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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
The Paradigmatic Career of David Horowitz
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
David Horowitz' career provides a lens through which the intellectual, political and social developments of an important segment of the American Jewish community can be analyzed for the period from the 1930s until today.
David Horowitz was born in 1939. His parents were Russian Jewish American communists loyal to the Soviet Union at least until Khrushchev denounced Stalin. While he was an undergraduate at Columbia, Horowitz passed through a phase of Schachtmanism, which was a variant of Trotskyitism less hostile to the Soviet Union. As a graduate student at Columbia, he was active in the New Left. After his graduate studies, he became an editor at the leftist magazine Ramparts. At this time period he become involved with the Black Panthers as an expression of his civil rights activism. An accountant friend was killed while she tried to straighten out Black Panther finances, and an attorney friend was crippled while attempting to defend some members of the Black Panthers. As a consequence, according to Horowitz he became disenchanted with the Black Power movement, and the mass killings of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge in combination with the apologetics of the Left and growing left hostility toward Israel eventually caused him to break with the Left and become a Neocon even if he rejects this label for himself. Horowitz differs with Christian evangelical conservatives primarily because of his support for homosexual rights.
Nowadays, Horowitz despises affirmative action and rejects reparations for slavery. In 1989 he founded the Center for the Study of Popular culture whose name was changed to the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2006. This think tank has raised about $1 million per year primarily from the ultraconservative Olin and Scaife foundations. Horowitz opposed US intervention in Kosovo but has supported every US military action against Muslims since the 1970s. Controlling academic discourse especially with respect to Israel is a major project of the Freedom Center, and since 2001 the Center has been heavily involved in inciting Islamophobia.
The secular Russian-Jewishness of Horowitz' career is striking. Russian Communism was to a large extent the revenge of Russianized populations that were denied the same political access as the Russian elite. Russian Jews took leadership roles in Russian communism because of their higher level of education and experience in organizing. Russian Jewish Americans brought this pattern to the USA even though the degree of exclusion of Jews from positions of power in the USA was nowhere as strict as it had been in Czarist Russia. Jews became union organizers and leaders in left-wing and radical politics. Support for African American civil rights was to some extent opportunistic because the higher African Americans rose socially and politically, the less alien American Jewish elites began to appear to traditional American white Christian elites. Jewish activists in the civil rights movement also tended to manipulate African American leaders to support Israel, and David Horowitz' career with the Black Panthers shows examples of such behavior.
Stokely Carmichael and other Black Power leaders drove the Jewish leadership from the civil rights movement when they lost patience with Jewish activists, who like Horowitz were using civil rights activism as a means of advancing Jewish interests. In the 70s Horowitz came into direct contact with some of the wealthiest Americans while he and Peter Collier were researching a series of books on America's monied elite. During the same time period a portion of unaccounted cash aid to Israel as a result of the Egypt-Israel peace was diverted to the US to promote Israeli interests. One can imagine that a higher income might have begun to look quite attractive to Horowitz, and he began to move away from leftism to a political position that could serve both the interests of the wealthiest Americans and the State of Israel while he enriched himself in ways that working for leftist causes never could.
In the pattern of secular or messianic Eastern European Jewish antinomianism that goes back to the 17th century, Horowitz dumped and married several wives while he kept company with a succession of college students as he worked on academic freedom issues that served as cover for the goal of making sure that colleges indoctrinated ideas favorable to the conservative white racist and Jabotinskian Zionist political agenda. In attacking academics David Horowitz has pioneered the google-smear tactic, which Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan describes as follows.
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
David Horowitz' career provides a lens through which the intellectual, political and social developments of an important segment of the American Jewish community can be analyzed for the period from the 1930s until today.
David Horowitz was born in 1939. His parents were Russian Jewish American communists loyal to the Soviet Union at least until Khrushchev denounced Stalin. While he was an undergraduate at Columbia, Horowitz passed through a phase of Schachtmanism, which was a variant of Trotskyitism less hostile to the Soviet Union. As a graduate student at Columbia, he was active in the New Left. After his graduate studies, he became an editor at the leftist magazine Ramparts. At this time period he become involved with the Black Panthers as an expression of his civil rights activism. An accountant friend was killed while she tried to straighten out Black Panther finances, and an attorney friend was crippled while attempting to defend some members of the Black Panthers. As a consequence, according to Horowitz he became disenchanted with the Black Power movement, and the mass killings of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge in combination with the apologetics of the Left and growing left hostility toward Israel eventually caused him to break with the Left and become a Neocon even if he rejects this label for himself. Horowitz differs with Christian evangelical conservatives primarily because of his support for homosexual rights.
