The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners (18 page)

To
what can such a perversion of reason and reality, of common sense, of any
measure of American self-interest be attributed: Poole’s Brotherhood
penetration of the U.S. foreign policy cadre? More wishful thinking? The
illogic of an upside down world view and America’s place in it? Or the
pernicious persistence of that first betrayal, the U.S.’s 1933 recognition of
Stalin’s murderous gulag of a regime?

As
the world confronts the next horror of innocent Syrian men, women, and little
children, hundreds of them apparently, killed in late August 2013 by a rocket
barrage of the deadly chemical weapon, sarin, the U.S. and the world once again
have the opportunity to react rationally, soberly, and with core U.S. national
security interests uppermost in consideration. It seems most likely that the
Iranian-and-Hizballah-backed regime of Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad is
responsible for this latest war crime, and the outcry to empower his al-Qa’eda-
and Muslim Brotherhood-dominated rebel opposition has become overwhelming.
U.S.
naval forces
are positioned near Syria in the eastern
Mediterranean Sea, pending a White House decision on U.S. action. Yet, even as
one side of this intra-Islamic sectarian civil war is getting the worst of it,
with more than 100,000 casualties racked up so far, and no end in sight, with
chemical weapons against civilians introduced into the conflict, there has
never been a more critical need for rational, sober-minded thinking about where
U.S. interests and responsibility lie. While a 2012
Presidential
Intelligence Finding for Syria
authorized the extensive
clandestine CIA, financial, and Special Forces training support that has been
channeled to Syrian rebels (jihadis and non-jihadis alike), in the months since
then, any decision to expand that support, now that chemical weapons have been
used against civilians in a large-scale attack, demands a significantly better
informed assessment of the probable beneficiaries of such assistance than has
been the case to date.

Any
decision to deploy U.S. military force beyond a punishing strike against the
specific Syrian base and military unit that carried out this chemical weapons
atrocity must take into consideration the consequences of an al-Qa’eda and
Muslim Brotherhood victory in the Syrian civil war. It is hard to see how
enabling the replacement of Iranian proxies and Shi’ite jihadis in Syria with
Sunni jihadis aligned with al-Qa’eda and the Muslim Brotherhood will advance
either U.S. national security interests in the region or those of our closest
allies, Israel and Jordan. Providing generous humanitarian assistance to
civilian victims is urgent and right; but, before America recognizes any more
totalitarian-minded enemies of genuine liberal democracy, it would do well to
enlist common sense, good judgment, and a judicious measure of national
self-interest. It is high time we stopped empowering those who wish us ill.

# # #

The Urge
to Purge: Strange Events Inspired by Diana West Controversy

By
Robert Stacy McCain

The
Other McCain

September
6, 2013

In
case you missed it, we have been intermittently following the controversy
surrounding Diana West’s new book, 
American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s
Character
:

• June 6: 
  ‘
  A Conspiracy So Immense’ — Was FDR
  Aide Harry Hopkins a Soviet Agent?
  
• Aug. 8: 
  Diana West Dissed by David Horowitz?
  
• Aug. 16: 
  Major Jordan, Carroll Reece, Birchers, Buckley and the
  Attack on Diana West
  
• Aug. 19: 
  Conrad Black’s FDR Idolatry
  

This
is good publicity in the sense that there is no such thing as
bad
publicity. When you’re trying to attract crowds for a book signing,
“controversial author” is excellent advertising, and I hope Diana is holding up
amid the firestorm. However, it is beginning to appear that Ronald Radosh and
David Horowitz have decided that it is not sufficient to attack Diana’s book.
Now, conservative organizations must
purge those who do not share their implacable hostility
.
[West writes]:

Clare M. Lopez,
the excellent Middle East analyst and my Team B II colleague, has been 
fired
 for
favorably mentioning my book in an essay.

Diana
links to
Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna quoting an e-mail
describing how Lopez was informed this week of her termination
:

The real shock
came the following morning, though, on September 4, when Ms. Lopez received an
email from Nina Rosenwald notifying her that her relationship with the
Gatestone Institute had been terminated at the request of the Gatestone Board
of Directors. On September 5, Ms. Rosenwald confirmed in an email sent to Ms.
Lopez and others what some had already suspected, that her firing was due to
her “choice of books to promote…,” a clear reference to Ms. Lopez’ citation of
historical events from Ms. West’s book. Although Ms. Lopez also had cited about
the same 1933 events to a second book, 
The Great Terror: A Reassessment
,
by Robert Conquest, for some reason, that reference did not seem to pose any
issues for the Board. Only Ms. West’s book about the very same events seemed to
irritate the Board, whose recently-appointed Chairman is former UN Ambassador
John Bolton.

This
is the “urge to purge,” a phrase Allen Sullivant often used to describe the
battles within the Sons of Confederate Veterans that began during the
mid-1990s, when SCV members angry over liberal attacks on Southern history
became politically active.

Activists
complained about what they called “eat, meet and retreat” leadership that
refused to fight back against the re-location of monuments and re-naming of
streets and schools, et cetera, that characterized the Culture Wars waged by
the forces of Political Correctness in the South. The clash between activists
(“hard-cores,” as they were frequently called) and more moderate leaders
devolved into a series of purges and counter-purges, with some of the ousted
leaders whining that their activist antagonists were dangerous racists,
accusations that only served to further incite the SCV’s liberal enemies. In
fact, to those familiar with the inner workings of the SCV, motives of personal
ambition were far more relevant to these conflicts than any outsider could
understand. Some people were so selfishly obsessed with their own
status
and
prestige
— including their authority as arbiters of what
constituted “true” Confederate heritage — that they lost any sense of
perspective and engaged in unnecessarily harmful tactics that damaged
themselves as well as the organization.

