The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners (20 page)

Here is one of the offending paragraphs from
"Recognizing the Wrong People." Writing about the suicidal aid we
have been giving not only the Muslim Brotherhood, but now, it is slowing coming
out, to the Syrian "rebels" who are but a known tool of Al-Qa'eda,
Lopez asks:

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?

Lopez, together with Diana West, wants to know
why we are aiding our enemies. It is indeed a baffling phenomenon. I offer my
own explanation of that "pernicious persistence": the liberals, the
Progressives, the Democrats, and anyone else who believes that force justifies
the ends, are totalitarians in mind, in heart, in essence. That describes
especially Barack Hussein Obama.

As for the Neocons, it is about time that we
include the smarmy and righteous thought police of FrontPage and Gatestone.

# # #

An Army of Kooks

By
Ned May

Gates of Vienna

September
8, 2013

The
controversy over
Diana West’s
book
American Betrayal
has gotten ugly, and it’s bound to get
uglier still.

When
someone stakes out such an irrational and malicious position, and then doubles
down when called on it, there’s no way out without an immense loss of face. A Chernobyl-type
meltdown is now underway, and radioactivity from the disaster will dust a lot
of people before all this is over.

If
you’re sick this story — and I’m pretty sick of it myself — you can
skip this post and go read about President Obama or Miley Cyrus or something.
But a recent exchange at FrontPage Magazine drew my attention, and it deserves
at least a mention here.

Yesterday
Mr. Horowitz published a response to Diana West’s rebuttal of Ronald Radosh. It
appeared first at Breitbart, and was
mirrored soon afterwards
at FPM, where the comments have become… ahem… rather heated.

In
the comment thread, one
“ziggy
zoggy” said
,
inter alia: “Andrew Bostom, you Westrolls are worse
than Paulbots… You need to take of [sic] your tinfoil hat. It’s baked your
brain like a potato.” That gives you an idea of the level to which public
discourse has descended at FPM.

In
response to Mr. Zoggy, David Horowitz, the editor of the whole shebang,
said
(words and phrases of interest have been marked in [bold] for further
attention):

Thank you Ziggy
Zoggy. I haven’t the foggiest idea who this Lopez woman is, I haven’t
communicated with Nina Rosenwald in six months, I am not familiar with
Gatestone, and I am not the aggressor in all this. The
victim lady
is. She attacked me as a totalitarian for removing a
review that made at seem as though Frontpage was endorsing a
preposterous
book
. Then she
organized a
kook army
of which Bostom is a prime member to attack me as a closet
communist. She is
incapable of rebutting
any of the criticisms
made of her book first of all because the criticisms
are sound, secondly because they are
over
her head
, and thirdly because she has invested all her energy in
concocting a conspiracy theory
to
explain her critics
instead of
attempting to answer them
.

Before
I analyze the text, did anyone else besides me notice how much this screed
sounds like Charles Johnson? Adapted for the appropriate context, it could have
been written by the Grand Lizardoid himself back in 2007 or 2008 in the
comments at Little Green Footballs.

The
stylistic resemblance is unmistakable. It’s uncanny… and creepy.

Now
let’s take a look at some of those interesting terms. I’ve rearranged the order
of the items for the purposes of this discussion:

• Victim
  lady
  . Well, this is a winner: condescension, with a whiff
  of sexism. Any of you girls want to weigh in on this one?
  
• Over
  her head.
  Yup. That’s what you’d expect from a girl with no
  credentials as a historian. “Well, sir, little lady, don’t you worry your
  pretty li’l head none about them Commies. That’s men’s work; we’ll take
  care of it.”
  
• Preposterous
  book.
  If Ms. West had written that Stalin and FDR were space
  aliens, I could agree with the adjective “preposterous”. But a
  well-sourced, sober analysis of the evidence hardly deserves such an
  epithet, no matter how much one disagrees with her conclusions.
  
• Incapable
  of rebutting any of the criticisms.
  Actually,
  I’ve read sixteen thousand words of very effective rebuttal over the past
  two days. Does none of that count? “I’m the editor of FrontPage Magazine.
  We don’t need no steenkin’ evidence.”
  
• Instead
  of attempting to answer them.
  Ditto the above. I’ve read
  plenty of detailed answers. Perhaps the answers are not to Mr. Horowitz’
  liking…?
  
• Concocting
  a conspiracy theory.
  Can you say “projection”?
  Because, in the very same paragraph, he asserts that Ms. West, with her
  extraordinary influence and charisma, has
  
• Organized
  a kook army.
  Yup. All those kooks out
  there, paid to do battle with the beleaguered courageous truth-tellers at
  FPM. Uh-huh. Right.
  

Actually,
I kind of like the idea of being in the Kook Army. I’m tired of being a Kook of
One.

But
I must emphasize that I am neither a mercenary nor a draftee in this army. I
volunteered for service. I joined up enthusiastically, ready with my scorching
keyboard to do battle in whatever mosquito-infested backwater they send me to.

We’ve
been an
Army
of Midgets
in the past. There’s no reason why we can’t be an army
of all epithets.

Welcome
to the Army of Kooks!

# # #

Memo to David
Horowitz and Ron Radosh

By
Ruth King

Ruthfully Yours

September
9th, 2013

There seems to be no end to David Horowitz’s bile.
Today he responds to Diana West’s rebuttal [
here
].

