The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners (17 page)

Radosh cites S. M. Plokhy to show that the Soviets
treated American POWs fairly well. How familiar is Radosh with this subject? One
of the first acts of the Red Army upon entering Germany was to butcher 50
French and Belgian POWs at Nemmersdorf. The Soviets believed that all POWs were
traitors. Stalin's own son, a prisoner of the Germans, may have committed
suicide as a result of this Soviet policy. Soviet treatment of U.S, POWs is
more complex than can be dismissed with the statement, "the Soviets
treated American POWs fairly well." I suggest he read Nigel
Cawthorne's
Iron Cage
.

One subject you did not cover was the progressives
involvement
in the modern slave trade. Perhaps you avoided this subject because it is
obviously an absurd accusation that would have only increased the intensity of
the progressive attack on your work. Absurd or not, according to Secretary of
State, James Byrnes in his inappropriately entitled
Frankly Speaking
,
"Forced labor camps are a symbol of Hitler's regime that we should
eliminate as rapidly as possible." This would be fertile ground for an
aspiring historian wanting to make a name for himself by exposing how evil
"
we
"
were.

I have only one criticism of your
book, one that I believe you would totally agree with: your use of the word
"
we
."
 
The current genre of historiography
places a good deal of emphasis on "our" crimes.
 
Amerika is responsible for all kinds of
crimes, real and imagined. You say that "we" were accomplices in
Soviet crimes. When discussing U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union during the
Ukrainian famine you claim "we" became "a passive accomplice to
Stalin in the Ukraine." When discussing the forced repatriation of Soviet
citizens towards the end of the war, you state, "We became accessories to
a Soviet atrocity." You claim that in our dealings with the Soviets,
"We had things to hide, too." Well "we" had and have
nothing to hide. Once this is made clear the conundrum is solved. You point out
that, "officialdom was enraged not by the danger posed by Hiss, but by
Chambers for testifying to the danger." Progressives are more outraged by
Joseph McCarthy than by Joseph Stalin. You quote Vladimir Bukovsky who explains
"we now understand why the West was so against putting the communist
system on trial. There was ideological collaboration between left-wing parties
in the West and Soviet Union." As you have written, "The forces of
concealment, East and West, had a common enemy in the forces of exposure, East
and West." You are a member of the "forces of exposure" and as
such not a "we."

My book could be considered an
anti-American book because of its criticism of American policy. It is not. The
crimes detailed in the book are not America's crimes. They are the crimes of a
group of "progressives" who did not have America's interests at
heart. 

Finally, I would like to thank you
for referencing my book and describing it as "devastating." I will
send you a copy of the second edition when it appears in the fall.

John
Dietrich is the author of
The Morgenthau Plan:
Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy.

# # #

When Should a Book
Not Be Written?

By
Ned May

Gates
of Vienna

August
30, 2013

“A perversion of logic as
much as a loss of courage”

Diana
West spoke last night as a guest of Ahavath Torah Congregation in Stoughton,
Massachusetts. Her topic was the continuing controversy over her book,
American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s
Character
.

In
the following clip you’ll hear Ms. West point out the manifest falsehoods that
have been circulated about American Betrayal. They seem to represent an
attempted “takedown” of her book, a deliberate assault intended to destroy her
professional standing as a writer.

The
author also explains how she fell into the research that eventually resulted in
the book. She began by investigating an entirely different topic, the
penetration of the United States government by agents of the Muslim
Brotherhood, and followed the trail of evidence back to Communist penetration
in the 1930s and 1940s. The parallels between the two cases are striking
— each involves the subversion of our government by a totalitarian
ideology that seeks the overthrow of our constitutional republic.

Many
thanks to
The
United West
for
recording the event, and to
Vlad
Tepes
for editing
this excerpt
.

I recommend watching
the
full two-hour video at United West
. Diana West’s talk begins at about
12:30, and a Q&A follows her remarks. You’ll hear a lot about what what’s
in the book, including some quotes read by the author, and more remarks about
the nexus between what happened in the 1940s and the current “civilization
jihad” against our country.

