Monday, May 04,
2009
The Threat at
Home
by
David
Horowitz in
Townhall.com
My parents
were members of the American Communist Party and I was part of the progressive
left which was the communist left and which has grown ominously large toda1y,
and has seen its candidate elected to the White House. I was the editor of the
largest magazine of the new left, which was organized by the children of
communists, so-called 'red diaper babies' like myself. We regarded
America
as the enemy. We began as an isolated political minority, but the hate
America crowd
has grown alarmingly in size since then. Today, nobody is embarrassed about
slandering their own country even in time of war, and this includes our current
President who recently apologized for the actions of his country to Latin
American communists, Jew-haters and self-declared enemies, such as
Venezuela's
Chavez and Nicarauguan jefe Daniel Ortega, a degenerate
who molested his own daughter.
In Obama's
presence Ortega went into a rant against
America
claiming that our government conducted a "terrorist" war against
Nicaragua in the
1980s, when in fact American pressure forced an end to the Sandinista
dictatorship and the re-institution of a free press and open elections. What was
President Obama's response to the Ortega attack?"Well,
I was only six years old at the time." In other words, an
apology for our "terrorist" acts against the Marxist dictatorship. This
is disgraceful and also dangerous.
To answer
your question as to how I arrived at the views I now hold, during the early
1979s I was working with the Black Panther Party whose leaders were the heroes
of all progressives, who took them to be the victims of American oppression and
police brutality. As I soon discovered, the Panthers were, in fact, criminals
and murderers and not the victims the left claimed them to be. In 1974, they
killed my friend Betty Van Patter, which brought all
this home to me. The left protected the Panther murderers and made
apologies for their other criminal deeds. Today, campus progressives invite the
killers to their schools and give them ten-thousand-dollar speaking fees to
denounce
America
as a "racist" country and criminal nation, which is what progressives want to
hear.
The second
principal cause of my change of heart was the Vietnam War. I was one of the
leaders of the anti-war movement of the time. Of course, these anti-war
movements of the left aren't really anti-war movements in any meaningful sense
of the word. They are anti-American movements, designed to make
America
lose whatever war it is engaged in. If there had been a peace movement during
the lead up to the war in
Iraq, for
example, there would have been at least one demonstration in front of the Iraq
Embassy calling on Saddam Hussein to obey the U.N. resolutions and the arms
control agreements he had signed. But there wasn't. Not one. The so-called
anti-war activists were not demonstrating for peace. They were demonstrating
against America
and its efforts to hold Saddam to the UN peace agreements he had signed.
During the
Vietnam
years, the goal of the so-called anti-war movement was to cause
America to lose
the war-- and that includes every leader of the anti-Vietnam left -- John Kerry,
Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, and so on. The anti-Vietnam movement wanted
America to lose
because for the left, for progressives, we are the bad guys:
America, the
oppressor.
America did lose
the Vietnam as a
result of our protests. The anti-American anti-war movement forced
America to give
up the fight for freedom in
Vietnam, to
retreat from the field of battle, to withdraw overnight. It was the same
prescription that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed and the congressional Democrats
wanted for Iraq.
Fortunately they failed, and consequently
Iraq is not
ruled by terrorists today
But in
Indo-China the ending was different. Once
America
quit the field of battle, the Communists proceeded to slaughter two-and a-half
million poor Vietnamese and Cambodian peasants – one of the worst genocides in
history. But there wasn't a single demonstration by progressives against this
atrocity. Bloodbaths are okay if they are committed by progressives of color in
the name of "social justice."
From
communism to Islamo-fascism, the left in
America
– as elsewhere – has had a lifelong love affair with tyranny and terror, which
is the title of an important book that my Frontpage
editor Jamie Glazov has just published. It's called:
United in Hate, the Left's Love Affair with
Tyranny and Terror. That is who they are. Progressives are adept at
speaking the language of peace and love and justice; but these words are just a
smokescreen for their real agendas which are search and destroy. Anybody who has
ever encountered a progressive up close in any kind of political disagreement
knows that this is a hate movement. They hate conservatives; they hate
Republicans; they hate white males, and increasingly they hate Christians and
Jews. They hated George Bush.
How can you
hate George Bush? He may have done a lot of things that you wouldn't have done;
but how can you hate the man? But they do. They are haters. Their mouths drip
with hate. You can't name a single conservative spokesman from Rush Limbaugh to
Ann Coulter, to Sarah Palin to, well, George Bush, who
hasn't been stigmatized, slandered, demonized, libeled, and trashed as indecent,
beneath humanity, contemptible, toxic, and viral. And yet conservatives continue
to call such haters … liberals!
