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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; fascism</title>
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		<title>The Berlin Wall Does Not Rest in Peace</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/the-berlin-wall-does-not-rest-in-peace/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-berlin-wall-does-not-rest-in-peace</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2014 05:10:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berlin Wall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fascism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GDR]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244489</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Remembering the Communism-Terrorism Axis.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/berlinwall1.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-244490" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/berlinwall1-450x270.jpg" alt="berlinwall1" width="362" height="217" /></a>Twenty-five years ago, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came crashing down. The anniversary prompts a meditation on some realities that escaped the old-line establishment press, and which may remain unknown entirely to those growing up in the Age of the Tweet.</p>
<p>The wall was a project of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a one-party totalitarian dictatorship and the most slavish ally of the Soviet Union, which under Joseph Stalin grabbed half of Germany in the wake of World War II. The GDR was also the Communist state most involved in terrorism against the West in general and the United States in particular.</p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The official name of the wall was the </span><i>Antifaschistischer Schutzwall</i>, the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart,” the familiar inversion of reality. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-communism.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">As the late Susan Sontag observed during the 1980s, “Communism is fascism.”</span></a> So the GDR was actually the fascist state, with goose-stepping troops decked out very much like those of the National Socialist regime under the <i>Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei</i>, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, also known as Nazis. Sontag was not the first to make this observation. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/hans-massaquoi-who-grew-up-black-in-nazi-germany-dies-at-87/2013/01/23/3faaa5bc-64b1-11e2-b84d-21c7b65985ee_story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">The late Hans Massaquoi</span></a>, son of a Liberian father and German mother, who in <i>Destined to Witness</i> told of growing up black in Nazi Germany, saw no difference at all between the Nazis and Communists.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">The Communist regimes were so repressive that people fled at any opportunity, leaving loved ones behind. More than 3 million people fled the GDR and no Stalinist dictatorship could allow people to vote with their feet.  So in August 1961 the regime put up the wall, along with barbed wire and guard towers holding vigil over the “death strip,” as it came to be known, embedded with anti-personnel mines.</p>
<p><span style="color: #272727;">So the GDR made emigration an exciting experience. Some 5,000 made the attempt to breach the wall, among them the Strelzyk and Wetzel families, who flew to freedom in a hot-air balloon. In the 1982 Disney film </span><i style="color: #272727;">Night Crossing</i><span style="color: #272727;">, Peter Strelzyk (John Hurt) calls GDR oppressors “pigs,” a rare case of </span>truth in <span style="color: #272727;">cinema dealing with Communism. For those who remained, life was bleak.</span></p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Marxist ideology guaranteed that the GDR would be an economic basket case, less consequential to the world economy than Hong Kong. The GDR’s crowning industrial achievement was the Trabant, doubtless the most inferior automobile ever produced. But as John O. Koehler showed in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stasi-Untold-German-Secret-Police/dp/0813337445"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police</i>,</span></a> the Stalinist regime was efficient at repression.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Beyond North Korea and Albania under Enver Hoxha, perhaps no regime has exercised such complete control over the people. Koehler documents the repressions of the “Red Gestapo” against both Germans and the West. The material on Stasi operations against the United States and NATO remains relevant, along with Stasi operations in the Third World.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">In “The Stasi and Terrorism” chapter Koehler detailed the bombing of the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin a “massacre” carried out by the Libyan regime of Moamar Qaddafi. Koehler provides the full cast of characters, including Yasser Chraidi, the Libyan terrorist who planned the attack with Musbah Albugasem Eter, Musbah El Ablani and others who were not members of the Libyan People’s Bureau. Those included Mohamed-Suleiman Benali, a Moroccan “residing in West Berlin on welfare.”</p>
<p>The GDR was also a “playground for international terrorists,” such as Abu Daoud, leader of the Black September group that masterminded the 1972 Olympic attack that claimed 11 Israelis. The regime made Daoud a “guest of honor” at a Communist Party Central Committee event and housed at the Metropole, East Germany’s most luxurious hotel. “He was also given a reception at the mission of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and met with officials at the Syrian and South Yemeni embassies” before moving on unscathed. East Germany was also a safe haven for Carlos “the jackal,” Abu Nidal, and others.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><i>Stasi</i> provides a thorough account of how and why the Berlin Wall came down. But on the intelligence and terrorism sides, many loose ends remain. Libya is once again a playground for terrorists, and they now understand that they can kill American diplomats and torch the diplomatic compound with impunity. Not only so, but the U.S. Secretary of State will blame everything on a video and say “what does it matter?”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, 25 years after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, Barack Obama remains shrink-wrapped in statist superstition. Omnipotent government may have failed elsewhere, but in his view it remains precisely what America needs, along with more surveillance of the people. So no surprise if the anniversary draws no comment from the President of the United States.</p>