# # #

The following appeared at the Gatestone Institute website
before it was abruptly removed. Its author, Clare M. Lopez, was then fired —
fired — for, as Gatestone's Nina
Rosenwald
told Lopez in an email, Lopez’s “choice of books to promote.” Outrageous! The
piece is archived at
Ruthfully Yours
.

Recognizing the Wrong
People

By Clare M. Lopez

It
is high time we stopped empowering those who wish us ill: not just to recognize
a blood-soaked regime, but to keep on recognizing it.

President
Franklin D. Roosevelt [FDR], reversing the policy of four presidents and six of
their Secretaries of State not to recognize the Soviet government, in 1933
extended “normal diplomatic relations” to the Soviet Union, the totalitarian
slaughterhouse of Josef Stalin. As meticulously researched by Diana West in her
new book, “
American
Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character
,” the
reasoning behind Roosevelt’s decision was never made clear; what was clear,
however, since the 1917-1919 Bolshevik seizure of the Russian government by
force, was the Soviet reign of blood and terror. According to Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, author of
The
Gulag Archipelago
, by the late 1930s, Stalin’s regime was
shooting tens of thousands of people per month. Yet, for reasons that remain
murky, FDR was influenced, inspired, or somehow persuaded to normalize U.S.
relations with Stalin, in exchange for a page of Soviet concessions, not worth
the paper they were written on, which pledged that the USSR “would not attempt
to subvert or overthrow the U.S. system.”

What
West documents is the subsequent process of infiltration, influence, and
“occupation” by an army of communist agents and fellow travelers; here,
however, the focus is on what that original 1933 decision has meant for future
generations, most especially our own, when confronted with decisions about
whether or not to recognize enemies who make no secret of their enmity and
intention to destroy us.

Whatever
FDR’s thinking, West points out that this decision — not just to
recognize the blood-soaked communist regime, but to keep on recognizing it
— fundamentally transformed what
Robert
Conquest
, the great chronicler of Stalin’s purges, called “the
conscience of the civilized world.” And perhaps not just our conscience: as
West writes, “[b]ecause the Communist regime was so openly and ideologically
dedicated to our destruction, the act of recognition defied reason and the
demands of self-preservation.” In other words, quite aside from the abdication
of objective morality represented by FDR’s decision, there was a surrender of
“reality-based judgment,” the implications of which on the ability of U.S.
national leadership to make sound decisions involving the fundamental defense
of the Republic resonate to the current day.

Fast
forward to late September 2010, when Mohammed Badi, the Egyptian Supreme Guide
of the openly, avowedly jihadist Muslim Brotherhood [MB], literally declared
war on the United States (and Israel and unfaithful Arab/Muslim rulers). Badi
spoke plainly of “jihad,” “force,” and “
a
jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life
.
”
There was no ambiguity in his message: it anticipated the “demise” of the U.S.
in the face of Muslim “resistance.” Even as the Muslim Brotherhood, from the
earliest years after its 1928 founding, has always been forthright about its
Islamic supremacism and objectives of global conquest, a caliphate, and
universal shariah [Islamic Law], Badi’s pronouncement was as clear and menacing
as Usama bin Laden’s 1996 “
Declaration
of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places
,
”
or his 1998 declaration of “
Jihad
Against Jews and Crusaders
”
— and garnered about as much
understanding from the U.S. and Western political leadership of the time
— which is to say, very little.

As
explained, in fact, in a series of masterful online lectures for the Center for
Security Policy [CSP] by
Stephen
Coughlin
,
a former Major in the U.S. Army and one of this
country’s foremost scholars of Islamic Law, Badi’s October 2010 declaration of
jihad against the U.S. followed in direct response to al-Qa’eda’s call to war
as published in the inaugural issue, in July 2010, of its online Inspire
magazine. This was the alignment of forces that shortly would plunge the Middle
East and North Africa [MENA] region into chaos and revolution.

