The David Horowitz Freedom Center is supported by 100,000 individual donors, which is more than three times the number of its supporters ten years ago. Conservatives who have spoken at events the Center has hosted include four of the contenders for this year’s Republican presidential nomination (Santorum, Gingrich, Bachmann and Cain) former president George Bush, his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, his Attorney General John Ashcroft, Senator Marco Rubio, and his colleagues, John McCain, Jon Kyl, Jeff Sessions and others, Speaker John Boehner, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and Victor Davis Hanson. A recent pamphlet I wrote called Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution has sold half a million copies and has been distributed to another two million. Contrary to the Tablet’s description of the Center as a declining institution it has doubled its revenues in the last ten years and its influence in the conservative movement through its websites Frontpagemag.com and DiscovertheNetworks.org is greater than ever.

I obviously made a serious mistake in judgment, in agreeing to be interviewed by someone who misrepresented what I told him and ignored the evidence that contradicted his distortions. For being so unguarded, I owe an apology to my friends and supporters, several of whom expressed their dismay to me after reading the article. It is partly their concern that has prompted me to set the record straight. But, in a perverse way, I am also appreciative of the opportunity provided by the author of this tedious and hostile piece of writing because he has caused me to look at how embedded in the conservative movement I and my colleagues at the David Horowitz Freedom Center are, and how deeply we are indebted to it as well.

When I received the Tablet request for an interview, I was inclined to say yes because it came from a magazine with which I had a history, and which did occasionally published first-rate conservative writers such as Bret Stephens and Lee Smith. They even published a defense of Nonie Darwish that I submitted when she was attacked by one of their writers. I was also disarmed by the author himself who sent me an email about his intentions:

I am a leftist, though not a dogmatic one, and I usually don’t write directly about politics. For The Nation, I write mostly for the Books and Arts section, which isn’t nearly as ideologically-driven as the magazine’s editorial page…. So, we may not find much common ground politically, but that may make for a more stimulating piece. I’m less interested in debating Islamo-fascism than exploring your work’s position at the intersection of autobiography, politics, history, manners, and polemic. I think I can do so fairly.

In the past, my work has been attacked by leftists who will take a phrase from a fund-raising letter, or a heated polemic and omit its context or distort its meaning to discredit my work. The prospect of a leftist writer distinguishing the intellectual from the polemical in my work looked to me like an opportunity to break through the censorship that leftists had imposed on it.

I could not have been more mistaken. When the article “David Horowitz Is Homeless” appeared, it was apparent that none of its author’s assurances — interested in the intersection of styles of thought, not interested in scoring political points, will do it fairly — were sincere. Here is an illustrative example: “If what was once labeled extremism is now mainstream GOP boilerplate,” the author wrote, “then Horowitz deserves at least some of the credit.”

Not only was this a political attack, it was wildly inaccurate in both of its claims. The Republican Party today finds itself defending policies that were once the province of liberal Democrats like John F. Kennedy, specifically capital gains tax cuts, balanced budgets, strong defense budgets, color-blind racial standards and aggressive anti-totalitarian foreign policies. Only an extremist of the left could so mis-label a party that just nominated a former Massachusetts governor as its presidential candidate.

But the author isn’t done. He also wants to pin Republican “extremism” on me – the man whom conservatives have allegedly abandoned:

In a widely distributed 2000 pamphlet called The Art of Political War, praised by Karl Rove and endorsed by 35 state Republican party chairmen, Horowitz wrote: “In political warfare you do not fight just to prevail in an argument, but to destroy the enemy’s fighting ability. Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate with the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles. But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different. … Politics is war. Don’t forget it.” If you can remember a time when conservative discourse sounded like an Oxford lecture hall, then you have a sense of how far Horowitz has helped to steer this ship off course.

The missing context in this presentation is that the little pamphlet I wrote twelve years ago argued that it is Democrats – not Republicans — who have transformed the political arena into a combat zone. The pamphlet then urged Republicans to stop behaving as though it wasn’t.

The kernel of truth in the description is that I did remark to the author that Republicans haven’t really heeded my advice. It is true that 35 state party chairman endorsed the pamphlet, but none of them acted on its recommendations. Republicans have come a long way since then – thanks in the main to the emergence of the Tea Party. But they still have a long way to go.