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		<title>A Passion for Truth: In Memoriam Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941-2013)</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/a-passion-for-truth-in-memoriam-jean-bethke-elshtain-1941-2013/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-passion-for-truth-in-memoriam-jean-bethke-elshtain-1941-2013</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Aug 2013 04:36:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[evil]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fascism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[genocide]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jean Bethke Elshtain]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200949</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A titan who knew that refusal to act against evil inevitably leads to acquiescence and complicity with it.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/elshtain.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-201004" alt="elshtain" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/elshtain.jpg" width="250" height="350" /></a>The first thing to be said about Jean Bethke Elshtain is that she embodied paradigmatically the idea of a public intellectual, an engaged spectator, to use Raymond Aron&#8217;s famous formulation. For her, the concept of liberty as articulated by the dissidents of Eastern Europe (Sakharov, Havel, but also John Paul II) symbolized an indispensable anchor, a source of hope in our turbulent and dismaying world. Both in her writings (21 books and hundreds of articles) and public interventions, Jean was direct, honest, unabashedly dedicated to defending truth against opportunistic lies and cowardly conformity. She identified herself as a Christian thinker and, at the University of Chicago, held appointments both in political science and in the Divinity School.</p>
<p>I first met her in the spring of 2006, at a dinner organized by our common friend, Martin Palous, former Charter 77 spokesman, philosopher and at that moment the Czech Republic&#8217;s ambassador to Washington. My wife, Mary, and I spent hours in one of the most enriching intellectual conversations of our lives. A few days later, I was approached by Robert Boyers, the editor of &#8220;Salmagundi,&#8221; who invited me to a conference on Jihad, violence, and terrorism. He told me that it was Jean Bethke Elshtain who had recommended me. The proceedings came out as a special issue of the journal.</p>
<p>The &#8220;Boston Globe&#8221; reported on the conference and described my intervention as the most adamant in support of the war. In fact, I was simply voicing there the ideas held by Joan Bethke Elshtain, Vaclav Havel, Andre Glucksmann and many others who saw the value of a just war against a despicable criminal despotism. It was a difficult task taking into account that Christopher Hitchens, who was also listed as a participant, had to cancel his presence at the very last minute. So, there I was, the East European, debating such hyper-controversial issues with famous critics of the war, including Benjamin Barber, Martha Nussbaum, and Peter Singer. &#8220;Public intellectuals, much of the time at least, should be party poopers,&#8221; Jean Bethke Elshtain declared in 2001. On that occasion, I definitely was one.</p>
<p>For Jean, values and principles mattered, truth was not a malleable, fluid, relative entity, and the dignity of the individual needed to be defended against any attempts to diminish it. A professor of moral and political philosophy at the University of Chicago, Jean delivered major lectures on various campuses, authored influential books on burning political and ethical issues, including the acclaimed &#8220;Democracy on Trial.&#8221; She was not afraid to defend her views, to offer logical, historical, and ethical arguments for the need to engage in the Iraq war.</p>
<p>A lifelong student of Augustine (a passion she shared with Hannah Arendt), Jean knew that refusal to act against evil inevitably leads to acquiescence and complicity with it:</p>
<blockquote><p>The fight against German fascism and Japanese militarism put us in the world to stay. With our great power comes an even greater responsibility. One of our ongoing responsibilities is to respond to the cries of the aggrieved. Victims of genocide, for example, have a reasonable expectation that powerful nations devoted to human rights will attempt to stay the hand of the murderers.</p></blockquote>
<p>For her, September 11 was a not a &#8220;bad accident,&#8221; but a fundamental change in world affairs. It marked a mutation not only in political strategies, but also in the American way of dealing with the horrors of war:</p>
<blockquote><p>I come from a small people, Volga Germans, who would have been murdered or exiled had they remained in Russia rather than making the wrenching journey to America. &#8230; An image that crowds out many others in my mind is that of tens of thousands fleeing New York City by foot. As I watched and wept, I recalled something I had said many times in my classes on war: &#8220;Americans don’t have living memories of what it means to flee a city in flames. Americans have not been horrified by refugees fleeing burning cities.&#8221; No more. Now we know.</p></blockquote>
<p>At the end of his life, the great sociologist Daniel Bell confessed that he was most worried by the loss of historical sense among America&#8217;s youth. His was also Jean Bethke Elshtain&#8217;s concern. For her, like for Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Isaiah Berlin, Leszek Kolakowski, Judith Shklar, and Paul Ricoeur, truth and memory are inseparable. In the preface of her book, &#8220;Sovereignty: God, State, and Self,&#8221; she wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>One of my persistent worries about our own time is that we may be squandering a good bit of rich heritage through processes of organized &#8220;forgetting,&#8221; a climate of opinion that encourages presentism rather than a historical perspective that reminds us that we are always boats moving against the current, &#8220;borne back ceaselessly into the past,&#8221; in F. Scott Fitzgerald&#8217;s memorable words from <i>The Great Gatsby</i>. This historic recognition should not occasion resentment or dour heaviness; rather, it should instill gratitude. As this book drew to a close, I realized that it was no culminating magnum opus &#8212; few books are &#8212; but, rather, a contribution to the shared memory of our time and place. And that is enough.</p></blockquote>
<p>In her endless quest for truth, Jean Bethke Elshtain illustrated in a most inspiring way that quality described by Thomas Mann as <a href="http://www.demdigest.net/blog/2013/08/jean-bethke-elshtain-on-democracy-and-civil-society/">the nobility of spirit</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Hannah Arendt and the Catastrophes of the 20th Century</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/hannah-arendt-and-the-catastrophes-of-the-20th-century/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hannah-arendt-and-the-catastrophes-of-the-20th-century</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Jul 2013 04:26:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fascism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hannah Arendt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[totalitarianism]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A new film brings to life the persona of the much-debated philosopher. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p align="left"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/hannah_arendt.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-196724" alt="hannah_arendt" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/hannah_arendt-256x350.jpg" width="256" height="350" /></a><em>“If I can be said to ‘have come from anywhere’ it is from the tradition of German philosophy.”–</em><em> </em><em>Hannah Arendt</em></p>