It is
conservatives who are actually liberal. We believe that there should be two
sides to a question and that when people disagree with us they are often
mistaken, and not necessarily evil. I have written a book with Jacob Laksin about universities called One Party Classroom. Among other things,
the title highlights the fact that so-called liberals have purged American
faculties of conservative voices. It has been the most successful witch-hunt in
American history. Conservatives are as rare as unicorns on the faculties of
American universities and there isn't a liberal in sight who has expressed
concern about this deplorable fact or the mentality that makes it possible.
So-called
"liberal" professors will assign books on one side of controversial issues – the
leftwing side -- and then ram down students' throats the idea that
America
is a racist, sexist, homophobic, imperialist country, which therefore deserves
to be attacked by freedom fighters who are mis-labeled "terrorists." If these terrorists happen to
commit an unspeakable act every now then, it's only because they are forced to
do it by Jews and crusaders who have left them no alternative. What despicable
rot. People have been oppressed for thousands of years without resorting to the
evil tactics of Islamic "martyrs." Until the Palestinians there has never been a
people so in thrall to a death cult -- so culturally and morally sick -- as to
murder their own children by strapping bombs to them and telling them to blow up
other little children and, if they are lucky enough to be male, they will be
rewarded by Allah with seventy-two virgins. How depraved is that? And yet there is not a single Muslim
state that denounces the evil behavior of the Palestinians and their Hamas
leaders, while the American left supports them.
The avatars
of the next Holocaust – Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah and the terrorists of Hamas -- are far more open
than the Nazis in their determination to kill the Jews. Hitler hid the final solution from the German
people. He hid the fact that he
wanted to exterminate the Jews because he believed the Germans were too
civilized a people to support it. But the Iranians and Hamas and Hizbullah -- they shout it from the rooftops to the cheers
of the Palestinians and the Muslim world and Daniel Ortega, and American
leftists like Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill and
their academic "progressive" friends.
Conservatives need to understand this about
progressives. They hate you;
their malevolence will destroy you if you give them the chance. Look at the
performance of the Democratic Party leadership during the Iraq War.
America's
armed forces were in the field facing enemy fire. The Democrats had authorized
the war that sent them into harm's way. But the minute trouble started – three
months after hostilities began -- the Democrats pulled out and went into full
attack mode against their own country, against their elected commander-in-chief,
accusing America
of being the aggressor in the war, a criminal nation, an occupier, and torturer.
And how did
they explain their about-face? What reason did they give for first authorizing
the war and then conducting a propaganda campaign against it – for first
supporting their country and then condemning it, for indicting their own country
as an aggressor nation conducting an unnecessary war against a country that
posed "no threat." (These were the precise terms that
Al Gore used to attack his president and his country in his book The Assault on Reason, which was an apt
description of the book itself.)
The
Democratic leaders explained their betrayal of a war they had authorized by
saying that they were lied to, that the President "manipulated the intelligence"
to fool them into supporting the use of force against Saddam Hussein. But this
was in itself the most obvious and biggest lie of the war. Democrats sit on
all the intelligence committees
and have access to every intelligence secret
America
possesses. How could Bush manipulate the intelligence data that John Kerry had
on his desk? The answer is: he couldn't.
The
Democrats needed this particular lie, however, because they could not admit the
real reason for their betrayal. The real reason that Kerry and his colleagues
changed their views on the war had nothing to do with the intelligence data or
Iraq.
It was because a candidate named Howard Dean, who was running on a platform
opposing the war, was about to win the Democratic presidential primary as the
war moved into its third month. That was the real and only reason why John Kerry
turned against the war and for the second time in his wretched career stabbed
America's
fighting men and women in the field in the back. For five years while American
troops were fighting the terrorists in
Iraq, the
Democratic leadership conducted a propaganda war against them, showing that they
were perfectly willing to risk the lives and safety of our troops for political
gains for their party. Shame on them.
You can't
conduct a campaign saying that
America
is the aggressor in a war without encouraging the enemy and increasing his
strength. You can't destroy national security programs by leaking them to the
New York Times and defending the leaks, without endangering American lives. You
can't conduct an open-ended campaign to define
America as a
criminal nation without sapping Americans' ability to defend themselves in a
dangerous world with enemies who believe that murdering Americans is a
fast-track to the kingdom of heaven. But that is what progressives and the
Democratic leadership have done – and they are same individuals who are running
our nation today.