So why the continuing lies? The reason is this: The truth is too embarrassing. Imagine what it would be like for Betty Friedan (the name actually is Friedman) to admit that as a Jew she opposed America’s entry into the war against Hitler because Stalin told her that it was just an inter-imperialist fracas? Imagine what it would be like for America’s premier feminist to acknowledge that well into her 30s she thought Stalin was the Father of the Peoples, and that the United States was an evil empire, and that her interest in women’s liberation was just a subtext of her real desire to create a Soviet America. No, those kinds of revelations don’t help a person who is concerned about her public image.

Which is why it probably has seemed better just to lie about this all these years. The problem, however, is that lying can’t be contained. It begets other lies, and eventually becomes a whole way of life, as President Clinton could tell you. One of the lies that the denial of one’s Communist past begets is an exaggerated view of McCarthyism. Fear of McCarthyism becomes an excuse that explains everything. That McCarthyism was some gigantic “reign of terror” (to use Carl Bernstein’s sappy analogy), as though thousands lost their freedom and hundreds their lives while the country itself remained paralyzed with fear for a decade is simply not true. McCarthy’s personal reign lasted but a year a half, until Democrats took control of his committee. Being an accused Communist on an American college campus in the ’50s, moreover, was only marginally more damaging to one’s career opportunities than the accusation of being a member of the Christian Right would be on today’s politically correct campus, dominated as it now is by the tenured left. Bad enough, but reign of terror, no.

– Feminist Icon Debunked, January 19, 1999

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America will stand or fall with Israel. This assertion is illustrated and justified by the latest skirmish instigated by the too-familiar Andrew Sullivan. The Daily-Dish’s self-proclaimed conscience of a nation of torturers, has demanded that Ronald Radosh, NYC University’s co-author of The Rosenberg File, remove and apologize for his post at Pajamas Media. Radosh, a conservative historian whose Marxist odyssey mirrors that of David Horowitz, explains the cause of Sullivan’s outrage:

“A while back, I posted…an Israeli’s response to the Goldstone Report at Pajamas Media. Now, at his website at TheAtlantic.Com, Andrew Sullivan is asking me and PJM to “take down this racist post and apologize.” He also accuses me of “McCarthyism” and “of being unhinged on the matter of the Middle East” and of moving towards “grotesque slanders of the ‘treasonous’ motives of a man like Goldstone.”

The Goldstone Report is an investigation, prepared at the behest of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, of the war on Israel. Radosh’s post is a reproduced letter from Roy Chweidan, a man familiar with Goldstone’s career in South Africa. Sullivan cries, “Racism!” because Radosh posted Chweidan’s assertion that, “relying only on “Arab truth,” the Goldstone Report is inaccurate.

Radosh stands his ground:

“He argues, as you can see for yourself, that I am indeed both a Mc Carthyite and a racist for arguing that “an entire people” and an “entire ethnic group” are outside the realm of being normal; i.e., that because they are Arabs, they are by nature liars. He accuses me of making the same arguments as anti-Semites who say all Jews are above the truth by nature.”

“That, however, is not my point. It is, rather, the meta-narrative Thomas Friedman refers to in his Sunday New York Times column, one that is “is embraced across the Arab-Muslim political spectrum, from the secular left to the Islamic right.” That narrative, Friedman writes, citing the words of Lacan Hadad, says: ‘The Arabs and Muslims are victims of an imperialist-Zionist conspiracy aided by reactionary regimes in the Arab world. It has as its goal keeping the Arabs and Muslims backward in order to exploit their oil riches and prevent them from becoming as strong as they used to be in the Middle Ages — because that is dangerous for Israel and Western interests.’ ” Is Friedman too a racist because he argues there is an “Arab narrative?”

What does this have to do with our county’s survival? Everything. Israel’s abandonment and destruction depend on Americans accepting the “Arab Narrative.” Once the United States aligns its Foreign Policy with enlightened Academia, Israel will fall, and we will follow her into oblivion because our condemnation of the Leftist caricature of Israel cries out for our own. If we subscribe to the revolutionary fantasy that Israel is the mother of her own enemies, that Hamas is not engaged in Terrorism, but righteous retaliation, and that Israeli self-defense is criminal oppression, how shall we not be convicted by this same myth?

We have wondered why every NRB Post addressing Islamic Terrorism, or anti-Israeli politicians, or US Foreign Policy is countered by virulent, acrimonious slashing. The answer is that the key to the utopian transformation of America, so lusted after by the Left, is to instill, within our national conscience, a disarming self-doubt, a shame nourished by the specter of ourselves as agents of evil, instead of “freedom’s last best hope.” If we join the global mob in clamoring for “Terrorist” Israel to be policed by the community of nations, then we, who have supported Israel, “driving peaceful Muslims to embrace Jihad for their own survival,” we too, must be disarmed for the good of humanity.