<p align="left">How can one preserve his/her humanity in dark times?  How and why does one lose his/her humanity? My reaction to the film about Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta, with Barbara Sukowa in the leading role, is that the director successfully translated the drama of ideas into a cinematographic narrative, despite daunting difficulties of such a task. The movie captures the stakes of the great polemics in which Hannah Arendt was involved. It renders persuasively the way in which she perceived thinking (<i>das Denken</i>) as the essence of human identity. Thought for Arendt could not be separated from morality, that is the specific capacity and the particular obligation that, as Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian put it, elevate us a step above zoology. According to Arendt, when thought is separated from action, or  vice-versa, when human action takes place in the absence of thinking the realm of liberty is endangered. She argued in her volume <i>The Human Condition</i> that “[t]he chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is always full of events which can ultimately be told as a story, establish a biography[.]” The promise of politics was for her the promise and imperative of living in truth.</p>
<p align="left">The script of the film is, to a large extent, faithful to the facts, as it encompasses extensive excerpts from her lectures and from Hannah’s correspondence (with Mary McCarthy, Heinrich Blucher, Karl Jaspers, or with Kurt Blumenfeld, a dear friend who brought her close, in her youth, to Zionism). We witness how she became the target of a veritable symbolic lynching because the thinker broke with certain taboos and dared to publicly wash such dirty linen, so to speak. This was not about legitimate and honest criticism. Influent people accused her of self-hatred, of reneging on her identity, of loathing the state of Israel, etc. In this context, she was even labeled an &#8220;enemy of the state of Israel.&#8221; Even her own colleagues indulged in what one calls<br />
&#8220;character assassination.&#8221; This woman (and I emphasize the word <i>woman</i>) was denied the right to publicly state her opinions. Or, even the right to hold such opinions. Arendt may have been wrong on many factual issues, yet her questions were invitations to uninhibited coming to terms with the past.</p>
<p align="left">What is missing from the movie, and I believe it should have been mentioned, is the fact that Hannah Arendt believed that radical Evil can be equally incarnated in Auschwitz and the Gulag. She did not use the concept of the Gulag, but she extensively wrote on the role of ideology in the Stalinist genocidal terror. Moreover, when <i>The New Yorker</i> decided to send her as correspondent for the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Arendt had already written her masterpiece about the catastrophes of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, <i>The Origins of Totalitarianism</i>. In this volume, she developed an analysis of radical Evil based on a Kantian intuition. My former PhD student, Benli Shechter, wrote a superb dissertation on how the discussion about totalitarianism unfolded in the pages of the famous magazine <i>Partisan Review</i> under the influence of Arendt’s writings. This was also the place where Mary McCarthy published an anthological pamphlet against Hannah’s detractors, in the aftermath of the publication of <i>Eichmann in Jerusalem</i>. I would add about Mary McCarthy, an important character in the movie and Arendt’s dear friend, that she was one of the most significant voices of the American, liberal, anticommunist Left and that she took part in the creation of the Committee for Cultural Freedom in the US, an anti-Stalinist initiative whose purpose was to challenge communist and fellow travelers’ propaganda offensives.</p>
<p align="left">Central to Arendt’ vision is the focus on the unique phenomenon of moral anesthesia, on the elimination of the difference between Good and Evil. The bureaucratic person carries out orders automatically. Thoughtlessness is the reason why radical Evil becomes banal Evil. When I use “becoming,” I mean it as the routinization of Evil. By no means do I think that the cold-blooded, morally emasculated planning of genocide is less of a manifestation of radical Evil. Those who read Himmler’s 1943 speech before SS cadres in Posen (Poznan) realize that Evil was justified on ideological bases without which the absolute crime that is the Final Solution could not be envisaged as the achievement of the Nazi’s historical mandate. In <i>The Origins</i>, Hannah Arendt quoted a Nazi ideologue, who defined the national-socialist state as a <i>Weltanschauungsstaat</i> (a state founded on a specific world-view), just as Lenin’s state was an ideocratic one. I discussed recently with a friend this topic. I believe that his standpoint ideally epitomizes my own views here: “What happens is that evil is no longer conceived of as evil, so, through <i>thoughtlessness</i>, it descends into everyday banality, when one is not required to take reasoned decisions, only administrative ones.” Writing about Arendt’s work, Romanian intellectual Monica Lovinescu remarked that the elimination of the moral and juridical person, of individuality, transforms totalitarianism into machinery manufacturing the absurd. Russian dissident Yuri Glazov wrote luminously about the moral abyss of the Soviet world.</p>
<p align="left">The eradication of moral perception via ideology – this is the greatest problem addressed with unwavering courage by Hannah Arendt. She died in 1975, so she did not have the possibility to write about <i>Gulag Archipelago</i>. I am certain that she would have published an essay on Solzhenitsyn, which she would have included in a new edition of her volume  <i>Men in Dark Times</i>. In 1967, fifty years since the Bolshevik coup d’état generally known in history as the October Revolution, Arendt participated, along with Isaiah Berlin, Shlomo Avineri, George Kennan, Leonard Schapiro, Marc Ferro, Adam Ulam, and Bertam Wolfe, at a seminar at Harvard, organized by Richard Pipes. This was the moment when one of the most important books on revolutionary Russia came about.</p>
<p align="left">I think it is worth emphasizing that the revisionist school of Sovietology, along with its present manifestations, attacked the very idea of the comparative study of communism and fascism as branches of the same totalitarian genealogical tree (the two totalitarian twins, as French historian François Furet put it). Another target was obviously the concept of totalitarianism proposed by Arendt during the fifties. The latter was disparaged for allegedly being an ideological legitimation of the Cold War.</p>
<p align="left">It seems that what Jean-François Revel called the totalitarian temptation has yet to disappear. Presently, we witness the panegyrics of “the communist hypothesis” or of “the communist horizon.” Elena Bonner rightly put it in her speech upon receiving the “Hannah Arendt” Award from the city of Bremen, the “Henrich Boll” Foundation and the “Hannah Arendt” Association:</p>
<blockquote>
<p align="left"><em>Reading Arendt is frightening even today. Her account of the general resemblance of the Nazi and Communist regimes has been confirmed by many others. On Hitler: “He was phenomenally false…lack of a sense of reality …indifference to facts” (Konrad Heiden). On Stalin: “revulsion for the truth of life,” “indifference to the real situation” (Nikita Khrushchev). In Germany: “The Führer is always right.” In the USSR: “The Party is never wrong.” Hitler: “The nation will be victorious or it must perish totally.” In the USSR, as a song put it, “Bravely we’ll go to war for the power of the Soviets and we will die as one in the fight.” Death camps and the Gulag. Gas was used in the former. The latter didn’t need to waste money on it—hunger and cold did the job.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p align="left">The perpetrator of radical Evil never troubles oneself with ethics because he is completely estranged from morality. Appearances are banal, the essence is radical. This type of individual does not act only from a blind sense of discipline, but also because it shares the totalitarian ideology. We now know enough historical facts to argue so. Adolf Eichmann was not a detached, cold, indifferent bureaucrat. He was obsessed by the role of the Jews. He considered them harmful vermin. Ideology therefore sets up the pattern for the de-humanization of the Other, of the alleged enemy. The bureaucratic system allows these “exterminators” to act with the conviction of their historical mission, of a providential command and of impunity…</p>