The Tablet Magazine article can be found here.

Reprinted from dailymail.co.uk

Outrage as Egypt plans ‘farewell intercourse law’ so husbands can have sex with DEAD wives up to six hours after their death

By Lee Moran
 

Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives – for up to six hours after their death.

The controversial new law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament.

It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women’s rights of getting education and employment.

Egypt’s National Council for Women is campaigning against the changes, saying that ‘marginalising and undermining the status of women would negatively affect the country’s human development’.

Dr Mervat al-Talawi, head of the NCW, wrote to the Egyptian People’s Assembly Speaker Dr Saad al-Katatni addressing her concerns.

Egyptian journalist Amro Abdul Samea reported in the al-Ahram newspaper that Talawi complained about the legislations which are being introduced under ‘alleged religious interpretations’.

The subject of a husband having sex with his dead wife arose in May 2011 when Moroccan cleric Zamzami Abdul Bari said marriage remains valid even after death.

He also said that women have the right to have sex with her dead husband, alarabiya.net reported.

It seems the topic, which has sparked outrage, has now been picked up on by Egypt’s politicians.

TV anchor Jaber al-Qarmouty slammed the notion of letting a husband have sex with his wife after her death under the so-called ‘Farewell Intercourse’ draft law.

He said: ‘This is very serious. Could the panel that will draft the Egyptian constitution possibly discuss such issues? Did Abdul Samea see by his own eyes the text of the message sent by Talawi to Katatni?

‘This is unbelievable. It is a catastrophe to give the husband such a right! Has the Islamic trend reached that far? Is there really a draft law in this regard? Are there people thinking in this manner?’

The David Horowitz Freedom Center and Temple University Students for Intellectual Freedom have organized an “Islamic Apartheid Conference” to be held on Monday, April 23rd focusing on the second-class status of women and homosexuals in Islam and the intolerance for other religions.  An organized coalition of leftist and Islamist student groups at Temple University has created a Facebook page defaming the scheduled panelists and pledged to protest and disrupt the event.

The panel discussion will feature four distinguished experts: Nonie Darwish, author of the new book The Devil We Don’t Know, Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch and author of the new book Did Muhammad Exist?, Pamela Geller, founder and editor of the popular blog AtlasShrugs.com and author of  Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance, and Simon Deng, a refugee from Sudan and survivor of child slavery.

“We do not use the term ‘Islamic apartheid’ lightly,” commented David Horowitz, founder and chairman of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. “Nowhere in the modern world can such infringements on personal and religious freedoms and civil rights paralleling the situation under apartheid rule in South African be found as in the Islamic-controlled nations of the Middle East where women can be stoned to death for being victims of rape. Yet these insidious violations of human rights are barely discussed, let alone addressed, in the mainstream media and on college campuses. Our event at Temple University is the first step towards addressing the multitude of crimes against humanity committed by these Islamic regimes.”

The alliance of leftist and Islamist groups planning the disruption includes Occupy Temple, the International Socialist Organization, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, among others. This consortium has created a Facebook page for their protest which refers to the event as “a gathering of racist, Islamophobic bigots.” It further slanders Geller as “Queen of the Muslim Bashers” and defames the Freedom Center as “another anti-Muslim group which uses McCarthyist tactics to attack academic freedom around the country.”

These characterizations are false and defamatory. In fact, Horowitz was recently quoted by the University of North Carolina Daily Tar Heel as stating, during a speech at that university, that “there are good Muslims and there are bad Muslims, and the majority of Muslims are probably good Muslims – decent, law abiding and desiring peace. But there were good Germans too, and in the end, they didn’t make a damn’s worth of difference.”

The David Horowitz Freedom Center is a not-for-profit organization  dedicated to the defense of free societies whose moral, cultural and economic foundations are under attack by enemies both secular and religious, at home and abroad. More information is available on the organization’s website at www.horowitzfreedomccenter.org.

Is anybody else out there as sick and tired as I am of lynch mob racists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (vide: Tawana Brawley, the Duke Lacrosse kids) who don the mantel of the “civil rights” movement to indict non-blacks in advance of the facts, and incite racial rage against them? Yet that is exactly what they – and scores of black leaders — are doing to an Hispanic individual named George Zimmerman. Along with a cast of thousands, they are holding him guilty of racism before the fact, justifying a hatred, as inflammatory as the hatred once spewed by southern crackers against blacks.

