and historical memory makes for very compelling reading. And having met Horowitz and listened to him speak on a number of occasions, I know that his words express unsurpassed first-hand experience. It's why he's so widely reviled by those on the left. He's got their number down to a tee.

Here's Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties. These are discrete essays. I recommend starting with Chapter 6, "Divided Loyalties: The Fifth-Column Left," which brilliantly chronicles the historical continuities of the left's treason and subterfuge over the decades. (And readers will be amazed at how some of the Democrat Party's top leadership today populate the history of New Left radicalism going back decades.)

And check the authors' essay at FrontPage Magazine, "Destructive Generation":

The Left that the Sixties created tends to lose the battles: whether it is the push to erase the differences between the sexes, or to take away Everyman’s SUV, or to define down the terrorism of those who would bring their war into the heartland of this country. When they have the opportunity, the American people usually reject such ideas. But the Left wages a permanent war, and therefore often seems to be winning in the midst of its losses. Its survivorship comes from the fact that even as radicals were losing the decade-long referendum on their radical plans in the Sixties, they seized cultural citadels that allowed them to continue a stealth fight later on.

One of these citadels was the “elite” media, whose commitment to leftish ideas is so complete that it has become a series of scandals: Dan Rather’s bogus “exposé” about George W. Bush’s National Guard service, for instance, or Newsweek’s fraudulent report that Americans guarding al-Qaeda soldiers at Guantanamo desecrated the Koran—a story whose retraction did not keep sister publications such as the New York Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Los Angeles Times from editorializing, in essence, that Newsweek was right even though it was wrong or from continuing to pursue the Gitmo story like a vendetta.

Another citadel is commanded by the big foundations, notably Ford and Rockefeller, which have invested vast sums in movements carrying more than a whiff of the Sixties—a separatist Hispanic movement with an ethnic agenda rather than an assimilative one; and groups such as Catholics for Free Choice, created out of whole cloth to oppose the Catholic Church on abortion and other issues.

But nowhere is the entrenchment of the Sixties mentality more complete or more destructive than in the university. That the Left should now dominate the academy involves a savage irony, of course. It was only after failing in their intent to burn down the university in the Sixties that radicals decided to get on the tenure track in the Seventies. Unimpeded in their long march through these institutions by fair-minded centrists of the sort they themselves now refuse to hire, these Leftists have brought a postmodern Dark Age to higher education—“deconstructing” objective truths to pave the way for chic academic nihilism; creating a curriculum of contempt for American history and culture; and transforming many classrooms into chambers of inquisition and indoctrination. Some of them now profess to be embarrassed by the “excess” of a Ward Churchill, and no wonder: his sin is to reveal by his blatancy the agenda they try to disguise through stealth and subtle misdirection.

Former SDS president Todd Gitlin, currently a professor of sociology and journalism at Columbia whose academic work has centered on mythologizing the Sixties, candidly acknowledged the Left’s academic coup in a recent essay he called “Varieties of Patriotic Experience.” Writing about the failure of his—and our—former comrades to produce a revolution in the streets during the Sixties, Gitlin comments:

My generation of the New Left—a generation that grew as the [Vietnam] war went on—relinquished any title to patriotism without much sense of loss … . All that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked “political correctness” of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost—we squandered the politics—but won the textbooks.

Gitlin is as wrong in implying that the New Left, even in its earliest moments, ever had a “righteous” plan as he is in suggesting that establishing an atmosphere of political intimidation in the universities is simply a trivial pursuit. The “consolation” offered by the takeover is revolution by other means. And not least among the Left’s objectives now that the university is under its thumb is consolidating its fantasy of the Sixties as the Last Good Time. There are literally hundreds of college courses devoted to the history of the decade, but the growing literature of second thoughts—along with other dissident views—is virtually absent from the course lists.

Our book is no exception. Running for President in 2000, George W. Bush said that Destructive Generation was one of the three books that had formed his worldview on how America veered off course in the postwar era. But university professors have consigned this book to the memory hole, along with other books of second thoughts like Commies: My Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, by Ronald Radosh, and Professing Feminism: Indoctrination and Education in Women’s Studies, by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, former professors of women’s studies.

The erasure of an entire side of a critical argument calls to mind Stalin’s famous trick of airbrushing opponents out of photos so that they simply ceased to be part of history. The consequences can be measured by what is now the conventional treatment of two groups we wrote about in Destructive Generation, the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground. Both were central to the meaning of the Sixties; both are now treated by the academy in a way that reverses novelist Milan Kundera’s famous formulation about the power of memory over forgetting. Forgetting—an induced amnesia—is exactly the point of the current pedagogy...

More.

And pick up your copy at Amazon.

Dennis Miller Interviews David Horowitz

Listen to the interview, at Blazing Cat Fur, "A Most Excellent Explanation of the Left's Takeover of America."

Horowitz has a new book out, of course, "Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan for Defeating the Left."

'Because Obama is black and because he's a leftist he's completely protected by the press. Nobody holds him to account. We live in a kind of surreal universe where people will not say the truth. And the truth is that Barrack Obama is a menace to American security...'

It's David Horowitz, via Truth Revolt, "Horowitz: 'Obama is a Menace to American Security'."

Listen at the link.

This Is Columbia University

From David Horowitz, at National Review:

People who ask how it is possible that a convicted killer — a participant in a failed plot to blow up a social dance attended by 18-year-old draftees and their dates; a murderess who abetted the cold-blooded massacre of three law-enforcement officers, including the first African-American on the Nyack police force; a woman whose actions left nine children fatherless and who has shown no genuine remorse for that — should be hired as an adjunct professor at an elite school like Columbia University haven’t been paying attention to what’s happened to our educational system from kindergarten to the university level, which has long been under the academic thumb of a Left that is comfortable supporting Islamic supremacists and anti-American terrorists both at home and abroad. After all, it was at Columbia that, in the wake of 9/11, Professor Nicholas De Genova told 3,000 Columbia protesters against America’s war on terror that he wished for “a million Mogadishus” and that a peaceful world would have no place for America.

The prestige of Columbia derives from its scientific and professional divisions (Social Work and Education excepted), in which traditional standards drawn from the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution and including two sides to controversial questions are still observed. Over the past several decades, the liberal-arts divisions and the aforementioned professional schools have reverted to their religious origins, except that the doctrines being rammed down students’ throats without the benefit of opposing views are Marxist rather than Christian.

Continue reading.