The
third and final element to fall into place came in January 2011, in the form of
a
fatwa
from Cairo’s al-Azhar University, the pre-eminent seat of
Sunni learning in the Islamic world for over 1,000 years. That landmark
declaration, issued at the IslamOnline.net website by Dr. Imad Mustafa,
Professor of Fiqh and Its Origins, at the Universities of al-Azhar and Umm al-Qary,
made clear that “offensive jihad is permissible in order to secure Islam’s
border, to extend God’s religion to people in cases where the governments do
not allow it…and to remove every religion but Islam from the Arabian
peninsula…”

As
we know from Islamic books of law such as the “
Reliance
of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law
,” “Jihad
means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word
mujahada signifying warfare to establish the religion…” (Reliance, o9.0,
‘Jihad’). So, there was not much room for doubt about what was being discussed:
an alignment of al-Qa’eda and the Muslim Brotherhood under the theological
sanction of al-Azhar to transition together to a more militant phase of jihad
against the West, Israel, and westernized Middle Eastern regimes that have
failed to enforce shariah. The green light from U.S. President Barack Obama had
already been given months previously, at his milestone June 2009 Cairo speech.

Yet,
with every menacing signal plainly presented by the Brotherhood, as with the
blatant criminality of the Soviet regime, the senior national security
leadership of the U.S. in 2010-2011 still seemed oblivious to the jihadist
threat. So oblivious, in fact, was the Department of State under
Secretary
Hillary Clinton
that in early July 2011, it changed a long-standing
policy of no official U.S. government recognition of the Muslim Brotherhood,
and indicated that henceforth the U.S. proactively would pursue “engagement”
with the Egyptian jihadis. The timeline is just about eight months from the
Muslim Brotherhood’s declaration of war against the U.S. to full normalization
of relations — initiated by the United States — minus any cessation
of Muslim Brotherhood hostilities against the U.S. or its allies or even so
much as a hudna [temporary ceasefire].

Even
after the Egyptian military, urged on by huge numbers of the Egyptian people,
ousted the Muslim Brotherhood government of President Mohammed Morsi in early
July 2013, in a decisive coup d’état, followed by bloody street battles with
the die-hard jihadis who were also busy slaughtering Coptic Christians across
Egypt, the U.S. administration still could not bring itself to turn against its
Brotherhood. Muslim Brotherhood penetration of top-level U.S. policy-making
circles (as documented by Patrick Poole in a comprehensive June 4, 2013 essay
for the MERIA Journal, entitled, “
Blind
to Terror
: The U.S. Governments Disastrous Muslim Outreach
Efforts and the Impact on U.S. Middle East Policy”) is certainly part of the
explanation for such irresponsible behavior. The self-destructive legacy of
1933 that bequeathed to FDR’s successors a conditioned willingness to turn away
from reality, engage in endlessly wishful thinking, and accept appeasement as
an alternative to assertion of national will may well account even more
directly for the apparent inability of America’s most senior leadership to acknowledge
and confront even those enemies who declare war on us.

The
next example of the apparently endless capacity of the human mind for
self-deception is the U.S. decision, in March 2011, to enter the Libyan civil
war on the side of al-Qa’eda. According to
news
reports
, in early 2011 President Obama issued an “Intelligence
Finding” that authorized covert assistance to the al-Qa’eda-dominated rebels
fighting to overthrow the longtime Libyan ruler, Muammar Qaddafi. Among the
known jihadist militias with which Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the State
Department’s official envoy to the Libyan rebel forces, coordinated during the
2011 revolution were: the February 17 Martyrs Brigade; the local al-Qa’eda
franchise; Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG, led by Afghanistan veteran
Abdelhakim Belhadj); Libya Shield (which fought Qaddafi under the black flag of
Islam); and various branches of Ansar al-Shariah, another Libyan al-Qa’eda franchise.
Now, even if the most senior levels of the U.S. intelligence community somehow
were actually under the impression that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “
largely
secular
” organization that “has eschewed violence,” al-Qa’eda
surely was generally acknowledged to be an Islamic terror group, man-caused
disaster organization, or at the very least, in early 2011, a group that still
posed some level of threat to U.S. national security interests. Yet, all the
same, the Obama White House took the decision to dedicate diplomatic,
financial, intelligence, military, and weapons support to these Libyan
al-Qa’eda militias, along with our NATO allies, to help them oust a brutal
tyrant, but at the time, a true ally of the U.S. and the West in the fight
against AQIM (Al-Qa’eda in the Islamic Maghreb). By mid-July 2011, however, the
U.S. had formally
recognized
the Libyan rebel leadership as the country’s legitimate
government—al-Qa’eda, Muslim Brotherhood, and all.