<p align="left">The scene of Arendt&#8217;s final lecture is truly poignant. Especially if one takes into account that there have been people of great intelligence (e.g., Hans Jonas, one of Martin Heidegger’s favorite students, an expert in Gnosticism) who reacted, as the movie shows, with great sadness to what they perceived as Hannah’s “arrogance.” As I already mentioned, Mary McCarthy defended her in Partisan Review and wrote scathingly  about those who called Arendt “Hannah Arrogance”:<em>  &#8220;</em>These people get worse as they get older, and in this case it is just a matter of envy. Envy is a monster.” No one was spared in this context, neither Saul Bellow nor Alfred Kazin, themselves harsh critics of Arendt.</p>
<p align="left">Hannah’s mentor, philosopher Karl Jaspers, showed understanding for her standpoint, but he was probably saddened by the fact that she accepted reconciliation with Martin Heidegger, whom he never forgave for his infatuation with Nazism. She would also be labeled Heidegger’s “literary agent.” But Karl and Gertrude Jaspers cared too much about Hannah to rebuke her for such things. They formally accepted her argument concerning Martin’s &#8220;naiveté.&#8221; I doubt though that they considered it valid.</p>
<p align="left">The main scandal concerned her evaluation of the role of the <i>Judenrats</i> that was rooted in Arendt’s attempt to shed light on some of the darkest and most unsettling pages of what she defined as “dark times.” For Hannah, the interrogation of the thorniest topics, telling the truth about things which others preferred to gloss over with suspect zeal, was a Socratic duty before humanity. She refused to fall back on what she considered “tribal” attachments. In a letter to Karl Jaspers, from 20 July 1963, discussing the ceaseless historical campaigns against her, Hannah confessed that, without realizing it, she enraged people highly influential in Israeli politics among whom were former members of the Jewish Councils during the Nazi era. Even so, she wrote, there was no reason to give in: “If I knew what would happened, I would probably still have done it.” (Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, “Correspondence, 1926-1969,″ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992, p. 511.) In a wise response, Jaspers urged Hannah not to indulge in conspiratorial fantasies.</p>
<p align="left">When he broke with Hannah, thus ending their lifelong friendship, Kurt Blumenfeld spoke also for Gerschom Scholem, the  prominent Kabala expert, who had reproached her lack of love for the Jewish people. Her reply does not suggest coldness, but a different perspective on empathy. She loved her friends, she responded, but she did not feel love for a collectivity, ethnic or social. Did this mean that she was “arrogant”? I doubt it. Arendt and Scholem had been good friends with Walter Benjamin. She wrote the preface to <i>Illuminations</i>, published by  Schocken Books. In 1968, Scholem lambasted Hannah for her putative haughty detachment in relation with the cause that she once defended: “I knew Hannah Arendt when she was a socialist or half-communist and I knew her when she was a Zionist. I am astounded by her ability to pronounce upon movements in which she was once so deeply engaged, in terms of a distance measured in light years and from such sovereign heights.” Hans Jonas, in his turn, wrote in his memoirs that he was shocked by the anti-Zionist tone and especially by what he called “Hannah Arendt’s ignorance of Jewish matters.” Beyond their disagreements, on which, in later years, they ceased dwelling, Jonas was delivered a moving eulogy in honor of his old friend, in 1975, at the Riverside Memorial Chapel. The text was published in <i>Social Research</i>, the journal of the university where both of them taught (Hans Jonas, “Memoirs,” edited and annotated by Christian Wiese, translated form the German by Krishna Winston, Brandeis University Press, 2008). After she read a chapter of Jonas’s volume <i>The Imperative of Responsibility</i>, Arendt wrote to him: “One thing is certain. This is the book that the Good Lord had in mind when he gave life to you.”</p>
<p align="left">The wound of the <i>Judenrats</i>’ collaboration remains open. In fact, can we talk of collaboration in those circumstances? What were the alternatives? Were there any alternatives? Maybe yes, if one is to think of the insurrection at the Warsaw Ghetto or the Vilna partisans. <i>Bury Me Standing</i> is the title of a volume by Isabel Fonseca about the conditions of the Roma in contemporary Europe. In 1961 though, the Israeli audience, and not only them, were not willing to explore such an issue. Taboos functioned in an intensively prohibitive manner. For the young state of Israel, the Holocaust was a foundational collective narrative. Those were times of emergency when one could hardly take into consideration metaphysical debates on the phenomenology of Evil. Eichmann’s trial had a nationally pedagogical value. Arendt’s questioning of prosecutor Gideon Hausner&#8217;s rhetoric only made murky waters ever more troubled.</p>
<p align="left">At the time, historian Walter Laqueur wrote about the lack of empathy for victims in <i>Eichmann in Jerusalem</i>. I think he was mistaken. There is empathy in the book, but it is mixed with immense suffering for what Arendt saw as the great error of the communities doomed to extermination. I cannot imagine how Arendt would have reacted if she had seen the recent Israeli documentary <i>A Film Unfinished</i> on Nazi propaganda, the Warsaw Ghetto, and memory’s labyrinth. She did not wonder what she would have done if she had been caught in the deadlock of an impossible choice similar to the one of Adam Czerniakow’s, the leader of the Warsaw <i>Judenrat</i>, who killed himself just before the departure of one of the last trains transporting Jews to their death.</p>
<p align="left">The film presents Arendt&#8217;s relationship with Martin Heidegger as a sort of hermeneutical key for understanding Hannah’s spiritual biography. I find this excessive. Equally important were, from a philosophical point of view, her relationship with Jaspers or with Blucher. Arendt was not “a left Heideggerian,” as one author once wrote. She created her own original work and she did not take an apologetic approach toward the writings of her first great teacher of metaphysics. Dana Villa correctly underlines the fact that Hannah never contested the role of Reason in politics, but she defended a deliberative vision of the political space  that excluded monopolistic ambitions, regardless of their coloring: “She shares with liberals like Isaiah Berlin and conservatives like Michael Oakseshott a deep suspicion of rationalism in politics and the pretenses of theory to guide a transformative practice. From Plato’s ‘tyranny of reason,’ to the French revolutionary terror, to Marxism’s catastrophic fulfillment in Stalinist totalitarianism, political rationalism has shown itself every bit as capable of generating moral horror as either religion or Romantic nationalism.” (v. Dana R. Villa, “Apologist or Critic? On Arendt’s Relation to Heidegger,” in Steven E. Aschheim, “Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem,” University of California Press, 2001, pp. 331-332).</p>
