|
Faithful husband, soccer dad,
basset owner, and former cowboy
Return to TboggHomePage
FELLOW TRAITORS
*The Nether-Count*
100 Monkeys Typing
Ain't No Bad Dude
Alicublog
Americablog
American Leftist
Attytood (Will Bunch)
Bad Attitudes
Balloon Juice
Better Inhale Deeply
Bitch Ph.D
Bloggy
Bob Harris
Brilliant At Breakfast
BusyBusyBusy
Byzantium's Shores
Creek Running North
Crooked Timber
Crooks and Liars
Cursor
Daily Kos
Dependable Renegade
David Ehrenstein
Democratic Veteran
Dohiyi Mir
Down With Tyranny
Echidne of the Snakes
Edicts of Nancy
Elayne Riggs
Eschaton (Atrios)
Ezra Klein
Failure Is Impossible
Feministe
Feministing
Firedoglake
First Draft
Freewayblogger
The Garance
The Group News Blog
Guano Island
Hairy Fish Nuts
Hammer of the Blogs
Hullabaloo(Digby)
I Am TRex
If I Ran the Zoo
I'm Not One To Blog
Interesting Times
James Wolcott
Jesus' General
Jon Swift
Juan Cole
King of Zembla
Kung Fu Monkey
Lance Mannion
Lawyers Guns and Money
Lean Left
Liberal Oasis
Main & Central
Majikthise
Making Light (Nielsen Hayden)
Mark Kleiman
Martini Revolution
MaxSpeak
MF Blog
MyDD
Needlenose
The Next Hurrah
Nitpicker
No More Mr. Nice Blog
Norbizness
Norwegianity
Oliver Willis
One Good Move
Orcinus
Pacific Views
Pam's House Blend
Pandagon
Pharyngula
Political Animal(K.Drum)
The Poorman
Progressive Gold
Right Hand Thief
Rising Hegemon
Roger Ailes
Rude Pundit
Rumproast
Sadly, No
Seeing The Forest
Shakesville
Sisyphus Shrugged
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo
Slacktivist
SteveAudio
Suburban Guerilla
TalkLeft
The American Street
The Left Coaster
The Road To Surfdom
The Sideshow
The Talking Dog
The Talent Show
Tom Tomorrow
Tom Watson
Whiskeyfire
UggaBugga
Wampum
Wonkette
World O'Crap
TOSS ME
A BONE
Amazon Wish List
SOURCES
MSNBC
CNN
The Washington Post
Media Matters
The New York Times
The Guardian
Yahoo News
Salon
The Raw Story
Common Dreams
Media Transparency
The Nation
Alternet
Joe Conason
Talking Points Memo
THE VAST WASTELAND
Captain Corndog & Friends
Cheerleaders Gone Spazzy
80% True
Corner of Mediocrity and Banality
Village Idiots Central
Darwin's Waiting Room
News for Mouthbreathers
Mailbox
Your e-mail may be reprinted sans name and e-mail address. Think about how stupid you want to appear.
Blogroll Me!
Site Feed
|
Tuesday, April 08, 2003
Advertisements for my cowardly myself.
David Horowitz never stops trying to prove his "street cred" to an uncaring world and in doing so, reveals himself to be one of the more obtuse and self-promoting people wandering the planet.
When I was a college radical and anti-war activist forty years ago, I was quite the intellectual and (in my estimation) cautious and sober. Though I became an editor and then co-editor of the leading radical magazine of the Sixties, Ramparts, I never threw a rock during the entire era. I never joined a radical sect and never went to Communist Cuba or North Vietnam, which were then the meccas of the radical faith. Although I was a founder of an organization called the “Vietnam Solidarity Campaign,” I never fooled myself that the Communist state that would result from an American defeat would be a “rice roots democracy,” the way Tom Hayden and other leaders of the “New Left” movement proclaimed.
Nonetheless, before the era was over, I was lured by my desire to do humanitarian good and to further the cause of social justice into working with the Black Panthers, a group of radical gangsters who in 1974 murdered a friend of mine (the mother of three children) and a dozen other individualss(sic) besides. The project I had become involved in with the Panthers was building an elementary school.