Discussing removal of Mark Tapson’s positive review
he claims ….”(
I did not suppress the Frontpage review as she falsely claims,
but allowed it to appear elsewhere).”
Huh?

The only place it appears in its entirety is on
my blog
:

I have no benefactors and no advertisers so I can
and do post anything I like without his permission. In fact I post daily
columns from Frontpage by David Hornik, Daniel Greenfield, Jamie Glazov, Bruce
Bawer, Bruce Thornton, David Solway….all my favorite writers without his
permission. I also posted David Solway’s brilliant and measured take on the
entire brouhaha, (
Disagreement
Among Conservatives
) which Frontpage refused to post. To their credit,
Family Security Matters also posted it.

Furthermore I did not ask his permission to post
Edward Cline’s brilliant
review
of West’s book
nor his report of the controversy “
Frontpage’s
Spitball Strike Diana West
”
both of which were originally published at
Family Security Matters
.

Frontpage scrubbed Mark Tapson’s review of Diana
West, claiming that Mark Tapson was poorly informed about the issues raised in “American
Betrayal.” Why then, did they keep
Mark Tapson’s
review
of
Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of
Roosevelt’s Government
by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert
Romerstein (May 14, 2013) ???

In it Tapson asserts that the authors show “that
widespread government infiltration by Soviet spies sabotaged our foreign policy
and molded the post-WWII world in favor of the Soviet Union.” Perhaps, it was
the death of the esteemed Herbert Romerstain which inhibited Ron Radosh and the
editors at Frontpage.

Horowitz writes “Radosh and I have
collectively
spent
50 years writing several million words and nearly twenty books attacking the
liberal consensus, and exposing the anti-American agendas of radicals and
Communists, specifically those who infiltrated and finally took over academia.”
He cunningly uses the word “collectively” meaning 25 years
each
. In
fact, they had their so called “awakening” in 1987…a tad late.

Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. What took them so
long? By then all the neoconservatives agreed that the Communist regimes of
China and the Soviet Union were evil and genocidal.

Horowitz and Radosh were, by their own admission,
Marxists who carried their useful idiocy into the anti Vietnam War movement.
And, they remained Marxists in spite of the revelations of the murderous acts
and intentions of Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Castro. They remained Marxists
even when Robert Conquest, the brilliant historian, poet and essayist published
The Great Terror
– in 1968 detailing Stalin’s purges and
brutality. They remained Marxists when Czechoslovakia was invaded in 1968. They
remained Marxists when Horowitz became editor of
Ramparts
magazine and in his own words he was eager “to divulge the secrets of America’s
electronic intelligence agency to the world. We viewed it as an effort to level
the military playing field so that America would no longer be the superpower
that was able to lord it over everyone else.”

 
Ron
Radosh cavorted with Students for a Democratic Society and assorted thugs and
terrorists. In 1967 shortly before joining SDS he opined on Norman Thomas who
died in 1967. “
Thomas’ chief sin, in my view,
was to have written that he did not, “
regard Vietcong terrorism as
virtuous.”
He was guilty of attacking the heroic Vietnamese people, instead
of the United States, which was the enemy of the world’s people.”

In the spring
of 1985, however, Horowitz and Peter Collier wrote a column “Goodbye to all
That” explaining their decision to abandon radical left politics and vote for
Ronald Reagan!! Gasp! That “courageous” stand was taken four years after
America elected Ronald Reagan by a landslide.

Since his very late “awakening” David Horowitz has
done some great work. His pamphlet
“Why Israel Is
The Victim”
is the best I have read on the subject, and he is one of the most
articulate defenders of Israel.

It is, therefore, inexplicable that he has
turned so viciously and obsessively against Diana West. It is also inexplicable
that he continues to distort the contents of her cogently written,
trail-blazing book while continuing to throw mud on anyone who finds its
well-documented arguments of merit.

And, I must add, it is perhaps even more
inexplicable to me that no “A”-team pundits have stepped up to oppose this
Alinskyite campaign of personal destruction against Diana West. While it
is easy to wax eloquent about the importance of freedom of speech in the
abstract; where are the big guns now that our public square has become a
dangerous place for unconventional thinking and new ideas that threaten notions
of the status quo? 

Ronald Radosh was and remains a cad. What propels
his unvarnished hatred and will to libel and defame Diana West? M. Stanton
Evans, who appears on the cover of American Betrayal with a rousing endorsement
of the book gave Radosh a royal verbal thrashing which the redoubtable Ann
Coulter kept, and I posted it [
here
].

(Without the permission of David Horowitz)

Can it be that Radosh is still smarting from that
brilliant evisceration? And, the criticism of his review did not let up.
Accuracy in Academia’s Malcolm Kline had this to say: “In a recent critique of
Blacklisted By
History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against
America’s Enemies
that appeared in National Review, historian Ron Radosh makes numerous
assertions about the book by M. Stanton Evans that are completely unsupported
by the work itself.
Unlike Radosh, all of us read the book.”

And,
Ann Coulter
added this
about the Radosh review of the book: “Radosh makes misstatements of fact about
the book, misstates facts about the cases and falsely accuses Evans of plagiarism.
Other than that, it’s a good review!” She adds: “Radosh knows less about
McCarthy than I know about fly-fishing. He gets cases wrong, sources wrong,
hearings wrong. He’s been pulling this nonsense for 25 years now.”