Ronald Radosh brilliantly declared that the “Arab Narrative,” is the substantive issue of his battle with Sullivan, not feigned outrage at a breach of political correctness. Sullivan’s factually anemic defense of Goldstone’s opinion piece undermines our determination to remain the last bulwark against the true totalitarian Communist or Sharia Utopias.

The subjective suffering resulting from the war against Israel is shared by Israelis and the Arabs attacking her. The reality of who started and ruthlessly pursues the war is objective. The ultimate goal of revisionist history, as championed by Goldstone and Sullivan, is to demand the land of Israel, piece by piece. In this war, land is truth. Giving land away legitimizes the myth, “Israel stole and now occupies Palestine.”

Ronald Radosh refuses to apologize for or take down his post, his “settlement,” at Pajamas Media to appease Andrew Sullivan. In these wars of ideas, the truth is like the land, you can’t give the truth away to make peace without eventually losing your country.

Forty years ago, I wrote the first book about the New Left, which was also a kind of manifesto of our publicly proposed agendas for a more democratic and racially equal America. I say “publicly proposed” because as leftists we knew we could not announce what we really intended which was a socialist revolution in America. As “new” leftists, we retained the illusion that socialism was a workable future, and that we could avoid the “mistakes” the Soviets had made, which had tarnished and compromised the socialist agenda. We also told ourselves that we could not be candid about what we intended because of America’s repressive political atmosphere at the time. But, in fact, McCarthyism was already dead and the real reason it was so difficult for us to articulate our socialist intentions was because they had been so thoroughly discredited by the historical record.

In the same year, a much more famous (and equally disingenuous) document appeared, called “The Port Huron Statement,” which was the founding manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The Port Huron Statement did not admit to its socialist agendas, but called instead for “participatory democracy,” by which it meant a direct democracy (or “people’s democracy”) – a democracy that would embrace the economic order as well. This was exactly how Marx had described the Communist future, but the Port Huron statement prudently refrained from acknowledging that fact.

SDS quickly became the largest organization of the New Left enroling close to 100,000 members at its peak, and spearheaded the movement against America’s anti-Communist war in Vietnam. But a movement that had begun with slogans about “democracy” emblazoned on its banners, ended up — a bare seven years later — embracing totalitarian police states like Cuba and North Vietnam and genocidal Communist movements like the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. In its final spasms of revolutionary fervor, SDS spawned leaders like Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers who called for actual war against “Amerikkka” and went “underground” to lead the first political terrorist cult in this country.

As it happens, Tom Hayden, who was the most famous of the authors of the Port Huron statement was also one of the loudest voices calling for a “war of liberation” in “Amerikkka” and the creation of armed “zones of liberation” in American college towns. Although he didn’t go underground with the Weatherman, he gave their cause his moral and political support. Hayden even formed his own guerrilla foco (a term lifted from Che Guevara’s strategist, Regis Debray), called the “Red Family,” whose members trained at local firing ranges for the battle to come.

Not surprisingly, in the years that have passed Hayden has not cared to recall the details of these episodes or explain how this political degeneration might be connected to the principles he helped to draft at Port Huron. Nor have any of the New Left historians of this period. This failure is all the more striking in light of the fact that the disastrous direction in which he and others led the New Left was actually predicted at the moment of its founding by dissenters from the Port Huron consensus. These were notably the late Irving Howe and his disciple, Michael Harrington. Even in 1962, Harrington and Howe saw that Hayden and his comrades were totalitarians in the making.

–  Left Illusions

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Related posts:

1. From the Pen of David Horowitz: December 12, 2009
2. From the Pen of David Horowitz: December 2, 2009
3. From the Pen of David Horowitz: October 24, 2009

Being a leftist Anti-Zionist means not only never having to say you are sorry, such as when you get your facts all wrong.  It also means that you have an obligation to represent yourself as a victim of harassment.   Armchair martyrdom is as fundamental a part of leftist ideology as anti-Americanism and hatred of Israel.

In his now-famous essay from July, 1976, “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America,” Thomas Wolfe wrote about how desperately American academics wish to feel persecuted.  A pretense of being persecuted today seems to do wonders both for their ego and for their web traffic.  The entire “Zionist Lobby” is largely an invention by these same people, anxious to show that they are being oppressed by an evil nefarious conspiracy.  You just need to wave your stigmata and denounce the “Neo-Conservatives,” the “Rightwing McCarthyists,” and – of course the Jews.  Whining about being persecuted seems to be the leading participation sport of today’s far Leftists and the radical armchair postureurs.