There is no evidence whatsoever that race was a defining factor in the tragic death of Trayvon Martin. Notwithstanding the absence of evidence, this unhappy incident is now the occasion for school shut-downs, mass marches and public death threats by enraged African Americans, displaying behaviors reminiscent of the lynch mobs that were once a scourge of their parents’ generation in a now rejected past.

The facts surrounding the death of Trayvon Martin have not been investigated and are still uncertain. But the lynch mob has delivered its verdict: George Zimmerman is guilty of a race crime; Trayvon Martin was killed because he was black. “Trayvon is the Emmett Till of our generation,” said one mob leader, referring to the 12-year-old who was murdered by white racists in 1955 for whistling at a white woman.

There is no verifiable evidence for this fact-challenged, inflammatory, claim. According to the lone eyewitness to come forward, it was Martin who attacked Zimmerman and was on top of him and beating him to a pulp when the fatal shot was fired. The fact that Zimmerman’s face was bloody when the police arrived, is an apparent corroboration of this version of the event. Is this what happened? We don’t know. But it is a claim that should get tested in a court of law. Unfortunately to a lynch mob the evidence is irrelevant, the conclusion foregone.

If the demonstrators were merely calling for an investigation that would be proper. But the cries for retribution, and the accusations of racism, which dominate the public demonstrations are not. And that goes for the statement of the President as well. Not willing to be separated from his racial constituency, even when they are behaving badly, Obama has lent his prestige to the insinuation that the crime was inspired by the victim’s race. Otherwise there would be no reason to mention the fact that “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” Everyone who has a son should be concerned by the loss of this life. By making it racial, the president is establishing guilt without evidence, and indicting non-black America as well.

The display of racial outrage over this case is a national disgrace. It is a throwback to the past and a shameful repudiation of the values the civil rights movement once stood for but apparently does no longer.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.  

Is anybody else out there as sick and tired as I am of lynch mob racists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (vide: Tawana Brawley, the Duke Lacrosse kids) who don the mantel of the “civil rights” movement to indict non-blacks in advance of the facts, and incite racial rage against them? Yet that is exactly what they – and scores of black leaders — are doing to an Hispanic individual named George Zimmerman. Along with a cast of thousands, they are holding him guilty of racism before the fact, justifying a hatred, as inflammatory as the hatred once spewed by southern crackers against blacks.

There is no evidence whatsoever that race was a defining factor in the tragic death of Trayvon Martin. Notwithstanding the absence of evidence, this unhappy incident is now the occasion for school shut-downs, mass marches and public death threats by enraged African Americans, displaying behaviors reminiscent of the lynch mobs that were once a scourge of their parents’ generation in a now rejected past.

The facts surrounding the death of Trayvon Martin have not been investigated and are still uncertain. But the lynch mob has delivered its verdict: George Zimmerman is guilty of a race crime; Trayvon Martin was killed because he was black. “Trayvon is the Emmett Till of our generation,” said one mob leader, referring to the 12-year-old who was murdered by white racists in 1955 for whistling at a white woman.

There is no verifiable evidence for this fact-challenged, inflammatory, claim. According to the lone eyewitness to come forward, it was Martin who attacked Zimmerman and was on top of him and beating him to a pulp when the fatal shot was fired. The fact that Zimmerman’s face was bloody when the police arrived, is an apparent corroboration of this version of the event. Is this what happened? We don’t know. But it is a claim that should get tested in a court of law. Unfortunately to a lynch mob the evidence is irrelevant, the conclusion foregone.

If the demonstrators were merely calling for an investigation that would be proper. But the cries for retribution, and the accusations of racism, which dominate the public demonstrations are not. And that goes for the statement of the President as well. Not willing to be separated from his racial constituency, even when they are behaving badly, Obama has lent his prestige to the insinuation that the crime was inspired by the victim’s race. Otherwise there would be no reason to mention the fact that “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” Everyone who has a son should be concerned by the loss of this life. By making it racial, the president is establishing guilt without evidence, and indicting non-black America as well.