<p>Arendt learnt from Jaspers to be philosophical while loving humanity (<i>amor mundi</i>). She took from Heinrich Blucher a great admiration for Rosa Luxemburg and for workers’ councils as a form of direct democracy. Blucher’s ideas undeniably influenced her vision about what she called “the lost treasures of revolutionary tradition.” The sovereign heights, of which Scholem wrote so harshly, were actually that imaginary banister without which we descend into the abyss of self-destructive relativism and moral blindness.</p>
<p><em>Author&#8217;s note: For illuminating insights into the topics explored in this article, I recommend  Jamie Glazov&#8217;s symposium:<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/symposium-is-hannah-arendt-still-relevant/"> Is Hannah Arendt Still Relevant?</a></em></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Islamism&#8217;s Tactical Advantage</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-puder/islamisms-tactical-advantage/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islamisms-tactical-advantage</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-puder/islamisms-tactical-advantage/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Jul 2013 04:06:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fascism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Multiculturalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Political Correctness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[WWII]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=194985</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When a nation loses the will to defend itself. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Koran-book1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-195106" alt="Koran-book" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Koran-book1.jpg" width="255" height="186" /></a>America and the democratic West faced the European-based totalitarian ideologies of Nazism (National Socialism), Fascism, and Communism, and triumphed over them all.  Another totalitarian ideology has arisen in recent decades, this time not in Europe, but the Muslim Middle East, called Islamism.  It is a political perversion of Islam, albeit it is rooted in Islamic traditions and scriptures.  What makes this 21<sup>st</sup> Century Islamist totalitarian ideology different from the other destructive ideologies of the 20<sup>th</sup> century is the adoption of multiculturalism and political correctness (PC) in the democratic West that have tied the West’s hands in combatting this evil.</p>
<p>During World War Two, the Western allies did not mince words about the Nazi (German) and Fascist (Italy and Japan) enemies they faced.  American G.I.’s knew exactly who the enemy was, and so did the home front, which supported its fighting men and women. The American government helped define the nature of the enemy to the general public.  The British and Commonwealth governments did the same.</p>
<p>In the cultural sphere, Broadway and Hollywood, as well as the existing media (printed press and radio), supported the war efforts and helped define the enemy America was fighting.  And although the leftist influence in academia was growing as early as the 1940s, the culture in general respected patriotism, religious values, and traditions.</p>
<p>The Cold War that pitted the West against Soviet Communism was fought with similar clarity.  The West rejected the so-called “science” of Communism as a totalitarian tract that destroyed individualism and personal initiative.  It saw Communism as a system that rejected religion and social stability.</p>
<p>President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union “an evil empire” that locked its people up, preventing freedom of movement and thought. Reagan expressed in his March 8, 1983 speech a truth that the Obama administration refuses to accept about Islam.  He said, “I think the refusal of many influential people to accept this elementary fact of Soviet doctrine illustrates an <a href="http://www.nationalcenter.org/ReaganEvilEmpire1983.html">historical reluctance to see totalitarian powers</a> for what they are.  We saw this phenomenon in the 1930s.” What was true about Communism is true about Islamism.</p>
<p>There are those who differentiate between Communism and Islamism by saying that one (Islamism) is a religion, whereas the other is supposedly a political system. In reality, both are totalitarian systems. Both are radical ideologies that divide the world into the select and the profane. Both deny individuality and suppress free will, treat manmade dogma as infallible truth and seek to impose it by force. The ideologies of Communism and Islamism reject commonly perceived morality and insist that right and wrong are determined not in terms of Judeo-Christian values, but rather by the interests of their specific groups.  For the Communists it is the proletariat, and for the Islamists, the <i>ummah</i>.</p>
<p>In recent decades, U.S. administrations have treated the defense of freedom as an alternative to ideology.  Instead, America and the West need to confront Islamism as an insult to sanity. Likewise, we need to emphasize our own beliefs in universal Judeo-Christian values that distinguish between right and wrong.</p>
<p>Today, however, the government (the Obama administration), the sycophantic media and academia do not support the efforts to define and defeat radical Islam or Islamism.</p>
<p>The opposite is true.  The media and academia have employed political correctness and multicultural standards that obscure and obfuscate the dangerous nature of Islamism, hiding behind such “civil society” organizations as CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), MSA (Muslim Students’ Association), etc., that are supporting terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. Many of these organizations have intimidated Americans with concocted charges, including &#8220;Islamophobia&#8221; and racism, and have been allowed to “re-educate” U.S. law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and the military on “how to deal with Islamism.”  The FBI can no longer talk about Islam, and they can&#8217;t talk about jihad. The U.S. has permitted “the fox to guard the chicken coup.”</p>
<p>Victor Davis Hanson wrote that “Obama operatives suggested that radical Islamists were no more likely than any other groups to commit acts of terrorism. In fact, the very idea of terrorism — not to mention a war against it — was supposedly a Bush administration construct <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/05/01/the_obama_borg_118181.html">unfairly aimed at Muslims</a>. ” Obama, according to Hanson, “sincerely believed that there was no intrinsic connection between Islamism and terror; or, if there was, Islamic radicalism was no more dangerous than right-wing or supposedly Christian-inspired terror. Or if Islamic radicalism did arise, it might be mitigated by multicultural sympathy and outreach, mostly by contextualizing the violence as an inevitable result of prior Western culpability.”</p>
<p>In his May 1, 2013 article, Hanson ridiculed the Obama administration, pointing out that</p>
<blockquote><p>Vladimir Putin proved more helpful than did our own <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/05/01/the_obama_borg_118181.html">FBI and CIA </a>directors in the Tsarnaev case. After all, the FBI had interviewed, but not detained, a number of men who later proved to be Islamic terrorists, such as the Tsarnaevs, Nidal Hasan, Anwar al-Awlaki, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, and David Coleman Headley. One wonders what common complaint or malady these subjects shared — anti-abortion zealotry, tax resistance, homophobia, secret tea-party sympathies, several tours in Anbar Province, nativist anger at illegal immigrants, or simple head injuries?</p></blockquote>