Diana
West’s critics seem to be engaged in quite a similar crusade against her. There
is an “Us and Them” attitude, where neutrality can only be obtained through silence,
where anyone who offers an opinion on the controversy is forced to choose
sides, and where the basic tactical rule is,
“War to the knife, knife to the
hilt.”

My
long friendship with Diana West obligates me to her defense, despite the fact
that I also regard her antagonists as friends.

Since
I first became aware of this unfortunate conflict, I’ve urged a truce, or at
least a de-escalation of hostilities; instead it has turned into a relentless
intellectual civil war with no end in sight.

Your
big clue that something unexplained is happening here should be obvious from
a glance at Clare Lopez’s biography
:

Clare M. Lopez is
a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on national defense,
Islam, Iran, and counterterrorism issues. Currently a senior fellow at the
Gatestone Institute, the Center for Security Policy and the Clarion Fund and
vice president of the Intelligence Summit, she formerly was a career operations
officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, a professor at the Centre for
Counterintelligence and Security Studies, Executive Director of the Iran Policy
Committee from 2005-2006, and has served as a consultant, intelligence analyst,
and researcher for a variety of defense firms. She was named a Lincoln Fellow
at the Claremont Institute in 2011.

Whoa!
Lopez’s neocon credentials were hitherto impeccable. Neither a Norquist-friendly
libertarian nor a Buchananite paleocon could obtain a Lincoln Fellowship from
the Strauss/Jaffa hive at Claremont.
Ergo
, this can only be explained as
an internecine fight for supremacy between competing neocon cliques.

Grant
the seriousness of the specific historical dispute — and I am certain of
David Horowitz’s sincerity in this regard — what kind of backstage
machinations were involved in the ouster of a Jaffa-certified neocon from the
Gatestone Institute? Is this dispute so serious that these kinds of
scorched-earth tactics are justified?

Gatestone
Institute President
Nina Rosenwald is on Twitter
, and perhaps
she should be required to explain how this happened.

It
is important, I think, to see the crusade against Diana West in proper context.
In 2007,
National Review
permitted Radosh to savage
Blacklisted by
History
, M. Stanton Evans’s definitive defense of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
Ann Coulter was obligated to defend Evans, one of her
earliest mentors
, whom she praised as having written “the
greatest book since the Bible.” And 
Evans himself replied at length to Radosh, quoting Radosh’s
review and observing
:

This is going
pretty heavy on the quotations, but they are offered to suggest what
degree of trust may be placed in the assertions and paraphrases of Radosh
as to the contents of my book. As these instances suggest, that
degree of trust is roughly speaking zero. All of which is very bad, but
from my standpoint by no means the worst of it. Far more disturbing is
a recurring ad hominem element in Radosh’s comments – revealing
a nasty penchant for turning a debate about substantive issues into a
species of personal slander.

That
is to say, Radosh has a demonstrable habit of harsh rhetoric against
conservatives whose writings about Cold War history he disagrees with and,
while I’ve never been nominated for any honors in the “Plays Well With Others”
sweepstakes, I’m unaware that I’ve ever gotten anyone terminated from a
think-tank gig, either.

As
I see it — and I admit this may be unfair, but it is my honest impression
of this lamentable affair — Radosh is turf-guarding.

Study his biography
and it’s hard to avoid
this impression. Radosh is a Ph.D. historian and CUNY professor emeritus and
you get the idea that he resents these amateur interlopers encroaching on his
professional turf. Given his background as a “Red Diaper baby” who subsequently
co-authored a book about the Rosenberg espionage case that was extraordinarily
controversial when it was published in 1983, you have to see Radosh as a sort
of Coriolanus who, having earned his scars in Rome’s service, resents being
compelled to condescend to the plebian mob. In other words, it is about
respect
.

OK,
so if you are a conservative who wants to write a book about Cold War history
— and especially about Communist subversion – your first move,
before even beginning to outline your proposal, must be to consult Radosh,
describe your thesis, and ask his permission: “If I write this book, can I
expect you to praise it?”

Otherwise,
you could become a Controversial Author, which might help sell books, but makes
life quite risky for your friends.

American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s
Character
 – buy it now, before Ron Radosh can
burn every copy in existence.

#
# #

The Totalitarian Impulse

By
Ned May

Gates
of Vienna

September
6, 2013

As
mentioned
here Tuesday night
, an article by Clare Lopez was published
earlier that day at the Gatestone Institute’s website and then immediately
removed. Since Ms. Lopez had referred favorably in her article to
Diana West’s book
American
Betrayal
, and since Ms. West recently had
anathema
pronounced against her
for that same book, it seemed that there
might be a connection between the two events.

And
indeed there was. Our suspicions were correct.

I
just received this information from a source close to Clare Lopez:

In
late August 2013, Clare Lopez, then a Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute,
submitted an article for publication at the Gatestone Institute’s website. It
was entitled “Recognizing the Wrong People”, and drew on the U.S. government’s
1933 formal diplomatic recognition of the USSR as described in Diana West’s
book American Betrayal to form an analogy with the U.S.’s present day
recognition and/or support of other fundamentally-anti-American entities, such
as the AQ/MB-dominated rebel and opposition forces in places like Egypt, Libya,
and Syria.