The display of racial outrage over this case is a national disgrace. It is a throwback to the past and a shameful repudiation of the values the civil rights movement once stood for but apparently does no longer.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.  

The first (and last) thing anyone needs to understand about Barack Obama is that he is a Machiavellian con man whose loose way with the truth makes Bill Clinton look like a boy scout. This is a born and bred Marxist radical who charmed the pants off Wall Street and seduced its kingpins into giving him $100 million for his first presidential run. This is a man who will say and do anything to get power – and in an election year, power is at the ballot box — hence his pledge to the Jews this AIPAC season that he “has Israel’s back.” In this astute piece in the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens shows that Obama has been schooled in his antagonism to Israel not only by such Palestinian Israel-haters as Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said, but by Jewish leftists as well. Obama is a smooth enough article to fool most of the people most of the time. Hopefully, come November he won’t have fooled them all of the time.

Arizona’s Governor, Jan Brewer, released the following statement in response to Sarver’s criticism of the new law:

“What if the owners of the  Suns discovered that hordes of people were sneaking into games without paying?

What if they had a good idea who the gate-crashers are but the ushers and security personnel were not allowed to ask these folks to produce their ticket stubs, thus non-paying attendees couldn’t be ejected.

Furthermore, what if Suns’ ownership was expected to provide those who sneaked in with complimentary eats and drink?

And what if, on those days when a gate-crasher became ill or injured, the Suns had to provide free medical care and shelter?”

As John Perazzo and I write in our new broadside about Occupy Wall Street, this movement marks a new phase in the rebirth of the communist left. I wrote about this phenomenon previously in my book Unholy Alliance, where I included a lengthy analysis called “The Mind of the Left” tracing its development from the Stalinism of the Thirties through its reincarnation in the final degenerated stages of the New Left (William Ayers comes to mind) and then in the post-Communist resurgence of the international left first in the anti-globalization riots (which were not against  globalization but against capitalism) and then in the movement to defend the Iraqi mass murderer Saddam Hussein. Only a movement so swept up in its hatred of America as a symbol of capitalism could have committed a moral atrocity like this. In the book I also noted and analyzed the “unholy alliance” that had been formed globally between the forces of Islamic totalitarianism and the radical secular left. Hence the title of the book.

At the time I wrote the book — which was 2004 — the main organization of the international left was the Soros-funded World Social Forum which brought together narco-terrorists, Islamic jihadists and Western radicals such as Noam Chomsky. The World Social Forum has now emerged as the brain center of the Occupy movement — which is more accurately the neo-Communist international — and its plans for global anti-capitalist riots in June.

I’m going to dissent from the majority and from our Frontpage article on Obama’s State of the Union address. I think most taxation these days is theft, in that it goes for services we don’t need and I don’t want, like paying government union workers exorbitant pensions, and funding school systems that don’t teach, and providing people who don’t want to work incentives to have children out of wedlock and to create large families condemned to live in poverty, which produce an outsize share of criminals who prey mainly on the working poor. I am against the progressive income tax, because it is basically unfair and provides an incentive to the 50% who don’t pay taxes to support government waste and encourage destructive government policies, like the current system of welfare programs.

However, Obama’s proposal to plug what is essentially a loophole — low tax rates for carried interest income — in the present tax set up is a good idea. Mitt Romney earns $21 million a year but pays at a 15% rate because of this loophole. This is not income he earns as an active investor. He’s a politician and has been for a long time. There are so many people who are multimillionaires and billionaires that taxing them an additional 15% would amount to a significant boost in revenues at time when the country needs them and would hardly be as punitive as a 35% tax rate on someone making $100,000 — which is what unionized dispatchers make as longshoremen.