Nowadays, Horowitz despises affirmative action and rejects reparations for slavery. In 1989 he founded the Center for the Study of Popular culture whose name was changed to the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2006. This think tank has raised about $1 million per year primarily from the ultraconservative Olin and Scaife foundations. Horowitz opposed US intervention in Kosovo but has supported every US military action against Muslims since the 1970s. Controlling academic discourse especially with respect to Israel is a major project of the Freedom Center, and since 2001 the Center has been heavily involved in inciting Islamophobia.
The secular Russian-Jewishness of Horowitz' career is striking. Russian Communism was to a large extent the revenge of Russianized populations that were denied the same political access as the Russian elite. Russian Jews took leadership roles in Russian communism because of their higher level of education and experience in organizing. Russian Jewish Americans brought this pattern to the USA even though the degree of exclusion of Jews from positions of power in the USA was nowhere as strict as it had been in Czarist Russia. Jews became union organizers and leaders in left-wing and radical politics. Support for African American civil rights was to some extent opportunistic because the higher African Americans rose socially and politically, the less alien American Jewish elites began to appear to traditional American white Christian elites. Jewish activists in the civil rights movement also tended to manipulate African American leaders to support Israel, and David Horowitz' career with the Black Panthers shows examples of such behavior.
Stokely Carmichael and other Black Power leaders drove the Jewish leadership from the civil rights movement when they lost patience with Jewish activists, who like Horowitz were using civil rights activism as a means of advancing Jewish interests. In the 70s Horowitz came into direct contact with some of the wealthiest Americans while he and Peter Collier were researching a series of books on America's monied elite. During the same time period a portion of unaccounted cash aid to Israel as a result of the Egypt-Israel peace was diverted to the US to promote Israeli interests. One can imagine that a higher income might have begun to look quite attractive to Horowitz, and he began to move away from leftism to a political position that could serve both the interests of the wealthiest Americans and the State of Israel while he enriched himself in ways that working for leftist causes never could.
In the pattern of secular or messianic Eastern European Jewish antinomianism that goes back to the 17th century, Horowitz dumped and married several wives while he kept company with a succession of college students as he worked on academic freedom issues that served as cover for the goal of making sure that colleges indoctrinated ideas favorable to the conservative white racist and Jabotinskian Zionist political agenda. In attacking academics David Horowitz has pioneered the google-smear tactic, which Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan describes as follows.
It seems to me that David Horowitz and some far right wing friends of his have hit upon a new way of discrediting a political opponent, which is the GoogleSmear. It is an easy maneuver for someone like Horowitz, who has extremely wealthy backers, to set up a web magazine that has a high profile and is indexed in google news. Then he just commissions persons to write up lies about people like me (leavened with innuendo and out-of-context quotes). Anyone googling me will likely come upon the smear profiles, and they can be passed around to journalists and politicians as though they were actual information.
The attempt to control or intimidate academic discourse corresponds to a Central and Eastern European Jewish pattern. The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany by R. S. Levy describes in detail how German Jewish advocacy organizations like the Zentralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) used the legal system
- to force perceived enemies into bankruptcy,
- to attack members of the academic community believed unfriendly,
- to ban books or
- to force publishers to change offending passages.
- FrontPage Magazine -- an online "conservative" political magazine and website, edited by Horowitz, that is the successor to Heterodoxy (see below). Its main focus is on issues pertaining to foreign policy, war, and terrorism.
- Discover the Networks (previously, and still often referred to as, "Discover the Network") - A database of what it describes as organizations and "activists for leftwing agendas and causes -- egalitarians, socialists, and opponents of American 'imperialism'",[7] with a Java applet to display their interconnections in graphic form.[8]This description can include Jihadists, "anti-American" strains of anti-Iraq War activists, etc. After two years of development, went online in February, 2005, with a staff of two at a cost of about $500,000. [9]
- Students for Academic Freedom- claims chapters on 150 campuses. Opposes "indoctrination".[10]
- Wednesday Morning Club - In 2006 the Center held twenty-one Wednesday Morning Club events with speakers ranging from former Speaker Newt Gingrich, Victor Davis Hanson, Wafa Sultan, General Georges Sada,Judge Charles W. Pickering, Dennis Prager, Shelby Steele and Melanie Morgan with Catherine Moy. Speakers in 2007 include Dinesh D'Souza, Dore Gold, Bruce Herschensohn and John O'Sullivan. In previous years speakers have included then-Governor George W. Bush (1999), then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, Robert Bork, Representatives Tom DeLay and Henry Hyde, Senators Trent Lott, Bill Frist and Joseph Lieberman, Christopher Hitchens, Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes and George Will.[11]
- Jihad Watch (or Jihadwatch; also Dhimmi Watch) - blogs and articles on the ongoing "Jihad".[12]
- The Individual Rights Foundation - Organization of lawyers to fight speech codes and political correctness on campuses and elsewhere. Participated as Amicus Curiae in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, the successful defense of the Boy Scouts of America against the ACLU in the Supreme Court. [13][14]
- Libertas - A forum for promoting conservative films in Hollywood. It presents the conservative Liberty Film Festival.[15][3]
- Restoration Weekend - Annual conservative fundraising and networking event.
