Author: Harvey Klehr
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: November 3, 2004
David Horowitz is the conservative
polemicist liberals love to hate. His fierce attacks on political
cant and ideological certainties have provoked howls of outrage on
campuses across the United States and inspired sometimes angry and
occasionally stimulating debates about such issues as reparations
for slavery, political indoctrination by college faculty and professorial
antipathy for American foreign policies.
Precisely because he gives no quarter,
Horowitz is a formidable presence and debater. He understands
the history of the American Left, how it has been able to use its
stated concern for the underdog and underprivileged and its idealistic
rhetoric to cover up and camouflage support for and advocacy of uglier
policies, goals and repressive regimes.
Growing up in a Communist family,
Horowitz was one of the early intellectual eminences of the New Left,
before co-authoring a series of best-selling books with Peter Collier
on American dynastic families. Horowitz and Collier caused an uproar
among their radical friends in the 1980s by loudly endorsing Ronald
Reagan for president and organizing a conference at which a number
of 1960s radicals owned up to "second thoughts" about their intellectual
legacy. Excoriated as traitors and turncoats, they remained
on the intellectual offensive. Horowitz, in particular, relishes
his role as an intellectual provocateur. His latest book, Unholy
Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, will no doubt be dismissed
or routinely disparaged, particularly in the academy, as another
angry screed by a right-wing hit man. It should not be.
Unholy Alliance offers a very serious
and disturbing account of the intellectual corruption of an important
segment of the American Left. Even those of us who do not identify
with the Left should be worried about the kind of rationalizations
for Islamic terror and terrorists that have established a foothold
in its ranks. The willingness of some mainstream liberals to
form alliances with apologists for and defenders of terrorism in
the name of defeating President Bush or sabotaging the war in Iraq
represents an ominous development in American political life.
Just like the battle for the soul of liberalism in the 1940s and
1950s, during which liberal anti-communists confronted and eventually
defeated popular front pro-communists, the struggle within liberalism
about Islamic fundamentalism in this decade may well have a defining
effect on America's future.
Horowitz makes a very strong case
that significant segments of the Left have formed alliances of convenience
with Islamist radicals. He notes that immediately after 9/11,
a number of prominent leftists opposed any American response and
blamed American policies for the tragedy. With thousands of
Americans dead, Noam Chomsky was so consumed by hatred of his own
country and conviction that it was the fount of evil in the world
that he traveled to Pakistan to inform Muslim audiences that America
was planning to commit genocide in Afghanistan before it invaded
to overthrow the Taliban. Other prominent writers denounced America
for its reactions more vociferously than they condemned Al Qaeda
for its murderous actions.
Horowitz is careful to note that
he is not conflating all opposition to America's policies in the
Middle East with anti-Americanism nor is he suggesting that everyone
on the left buys in to the excuses and rationalizations for terrorism
offered by some of its acolytes. He accepts that some, perhaps
many, of those who opposed an American invasion of Iraq did so for
practical or tactical or patriotic reasons. His book could have been
strengthened had he spelled out these differences in more detail.
Horowitz also probably underestimates the extent to which normal
partisanship has shaped the willingness of some Democrats to excoriate
the President for policies they would have supported had a Democratic
administration implemented them. But he is absolutely on target
to note that by their unwillingness to repudiate their own extremists,
Democratic Party leaders have ensured that they will be less capable
of forcefully dealing with Islamic terrorism for fear of alienating
their anti-war and pacifistic base. And, they have severely
comprised elementary standards of democratic morality. Just as
it was incumbent on Republicans to repudiate and isolate outright
racists like David Duke and Jew-baiters like Pat Buchanan, Democrats
need to refuse alliances with Marxist-Leninists and supporters of
terrorism.
What is sure to make Horowitz's
argument controversial is his insistence that there is a clear connection
between the old anti-Americanism of the communist left and today's
radical anti-American left. But, in clear, blunt prose, Horowitz
lays out the connections. Eric Foner, scion of an old Communist
family, Dewitt Clinton Professor at Columbia University, defender
of the innocence of the Rosenbergs, praises the "patriotism" of Paul
Robeson, himself a loyal Stalinist and declares that he doesn't know
whether to be more afraid of terrorists crashing airplanes into buildings
or the "rhetoric" emanating from the White House. The first
large anti-war coalition, ANSWER, a creature of the Stalinist Workers
World Party, began its activities immediately after 9/11 and explicitly
defended Saddam Hussein. Leslie Cagan, head of the "mainstream"
Coalition United for Peace and Justice, has long had ties to the old
Communist Party, as does Medea Benjamin, head of Global Citizen, another
group active in anti-war organizing on the left.