As documented recently on this web site, Joel Beinin, the Israel-hating pro-Hamas sometimes-Maoist professor of Middle East Studies at Stanford University is just such a persecution whiner.  Here is what we wrote:

‘“McCarthyism” seems to be Beinin’s third favorite “m” word, after Marxism and Mao, and he applies it liberally to anyone who dares to criticize him. Beinin wrote a 2004 article called “The New McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East.” In it, Beinin denounced the Ford Foundation’s decision to withdraw funding from any university grantee that finances the promotion of “violence, terrorism, or bigotry or the destruction of any state.” What worried Beinin was that such restrictions could potentially hurt a “Palestinian student group [that] called for the replacement of the state of Israel with a secular, democratic state,” meaning one seeking the extermination of Israel.’

Beinin went on to declare that Bay Area Zionists silenced him and prevented him from giving a talk to a school in San Jose.  The San Francisco Chronicle checked and reported that no one at all from the local Jewish Community had even spoken with anyone at that school.

Well, the good professor is back.  Over the Thanksgiving weekend he widely circulated the following epistle, which we reprint for you here in full, spelling errors and all:

26 November 2009

I arrived in Israel at about 15:00 on Wednesday, 25 November afternoon to visit my mother, brother, and sister who are Israeli (and US) citizens resident in Israel since 1973.  My mother has been ill, and this visit was prompted primarily for that reason. I have visited Israel dozens of times before – most recently December 2008 – and resided in the country for extended periods on several different occasions.  Yesterday, for the first time since my first visit to Israel in 1965, I was detained without explanation at Ben-Gurion airport for nearly two hours and ultimately interrogated.  The questioners asked questions that they surely already knew the answers to.  The asked, for example, my profession and my email.  My position as Donald J. McLaughlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University and my email are a matter of public record, easily obtainable from the website of Stanford’s Department of History.  The questioners also asked whether I had travelled (sic) to “other countries in the region” which, since they had my passport in their hands for the better part of two hours with all the relevant visa stamps, was also not obscure information.  My luggage was not searched nor was I asked any question remotely related to the security of Israel except whether I had traveled (sic) to Iran (I was there once, for two weeks, in 1970 when Israel had warm relations with the Shah’s regime).

It therefore appears that this “investigation” had no purpose other than to harass and intimidate me.

Upon leaving I was told that I would be contacted further by one “Amos” from the Ministry of Defense.  For my convenience, I was given his phone number: 054-*******.

Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History
Professor of Middle East History
Joel Beinin
Contact in Israel: 054-565-2320

The main reports about the horrific suffering by Beinin at the hands of the security personnel at Israel’s airport have been on web sites run by Israel’s own predominantly-Arab Stalinist communist party and on one of its front groups named “The Left Bank.”

Now the above Beinin hysterics about being “intimidated” need a dose of deconstruction.  Beinin routinely travels to countries that happen to be at war with Israel, and has visited Iran, which happens to be officially on record as calling for the annihilation of Israel and its population.  By his own admission, Beinin’s passport is bristling with visas from such countries.  One would expect even the sleepiest airport passport inspector at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport to sit up and take notice of someone coming into the country with such visas.  Most passport inspectors at Tel Aviv airport, by the way, are teenage girls.  So you can imagine the terror and intimation experienced there by the poor professor.

Now Beinin’s insistence that the airport security staff must have known who he is rings a bit curious.  I did a search of the Hebrew web, and – sure enough – there are some internet mentions of him in Hebrew, but almost all of those are on the web sites of communist party and its fronts, which the airport inspectors may not visit on a regular basis.  There are two mentions of Beinin’s getting sued by Los Angeles journalist Rachel Neuwirth for his posting false smears about her.

What about Beinin’s claim that being questioned about his travels in belligerent countries constitutes “harassment” and “intimidation?”   (We have only his word that the questioning took two hours, and no mention at all of his being offered cookies and tea; I have waited in that airport for longer just to get a guitar case out of the belly of a plane!)   Well, an acquaintance of mine named Julia is an Israeli Jew born in Libya, a fact noted on her Israeli passport, and you would not believe the hassle she goes through every time she wants to come to the United States for a visit!  My wife was questioned at length and searched at Tokyo airport after 9-11 because her passport says she was born in the Middle East.