<p>A Washington Post editorial (April 25, 2012) slammed the Obama administration. “The notion that there is a legitimate form of Islamism reflects serious intellectual failing on the part of the Obama administration.  President Obama seems to believe the Islamists are legitimized simply by participating in the <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/25/obama-embraces-islam/">political process</a>[.]” The editorial goes on to say that</p>
<blockquote><p>No matter what the source of the delusion, no political movement that exalts the Koran can peaceably coexist with the concept of freedom at the root of Western governance. Islamist notions of democracy are constrained by the strictures of their religion. Radical Muslims reject the humanistic values that gave birth to modern Western government; the self-evident truths regarding everyone’s inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are infidel heresy to the Islamists. There are no inalienable rights under political Islam, only submission to the will of Allah.</p></blockquote>
<p>America and the West cannot defeat Islamism and its terrorist components as long as the Obama administration insists on using euphemisms such as “overseas contingency operations.”  Obama rejected George W. Bush’s own euphemism of “War on Terror.”  In both cases, the terms used obscure the enemy we are fighting with nebulous euphemisms.  The Obama administration prefers to avoid using the term &#8220;Long War&#8221; or &#8220;Global War on Terror” so as not to offend Muslims. Words such as “terror” or “war,” let alone adding the word &#8220;Islamic,&#8221; are strictly verboten by the Obama administration.</p>
<p>In December of 2011, the administration released a strategic plan for dealing with domestic terrorism. It made not a single mention of <a href="http://www.unionleader.com/article/20130424/OPINION01/130429657">radical Islamism</a>.  And, in 2010, the Pentagon released an 86-page report on the Fort Hood shooting. Though the perpetrator was a radical Islamist who corresponded directly with top al-Qaida terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, the report labeled the attack &#8220;<a href="http://www.unionleader.com/article/20130424/OPINION01/130429657">workplace violence</a>.&#8221;</p>
<p>As long as we in America (and of course in Europe) are shackled by political correctness and an array of misleading euphemisms, we will not be capable of defeating radical Islamism.  We might have to give up our way of life on the altar of multiculturalism and PC because of the cowardly and morally feeble, self-proclaimed “educated classes and political elites” who have lost the will to defend our civilization.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Devil in History</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/the-devil-in-history/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-devil-in-history</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Apr 2013 04:53:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[devil in history]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Marx]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Scholar Vladimir Tismaneanu sheds light on communism, fascism, and some lessons of the Twentieth Century.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/the-devil-in-history/devil/" rel="attachment wp-att-185984"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-185984" title="devil" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/devil.jpg" alt="" width="260" height="393" /></a>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Vladimir Tismaneanu, a Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of several books, including <em>Stalinism for All Seasons: A History of Romanian Communism</em> (UC Press), <em>Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-Communist Europe,</em> and <em>Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel</em>. His new book is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Devil-History-Communism-Twentieth/dp/product-description/0520239725/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&amp;n=283155&amp;s=books"><em>The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century</em></a>.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Dr. Vladimir Tismaneanu, welcome to Frontpage Interview. It is an honor and a privilege to have you with us.</p>
<p>Congratulations on this fascinating, brilliant and captivating book. It is a stupendous achievement.</p>
<p>I simply couldn’t put it down till I finished it.</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu:  </strong>It is a pleasure for<strong> </strong>me to engage in this dialogue. I know some of the contributors to Frontpage; I have known David Horowitz and Peter Collier since the 1980s. Your kind words honor me, especially coming from someone with your family background.</p>
<p>The book tries to offer a comparative perspective about those regimes that have taken a horrible toll on families like yours and mine. I am sure you noticed how important it is in the logic of my demonstration to highlight the extraordinary insights of the great novelist and moral thinker Vassili Grossman. You and I know that the Devil is not simply a theological construct, a whimsical metaphor or a speculative fantasy. Living within totalitarianism, surviving within an infernal universe, has been a real experience for millions of human being.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> True words indeed, Dr. Tismaneanu.</p>
<p>Let’s begin with what inspired you to write <em>The Devil in History</em>.</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu: </strong>I owe the title to the great Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. In a famous interview with Hungarian-born, British journalist George Urban, Kolakowski spoke about the presence of the Devil in twentieth-century ideologically-driven dictatorships. We speak about the Devil anticipated by Dostoyevsky in his masterpiece “The Demons” (or “The Possessed”). It is a Devil that exploits human gullibility, who organizes hatred, rancor, envy, resentment<strong>. </strong>It is a terribly modern devil that mobilizes, inebriates, intoxicates both elites and masses with the aroma of ideology. The Devil I write about in this short treatise of historical demonology is a metaphysician, a logician, and a statistician. He pretends to offer ultimate solutions to vital (or mortal) human questions by annulling the distance between the City of God and the City of Man. His expertise is to seduce, to enhance the human propensity for grandiose utopias. Political religions promise immediate redemption via the violent purification of the community. The non-belonger, the outcast, defined racially or socially, needs to be excluded, weeded out, eliminated, killed.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> So share with us what the book is about exactly. What is the main thesis?</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu:</strong>  I regard both Communism and Fascism as revolutionary projects, inherently and irredeemably hostile to liberal values. Both have used manipulative methods to arouse, to galvanize mass movements committed to an apocalyptic break with an execrated <em>status quo</em>. Both are secular religions obsessed with transcending the existing human condition in favor an anthropological revolution. Both are millenarianisms announcing the advent of the New Man. I suggest that a comparison between Communism and Fascism helps us understand better the nature, goals, and consequences of such movements, including their Islamist heirs. I regard them as parts of an unfinished century of revolutionary hubris.</p>