Note that JihadWatch/DhimmiWatch is for the most part run by the non-Jewish Robert Spencer, who lately has been meeting with the European extremist anti-Muslim right in order to coordinate anti-Muslim political efforts. (See http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/10-21-2007/0004686363&EDATE= .)
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is the latest Islamophobic project of the Freedom Center. If Horowitz is trying to increase suspicions of American Muslims, the silliness of his program seems to create contempt for the Freedom Center while it inspires non-Muslim American interest and conversion to Islam.
According to http://thinkprogress.org/2007/10/23/horowitz-islamofacism/,
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is the latest Islamophobic project of the Freedom Center. If Horowitz is trying to increase suspicions of American Muslims, the silliness of his program seems to create contempt for the Freedom Center while it inspires non-Muslim American interest and conversion to Islam.
According to http://thinkprogress.org/2007/10/23/horowitz-islamofacism/,
Kareem Shora, the Executive Director of the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee, said that Horowitz was dramatically overstating the number of participating schools:
- We contacted those institutions, alerting them to the fact that their name was being used, and wondering what exactly was taking place. … It's important to note though, after we contacted those institutions, most of those institutions indicated that no such events is taking place on those campus. And many contacted the sponsors and told them, "do not use my institution's name in your campaign," including some very renowned universities such as Yale and Princeton.
Shora also said that the president of Liberty University, the evangelical school founded by Jerry Falwell, also had their name removed from Horowitz's list.
Much of the criticism that Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week speakers make about Islam also applies to Orthodox Judaism. Possibly Horowitz et al. are so ignorant of Judaism that they are unaware of the similarities of Islam and Orthodox Judaism, but it is more probable that the Islamophobes are just trying to recast Islamophobia according to the model of late 19th and early 20th century anti-Semitism and are focusing on critiques that worked against Judaism in the past.
Horowitz may not care about the effectiveness of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. He may be able to raise money simply on the basis of presence at American universities and the degree of controversy that he creates. If such is the case, attempts to suppress Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week may benefit Freedom Center fundraising. Instead of becoming defensive, American Muslims should go on the offensive and strengthen alliances with progressive and conservative non-Muslims, who are aghast at the damage that Zionists and extremist American Jews have managed to do to American society and to US foreign policy..
If it is legitimate to open up discussion of Islamo-Fascism on American campuses, can American Jews and prejudiced Judeophiles object to a Zionazism Awareness Week? The late but highly respected University of Wisconsin professor George Mosse discussed the similarities of German Nazi and Zionist ideology extensively while Harvard Professor Jay Harris has mentioned in his classes the superficial likeness of German Nazism and Zionism. Zionists so casually commit atrocities against the native population of Palestine that "superficial" is probably an inappropriate adjective. Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is an opportunity for Muslims to open up a discussion of the legitimacy of the Zionist state, of the damage that the US Israel alliance does to America, and of the excessive influence that Jewish fanatics have in the USA.
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Horowitz may not care about the effectiveness of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. He may be able to raise money simply on the basis of presence at American universities and the degree of controversy that he creates. If such is the case, attempts to suppress Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week may benefit Freedom Center fundraising. Instead of becoming defensive, American Muslims should go on the offensive and strengthen alliances with progressive and conservative non-Muslims, who are aghast at the damage that Zionists and extremist American Jews have managed to do to American society and to US foreign policy..
If it is legitimate to open up discussion of Islamo-Fascism on American campuses, can American Jews and prejudiced Judeophiles object to a Zionazism Awareness Week? The late but highly respected University of Wisconsin professor George Mosse discussed the similarities of German Nazi and Zionist ideology extensively while Harvard Professor Jay Harris has mentioned in his classes the superficial likeness of German Nazism and Zionism. Zionists so casually commit atrocities against the native population of Palestine that "superficial" is probably an inappropriate adjective. Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is an opportunity for Muslims to open up a discussion of the legitimacy of the Zionist state, of the damage that the US Israel alliance does to America, and of the excessive influence that Jewish fanatics have in the USA.
10 comments:
Either you are blind, or you are simply a hypocrite. There is an ONGOING Jihad. But of course, it's probably a lie invented by the Jews/West/Whatever.