From the vantage of the political and cultural left, my activities with the Black Panthers were neither marginal or extreme. At the time, the Panthers were icons of the progressive intellectuals, symbolizing strong black leaders who were standing up for their “oppressed” community. The entire liberal culture supported them. Leading cultural figures like Garry Wills and Murray Kempton were writing praises of the Panthers in the New York Times Sunday magazine Kempton even compared their leader Huey Newton to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther in the Times’ august pages. To this day The New York Times, The Washington Post and other pillars of the American political culture, celebrate the Panthers – the murderers of my friend and a dozen others – as icons of the “social struggle.”
Fortunately, the Panthers disintegrated in the early Seventies, dragged down by their criminal activities, internecine battles and the sordid brutality of their leaders, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. Before he died, Cleaver told a Sixty Minutes audience, “If people had listened to Huey Newton and me in the Sixties, there would have been a holocaust in this country.” Many radicals, among them Cleaver’s most prominent promoter – Los Angles Times columnist Robert Scheer -- looked forward to that holocaust and actively encouraged it. The Panthers were the “noble savages” of liberal compassion, symbols of the injustice that America was said to be inflicting on American blacks.
In his own words, Horowitz tells us that he was a "college radical and anti-war activist" and "quite the intellectual" (…really, now? What happened?) but David never really got all that involved, and in fact, seems to go to great lengths to disassociate himself with his past, because, you know, everyone else was doing it (“The entire liberal culture supported them. Leading cultural figures like Garry Wills and Murray Kempton were writing praises of the Panthers in the New York Times Sunday magazine Kempton even compared their leader Huey Newton to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther in the Times’ august pages”). Long story short....David is finally confessing to being a dilettante with a side order of victimology (“in 1974 murdered a friend of mine”…which he never stops mentioning).
So what is the purpose of Horowitz’s confession? Why to trash Rachel Corrie, of course.
How many American college students and antiwar activists have been seduced by these poisonous elements at work in our society? It is difficult to know. But one who has already paid for it with her life is Rachel Corrie, a 24 year old undergraduate at Evergreen College in Olympia Washington, who has become known as the “Saint of Rafiah,” the name of the West Bank town where she died. Evergreen is one of the many leftwing campuses in America, whose values have been turned so upside down by tenured leftists that it recently featured convicted murderer Mumia Abu Jamal as its commencement speaker. (He spoke via tape).
Rachel Corrie began her activist career as a member of the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace, an organization formed directly after the 9/11 attack on America to oppose an American military response. Its members feared that, “America would retaliate by bombing some of the poorest and most oppressed on earth, the Afghan people.” Their Marxist view of the world is captured in one of the Movement’s favored slogans: “Corporate Globalization Equals Imperialist Domination.”
It was not long after she joined the Olympia Movement that Rachel Corrie was burning an American flag in the name of social justice. It was logical step for her to gravitate to an organization that would demonstrate her commitment to the cause. Through her contacts in the antiwar movement she joined the International Solidarity Campaign, whose purpose is to recruit young Americans to become human shields for Palestinian terrorists. The Solidarity Campaign’s ties to terrorism became inescapable eleven days after Rachel Corrie’s death when an elite anti-terror unit of the Israel Defense Forces captured a senior Islamic Jihad terrorist, Shadi Sukiya hiding in its offices in Jenin.
Rachel Corrie was sent by International Solidarity to a town called Rafia in the Gaza Strip to obstruct Israeli Defense Forces conducting anti-terror operations. She sat down in front of an Israeli military bulldozer, and – according to an American eyewitness -- was inadvertently killed when the machine whose driver could not see her, ran over her. This Sunday, the New York Times Magazine – the same magazine that once celebrated the murderer of my friend by the Black Panthers– had a tribute to Rachel Corrie, to her humanitarian goodwill. The article was called “One Last Sit-In,” to wrap the halo of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement around her pro-terrorist activities. The Times article summarized the news reports of Corrie’s death in these words: “23-year-old peace activist from Olympia, Wash., crushed to death by an Israeli Army bulldozer as she tried to block the demolition of a physician’s home in Gaza.”
You see, if Rachel Corrie had been offered the opportunity to hear the sage words of “former radical” and putative “intellectual” David Horowitz, who has made a career out of complaining that student bodies won’t pay him to speak on their campuses, she would be alive today, looking forward to life as a whiny, bloated, sweaty sell-out who never put anything on the line, who merely dabbled in left-wing circles until the opportunity came along to cash in with the help of a rightwing sugar-daddy.
I mean, what are ideals, compared to a monthly check personally signed by Richard Mellon Scaife?
Money for nothing and your self-loathing is free.
|
|