More to the point, Joel Beinin is an anti-Israel hate propagandist, someone who has made a career out of rationalizing anti-Jewish terrorism and endorsing Arab demands for Israel’s annihilation.  Other countries routinely bar hostile propagandists for far less provocation.  Canada banned ultra-leftist and Saddam’s agent George Galloway from entering, and also banned some other radicals.  Canada also banned a controversial rap group from entering.  The US banned Tariq Ramadan due to his terrorist connections.  It has banned others for security reasons, including Cat Stevens, the British author Sebastian Horsley, a pro-LSD Canadian psychologist, and at least one Israeli.  The UK banned radio host Michael Savage (along with 15 other people) for being insensitive to Moslems, and tried to ban Dutch politician Geert Wilders.  Egypt has barred Hamas members from entering.  The Ukraine banned the mayor of Moscow from entering the country because of things he said.

Now as it turns out, Israel almost never prevents anti-Israel propagandists and anti-Semitic hate-mongers from entering the country.  For example, it rather stupidly allows lots of “anarchists” from the “International Solidarity Movement” and similar pro-terror groups to enter the country and then to attack its policemen and soldiers as their attempt to help Palestinian terrorists.  The only two anti-Israel propagandists of note who have been barred from entering Israel in recent years were: 1.  Norman Finkelstein, a Neo-Nazi who was fired by DePaul University and who was barred from entering Israel due to his intimate ties with the Hezb’Allah, and 2. Richard Falk, the anti-Semitic retired professor from Princeton who was barred from entering Israel as head of an anti-Israel UN propaganda “commission.”  (When Falk arrived earlier as a private person to give university lectures, he was admitted.)

Anti-Israel fanatics, like Noam Chomsky and the Swedish journalist who recently invented a medieval blood libel about Jews stealing the body parts of Palestinians, have been admitted to Israel freely, although they never would be if I had anything to say about it.  Even Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whose nasty diatribe, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, has become the Koran for Israel-bashers and Jew-haters around the world, were welcomed in Israel for a speaking tour.

It goes without saying that Beinin has never expressed any criticism of the fact that Israelis are prohibited altogether from entering Iran and most Arab countries.  Some of those countries prohibit entry to Jews from anywhere.  In Saudi Arabia you will get expelled and beaten to a pulp if you have a Hanukka Menorah or a Christmas tree.

Of course the greatest irony in all of this is that Beinin was not banned from Israel at all, in spite of being a fanatical pro-terror anti-Israel propagandist.   He was simply interviewed by an alert young passport inspector, suspicious of all those visas in Beinin’s passport from countries seeking Israel’s annihilation.  For Beinin, however, the incident was a priceless opportunity to wave his stigmata and show the world what a persecuted martyr and victim he is.  His questioning in the airport proves he is being intimidated and harassed by them damned Zionists!

This is not to say, of course, that McCarthy’s response to Communism was not destructive.  In his hands, the struggle against this fifth column was perverted first into a weapon aimed at the Democrats and ultimately into a scattergun aimed at his own party, at America, and finally at himself. His reckless demagoguery did damage to innocent people, and the atmosphere created by his success cast a pall over the political arena.  It imperiled the democratic process, and it destroyed the credibility of anti-Communism itself.  Robert Lamphere, the head of the FBI counterintelligence team that caught the Rosenbergs, has since said, “Senator McCarthy’s crusade, which was to last for the next several years, was always anathema to me.  McCarthy’s approach and tactics hurt the anti-Communist cause and turned many liberals against legitimate efforts to curtail Communist activities in the United States.”  Whittaker Chambers saw the problem with McCarthy at the time the problem was unfolding: “All of us, to one degree or another, have come to question his judgement and to fear acutely that his flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions … will lead him and us into trouble.  In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some blunder which will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come.”

As a result of Truman’s internal security programs, many Party members did lose their jobs in institutions considered vital to the nation’s defense and survival- in government, in the media, and in education.  But with extraordinarily few exceptions, they were not fired from government agencies and other institutions for holding “unpopular ideas,” as the Communists themselves maintained and as the mythology that has grown up around the McCarthy period still holds.  They were fired for being members of (or for refusing to cooperate with inquiries into their membership in) an organization that was subservient to a hostile foreign power and whose purposes were inimical to American democracy.  Thus Columbia University justified its policy of excluding Communists from its faculty in the following statement (of which Lionel Trilling, spokesman for American liberalism, was one of the authors): “Membership in Communist organizations almost certainly implies a submission to an intellectual control which is entirely at variance with the principles of academic competence as we understand them.”

– Destructive Generation by Peter Collier and David Horowitz

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Today’s Horowitz quote of the day was selected as an answer to the questions of such commenters as KuhnKat, The Inquisitor, and Sovereign Jim.

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If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please email it to DavidSwindle {@} Gmail.com. Please include:

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