This is excellent!
Joachim: That's an excellent piece. Keep them coming.
Very good piece on Horowitz, but two suggestions. One is that he is no “conservative”—he is trying hard to destroy a good chunk of the legal framework of democracy and is of course a war-and-more-war supporter and believer in subordination of U.S. foreign policy to Israeli interests. He is a reactionary, proto-fascist, fifth columnist, and anti-semite (given that Arabs are semites). Second, I have always been impressed with how much he hates his old comrades and how much he targets and vilifies them. They didn’t adequately appreciate him, and his resentments run deep. They are a force explaining his behavior I do believe. I am proud that he was furious at me many years ago for a hostile review (published in Seven Days) of his already-turning-coat biography of the Rockefellers.
I did not actually call him a conservative although some of the projects sponsored by the Freedom Center claim to raise money for conservative causes -- something, which is in fact worth checking for veracity.
Because he is not a conservative and does damage to conservative causes, I suggested that "American Muslims should go on the offensive and strengthen alliances with progressive and conservative non-Muslims, who are aghast at the damage that Zionists and extremist American Jews have managed to do to American society and to US foreign policy."
Resentment is part of the pattern. Russianized (Rossitski) populations in the Czarist Empire had tremendous resentments that they did not receive the political access of the Russian (Russki) population, and ethnic Ashkenazim were probably the most aggrieved because ethnic Ashkenazim had been effectively if not officially members of the Polish szlachta (gentry). The depth of ethnic Ashkenazi resentment lead many (especially 2nd generation) Russianized Ashkenazim to conclude that Czarist rule had to be violently overthrown and led a far smaller number of Russianized Ashkenazim to become Zionists. ("If we cannot be an elite in the Russian Empire, we will become the elite in Palestine, which is rightfully our inheritance.")
Thanks for the positive evaluation.
Recently you alluded to George Mosse's discussion of the shared origins of zionist and nazi ideology.
I looked in his book on German ideology and found nothing. Can you suggest a reference?
You are perhaps familiar with Keller's book The German Language where he points to Moses Hess and Theodor Herzl as originators of the termN azionalsozialismus.
He wrote another book entitled "Germans and Jews" which discusses this issue.
It is a collection of separate articles which he then wrote into a book.
I think he focused to much on fear of economic dislocation and not enough on the fear of the Soviet Union (obviously related) and he glossed over the roll of German Jews and ethnic Ashkenazim in the Bavarian communist coup.
I will see if I can did up the relevant passages.
I believe he also wrote a few independent articles on the subject which were never collected together.
I remember this from a class I took as an undergrad 35 years ago. The professor passed out xeroxes of the articles, but if I have them they are deep in storage.
It is also worthwhile to compare Koonz's The Nazi Conscience with studies on contemporary Israeli Jewish society.
Klemperer also writes in his journals how similar he finds German Nazi and Zionist thought. These passages were of course left out in the English abridgements.
The German Nazis also accepted all of Nordau's eugenics ideas without change. Nordau was after Herzl the most important primary Zionist leader.
It is also interesting that the German Nazis also eventually came to accept Nordau's judgment on Wagner as the most degenerate (entarteter) artist of the 19th century even though originally that considered him unser einer as the quintessential voelkisch German composer.
I suppose you have seen this article by Fisk on Klemperer:
http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk04062006.html
Killing people is always wrong but Fisk has bought into a severe misunderstanding of the mass murders of Jews during WW2.
Now that we have access to Soviet archives, there is no question that ethnic Ashkenazim were up to their eyeballs in ethnic cleansing, mass murder and genocide well before WW2 started. One of the first groups targeted by ethnic Ashkenazi Soviet officials were Russian Germans simply for having been competitors to ethnic Ashkenazim for the same economic niche.
If the Holocultists want to define Germans as a Taetervolk (perpetrator people), then ethnic Ashkenazim are at least as much a Taetervolk.
Unlike Germans, who are remorseful, ethnic Ashkenazim are benefitting from, supporting and carrying out genocide in Palestine right before our eyes.
To understand the Holocaust, one must understand ethnic Ashkenazi genocidalism as part of a wave of genocidalism that starts in the 1820s in Czarist Russia (in Chechnya in fact) and spreads West. This genocidalism is very much a part an intrinsic aspect of the Soviet Revolution to which the German Nazis were a reaction.
I dug up my copy of Germans and Jews by Mosse. The chapter entitle "The Influence of the Volkish Idea on German Jewry" (pp. 77 -- 115) discusses some of the similarities of Nazism and Zionism. Mosse is defensive, and one must take some of his claims with a grain of salt.
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