The New York Times, which played a key role in getting convicted and unrepentant murderer Kathy Boudin a parole, has now published a similar massive plea posing as a news story for her accomplice, Judy Clark. The piece is maliciously titled “The Radical Transformation of Judy Clark” as though Clark, understanding the heinous nature of her crime which left 9 children fatherless, is prepared to renounce the life that led to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course Clark is in her sixties now and regrets her separation from the infant she abandoned to commit the crime (her last crime not her only crime). Her daughter  is now 31 and she would obviously like to be able to share the kind of life with her that her victims cannot share with their dead fathers. And, of course, being old and gray, she no longer thinks Amerikkka is on the brink of a violent revolution and liberation. Unlike Boudin, moreover, she does seem to have given some thought to the enormity  of what she did to those nine fatherless children. But that said, there is no indication that her parole plea is anything but self-serving, or that she has turned her back on the progressive terrorists — Boudin, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn among them — who were her comrades-in-arms through the twelve years of armed warfare she conducted against her country and its citizens, which left more than a handful of people dead.

To begin with, Clark and her mouthpiece at the Times, present the culprit as an absent-minded accomplice to the one crime for which she was convicted, the Brinks robbery in Nyack NY in 1981. According to Clark,  her participation  was an “obligation” — the fulfillment of a promise she had made to participate as a getaway driver in a robbery she thought would never take place. This is baloney. Clark was part of a group that called itself “The Family,” which  was a working alliance between the Black Liberation Army and the May 19th Communist Movement (so-named in part to commemorate the day the BLA murdered a black and white police team in New York for no reason other than that they were a black and white officer working together).

The May 19 gang was mainly women (among them Boudin, Clark and Susan Rosenberg) who served as the getaway team for the BLA in a string of bank robberies in which people were killed. One attempted assassination of  a New York judge was unsuccessful. All these crimes were committed in the name of the revolution, which in the perverse eyes of progressives like Judy Clark, justified them. The Family had also sprung a cold-blooded killer — Assata Shakur — from federal prison. Clark’s role in the May 19th organization was not the beginning of her criminal career but its fulfillment. Previously she had spent 7 years as one of the most fanatical members of the Weather Underground, helping to conduct many bombings and kill at least three people, and probably also two police officers whose deaths are still under investigation.

A guilty person who understands their guilt and has genuine remorse begins by accepting responsibility for what they did and for all they did — and not pretending (as Clark does in this article) that they became a violent radical only after they were arrested as a result of guilt for not having been revolutionary enough. Or that their participation in the one crime they were apprehended for was actually the result of inattention or some other excusable offense.

Far more important, a truly remorseful terrorist will feel obligated to turn his back on his fellow terrorists and their supporters and do the innocent a service by revealing what they know, and who their networks are, and what they actually did — not just what they got caught doing. This kind of truth-telling is an authentic form of atonement and would protect others — and particularly young radicals just starting out who may become involved in criminal ventures just as Clark did when she was young and the tragedies she caused were still in front of her.

Update: Ron Radosh has a different take at Pajamas Media.

I did my mourning for Christopher when he was given his death sentence last July and appeared in public as a punished shell of his former self. For those of us who knew him, it was hard to watch and painful to think about. Christopher was a great entertainer and everyone will miss him for that. He was also an outspoken if inconsistent moralist, and a fearless champion of the right to think and speak one’s mind, and he will be remembered gratefully for that.

Christopher had a dark, mean side, which was not so likeable, and whose bile was directed at religious people and select conservatives like Ronald Reagan, and for some reason celebrities like Lady Di. But his wit and verbal bravura were irresistible and helped many to forgive him his transgressions. When he was struck with cancer, thousands of his targets directed prayers for him to heaven in the face of his ridicule.

He was a man of the Left to the end, and that is where he went to die. In his last decade he had held his comrades to account for their malicious support for the tyrant in Iraq and their equally disgraceful attacks on their country for its support for freedom. It was his remarkable achievement to retain his standing in a movement committed to those ends. He was able to do so in part because of his final campaign against God, which occupied the main part of his dying days. I understand why Christopher did this, even though its ordeals took precious time and attention from his family and friends and from himself. He was when all was said and done a romantic, who sacrificed his life in this world to the fantasy of a future he imagined – first without capitalism and then without faith.

I have missed Christopher since the day he was given his death sentence. I have reflected more than once on the times I saw him early in the day with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other and the look of a man who had been freshly mugged, and thought my friend is killing himself, knowing that there was nothing I could say or do to stop him. After his diagnosis, Christopher defended his reckless self-destruction saying it helped to make his life give off “a more lovely light.” I think it did for him, and am glad for that, though those of us who enjoyed its pleasures will wish he had found some other way to shine.