<p>My main question, underlying all the other ones, is: How was it possible for ideologies so different in their origin and rhetoric to result in mass murder? I see nihilism at the core of both revolutionary programs. Communism, as the great French historian Francois Furet said, is a pathology of the Enlightenment. Fascism is pathology of the Counter-Enlightenment. They are both exacerbated, inflamed, pathological expressions of the attempt to impose through violence elitist fantasies of historical grandeur.</p>
<p>Another main point is my polemic with the disingenuous double standards so often used in dealing with the two totalitarian visions (Communism, in any of its incarnations, and Fascism). It is amazing how prompt the criticism operates whenever dealing with Martin Heidegger’s romance with National Socialism and how meek the reactions are when focusing on Georg Lukacs, a zealot of Bolshevism until the end of his life.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>How is <em>The Devil in History</em> different from other books in this field?</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu: </strong>It is an effort to bring together political philosophy, political history, and the history of ideas.<strong> </strong>I started working on this project many years ago, when I first tried to fathom the common roots of the totalitarian twins. For me, ideology is the crucial element in the effort to understand something that otherwise defies representation: the absolute horrors of the Gulag and the Holocaust. I see my book as a theoretical and ethical synthesis, an antidote to moral relativism. In writing it I was very much inspired by Solzhenitsyn’s approach in “The Gulag Archipelago”:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>“Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied or passed over or suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.” </em></p></blockquote>
<p>So, to put it briefly, my book is about Evil and evildoers. I refuse to accept the idea that Marx (or even Lenin) were innocent thinkers whose ideas were viciously bastardized by the scoundrel Stalin. In dealing with Bolshevism, I paraphrase Kolakowski&#8217;s first line in his trilogy on Marxism (&#8220;Karl Marx was a German philosopher”) and I insist that Vladimir Ilich Ulianov (Lenin) was a Russian Marxist.<em></em></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Tell us about your background and how you think it might give you an extra passion and insight into the phenomena that you study.</p>
<p>It all began when, if I am correct, you were a teenager in Communist Romania, and you got your hands on a forbidden text of Arthur Koestler’s <em>Darkness at Noon</em>. …</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu: </strong>I was born on July 4<sup>th</sup>, 1951, into a revolutionary family. Both my parents fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War; my father lost his right arm in the battle on the River Ebro when he was 24. My mother, a medical school student, was a nurse in the International Hospital. They were Stalinist internationalists, intensely and honestly believed in Soviet anti-fascism<strong>. </strong>After the defeat of the Spanish Republic, they went as political refugees to the USSR.  My two sisters were born there &#8212; Victoria in Kuibshev (now Samara), in November 1941, Rodica in Moscow, in April 1944. The family returned to Romania in February 1948. My mother, who had graduated from Moscow Medical School no. 2, taught pediatrics at the Institute of Medicine in Bucharest. My father became a communist ideologue. Because of his critical comments about the Romanian Stalinist leader Gheorghiu-Dej, he was expelled from the party in 1960. Until the end of his life, in February 1981, he remained a Marxist. My mother ended her infatuation with Communism in 1952-1953, during the anti-Semitic campaigns in the USSR and in the Soviet Bloc. She had studied under guidance of some of the accused doctors and could not accept the lunatic charges (“attempts to poison the Soviet leaders.”)</p>
<p>I learned a lot from my parents and their friends about the history of communism. Discussions at home were quite frank, although I disagreed with my father on the overall interpretation of Leninism. The books that influenced me the most, during my Romanian adolescence and student years, were Koestler’s <em>Darkness at Noon</em>, Hannah Arendt’s <em>The Origins of Totalitarianism</em>, and Raymond Aron’s <em>Opium of the Intellectuals. </em>Please keep in mind that, because of his “maverick” foreign policy, the Ceausescu regime ceased to jam Western radio stations. I learned about these books from the enormously influential essays written by émigré intellectuals Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca, broadcast via Radio Free Europe. Their ideas played a decisive role in my formation. Initially, I was attracted, like so many in my generation, to neo-Marxist, or humanist Marxist theories, including the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory.</p>
<p>Later, I realized that revisionist Marxism was just another theoretical dead end, an illusion with no real chance to change the existing despotic systems. Books such as those mentioned and many others were circulating clandestinely in Romania. I read <em>The Gulag Archipelago</em> in French translation. I read Nikolai Berdiaev&#8217;s book on the origins of Russian communism in French, I read Orwell&#8217;s <em>1984</em> in English.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What do you see as the main similarities between Nazism and Communism? You profoundly document how the drive to purify and disinfect man was one of the main driving forces of both ideologies, and so mass killing becomes the inevitable mandated result…..</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu:</strong> Both systems destroyed civil society, rule of law, pluralism, and did their utmost to humiliate the individual. As Hannah Arendt wrote, totalitarianism is a tyranny that makes human beings superfluous. Both worshiped the ideological State (the Nazis called it <em>Weltanschauungsstaat</em>) and imposed collectivist values meant to destroy the autonomy of the mind. Both used secret polices to generate a sense of universal fear. Both organized state terror to eradicate any form of opposition. Both (and here I insist to include Maoism as a version of Leninism) practiced genocide.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> The main distinctions?</p>
<p>On one realm…in their application …one of the differences you point to is that a “re-education” was possible in the communist Gulag, whereas in the Nazi Auschwitz there was only death. …</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu: </strong>Let me start with a quotation from C. S. Lewis:<strong> </strong></p>
<blockquote><p>“<em>Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”</em></p></blockquote>
<p>The distinctions are related to their avowed intentions. Communism never admitted that it aimed to physically get rid of millions of people “unworthy of life.” It was not the fulfillment of a biologically-defined vision of the perfect society. But if you think of the real conditions of communism during what we call high Stalinism (or high Maoism), the differences with the Nazi atrocities seem to vanish. The Gulag’s function was not to re-educate the individual, but to exhaust, freeze and starve him or her to the point of annihilation.</p>