Cagan, Benjamin and their allies
have successfully incorporated many of the old Communist themes into
contemporary anti-war protests with scarcely a murmur of dissent
from the notables who endorse and participate in them. There
is the emphasis on American imperialism as responsible for the ills
of Third World countries and a distinct hostility to both capitalism
and corporations. At the large and disruptive Seattle anti-globalization
protests of 1999 Gerald McEntee, head of a large public service union,
the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers and
a Gore advisor, denounced "corporate capitalism." There is
the demonization of America and the West as a fount of racism, sexism
and discrimination, a theme repeated by dozens of American Non-Governmental
Organizations at the infamous United Nations Durban Conference in
2001.
And, above all, there is the hatred
of Israel that permeated Durban and has increasingly infected larger
segments of the radical left. Denunciations of Israel as a colonial
settler state, long confined to the fever swamps of American political
life, now are a regular part of anti-war demonstrations. So
are explicit comparisons of Israel and Nazi Germany and praise and
excuses for suicide bombers. The Presbyterian Church urges
disinvestment from companies doing business in Israel. More than
occasionally, the anti-Israeli animus seamlessly morphs into classical
anti-Semitism. Conspiracy theorists on the left mutter about
the inordinate influence of Jewish, neo-conservative cabals sacrificing
American national interests to serve Israel. In the war between a
democratic Israel that, whatever its faults, grants civil rights to
minorities, empowers women and is tolerant of gays and lesbians, and
Hamas and Islamic Jihad which seek to impose sharia and preach intolerance
and repression, significant segments of the left condemn Israel and
fault it for protecting its citizens. And while most Democratic
politicians would never utter such comments, they associate with
and accept support from those who do.
The most arresting portion of Unholy
Alliance is Hurwitz's account of the left-wing embrace of radical
Islamists in America. In the late 1980s Abdullah Azzam, Osama
Bin Laden's mentor, criss-crossed the United States recruiting jihadists,
raising money and setting up support networks for purchasing weapons,
forging passports and destroying liberal, secular societies.
After his assassination, the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman, took
control of his organization and planned the first bombing of the
World Trade Center in 1993. His attorney, Lynn Stewart, now
on trial for providing material support to terrorism, a long-time
radical, defended Islamic terrorists as "basically forces of national
liberation" and advocated "directed violence" against the American
capitalist system.
Sami Al-Arian, one of the co-founders
of Palestine Islamic Jihad and a former professor at Florida Atlantic
University, was running a Hamas front at the university for years.
Among the allegations in his pending criminal indictment are the
funneling of payments to the families of suicide bombers and requests
to sources in Saudi Arabia for help in locating bomb-making chemicals.
When his activities were first exposed years ago, the reaction of
some on the left was not to express horror at the idea of a professor
engaging in support for terrorism but to denounce his accusers for
"McCarthyism" and engaging in "political repression."
In the late 1940s the Democratic
Party faced a stark choice between those who argued that the United
States needed to accommodate itself to communism and those who insisted
that it was a pernicious doctrine whose advocates had no place in
a democratic political system. Henry Wallace called for an
alliance between liberals and communists, asserting that they shared
a commitment to the poor and disadvantaged and that American foreign
policy should build bridges to the communist states in pursuit of
a more peaceful world. Hubert Humphrey fought the first battle in
that war in Minnesota and Harry Truman won the war in 1948 by insisting
that communists and Democrats were not allies but enemies. By driving
the communists and their allies out of the Democratic Party, Truman and
Humphrey salvaged the honor of liberalism.
Horowitz notes that several leftists,
notably Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens, have pleaded with their
compatriots to avoid forming alliances with Islamists or deluding
themselves into thinking that radical Islam is a progressive force.
But they have had little influence. And more mainstream liberals
like former President Carter continue to give credence and respectability
to conspiracy theorists, extremists and anti-Israel activists like
Michael Moore. Although conservatives are the most likely readers
of this book, it contains important lessons for liberals. Despite
his persona as a conservative ideologue, I would guess that David
Horowitz would be pleased to see liberals regain their moral footing
and once again refuse to compromise or cooperate with enemies of
democracy. That would be beneficial to both liberalism and
conservatism. Until that happens, books like Unholy Alliance
are a valuable reminder to liberals that the enemy of my enemy is
not always my friend and to conservatives that old enemies are very
resilient.
Harvey Klehr, Ph.D., is a professor
of political science at Emory University and co-author of In Denial:
Historians, Communism, and Espionage.