<p>Another important distinction is that Nazism (or Italian Fascism) did not reach the point of de-radicalization the way Soviet-style regimes did. It is hard for me to imagine a 20th NSDAP Congress in which Parteigenosse Bormann (or Himmler) would condemn “Adolf Hitler’s Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” the way Nikita Khrushchev dealt with Stalin. National Socialism did not have a presumably humanist pre-history to which the militants could harken back in order to justify their prolonged commitment to the Cause even after the denunciation of the “God that failed.” Nazism and Italian Fascism were liderocentric worldviews. Bolshevism was rather partocentric. Historian Martin Malia wrote about ideocratic partocracy. Stalin was lionized as the leader of the mystical entity called Party. This is what political scientist Ken Jowitt accurately identifies as charismatic impersonalism. So, even if the leader dies and is posthumously denounced as a sociopath, the Party’s image remains sacred, unblemished, unperishable, like a Platonic idea.<strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>This is all connected to the fact that there were no Nuremberg-style trials for communist mass murderers after the collapse of communism in the 1989-1991 period. Western leftist intellectuals were not, to say the least, too supportive of such trials. As you point out, many of them, till this day, are reluctant to confront the truth about Lenin. Give us your wisdom as to the reason why.</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu: </strong>Not only Western leftist intellectuals, but also some East European famous dissidents voiced reservations about such trials. In their case, the argument is that lustration (screening of former communist bureaucrats and secret police officers and collaborators and elimination from public office for a period of five years) could generate social turbulence and result in witch-hunts. I happen to disagree with this view: the much-desired reconciliation cannot be achieved in the absence of repentance (I am sure you remember Tengis Abuladze’s great film with this very title, <em>Repentance</em>). Regarding the idea of witch-hunts, I cannot but smile: first, witch-hunts were about innocent individuals accused of phantasmagoric crimes. The crimes in the former communist countries were not imagined, but absolutely, palpably, and painfully real. Second, I don’t see a reason to wax compassionate for the former communist magnates and their underlings. Most have thrived after the collapse of the inhuman regimes they had imposed on their subject. You’re right: the absence of Nuremberg tribunals has created a widespread and justified sense of malaise among many people. As for the Leninostalgia, I see it is as an expression of historical ignorance combined with a sense of desperation linked the current conditions.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>The nature of Stalin’s anti-Semitism?</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu: </strong>Stalin abhorred difference, and Jews appeared to him as alien, different, cosmopolitan, i.e. threatening. He may have inherited anti-Semitic prejudices from his early years in Georgia, including the time he spent in the Orthodox Seminary in Tbilisi. Later, he clearly felt daunted, even humiliated by fellow Bolsheviks of Jewish origin (although he was quite close to Yakov Sverdlov and Lev Kamenev). He used anti-Semitic innuendo during the struggle with his rivals, especially with Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev. Much of his anti-Semitic fixations developed during and after World War II, when he became convinced that Jews were inherently unable to nourish genuine Soviet (i.e., Russian) patriotism. It is interesting that some of his acolytes were Jewish communists who shared Stalin’s phobias. One of the most notorious was Lev Mekhlis, for many years the editor of <em>Pravda</em> and one of Stalin’s most trustworthy lackeys. I would say, however, that anti-Semitism did not reach the point of becoming a pillar of the Soviet ideology the way it functioned in Nazi Germany.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What are the main failures of Marxism in your view? Why did it (does it) create such massive evil?</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu: </strong>The refusal to understand the foundations of liberty led to the totalistic view of man, history, and society.<strong> </strong>Marxism promised fraternity, solidarity, community, yet the result was, as Kolakowski pointed out, universal bondage. The source of evil is, in my view, the sanctification of historical violence, the apocalyptical Messianism that endowed a social class, via its self-appointed  representatives, or delegates, to exert absolute, unrestrained power. Marx failed to comprehend human psychology, or, better said, the human soul. A great Polish poet, Aleksander Wat, once said that Communism kills the inner man.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Nazism and Communism viewed the sanctity of human life and the notion of the individual a certain way. That view is quite different from how the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is at the foundation of Western civilization, views the sanctity of human life and the individual. Can you talk a bit about that?</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu: </strong>For Marxists, man is the ensemble of his social relations. In other words, the human condition is socially determined. You change social circumstances, you can expect (and provoke) mutations in human mentalities, emotions, reasoning etc. The Nazis saw man as the heir to the mythological traditions of <em>Blut und Boden</em> (blood and soil). Both ideologies held tradition, especially religious tradition, in deep scorn. Both abolished natural law and the time honored distinctions between Good and Evil. These distinctions were subverted by the new absolutism: the definition of Good as whatever serves historical progress or racial purity. Needless to say, these two criteria meant complete dedication to the totalitarian Party and its Leader.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>A very profound part of your book is your discussion of Stéphane Courtois’ introduction to <em>The Black Book of Communism</em>. Can you share with us the nature of the controversy it sparked and the meaning and significance of that controversy? And of course please comment on the importance of <em>The Black Book</em> itself.</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu: </strong><em>The Black Book</em> (translated and edited in its American edition published by Harvard University Press by historian Mark Kramer) was a catalyst for a long-postponed reckoning with left-wing totalitarianism in France, Italy, Germany, and many other countries. In France, the communist and the socialists were shocked by the analogy between the presumably noble Marxist creed and the Nazi ideology. Furthermore, Stéphane Courtois compared in his introduction the tragic fate of Jewish kids in the Warsaw ghetto and that of the children of the kulaks in Stalin’s USSR.  I would notice that the comparison that created such an uproar when <em>The Black Book</em> came out in 1997 is nowadays much less conducive to scholarly controversies. Politically, the refusal to accept the striking similarities between Communism and Fascism remains a highly sensitive issue.<strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>You discuss a letter that Nikolai Bukharin wrote to Stalin during the last days of his trial. Illuminate for us the contents and nature of it and how it shines a light on your own thesis.</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu: </strong>Nikolai Bukharin (1889-1938) was the least intolerant and the best educated member of the top Bolshevik elite. Lenin treated him like the son he never had. Stalin himself maintained a warm friendship with Bukharin who, in spite of their ideological conflicts, continued to live close to the Leader in a Kremlin apartment and was one of the writers of the Stalinist Constitution. Bukharin was arrested in 1937 and figured as the star of the third and last of the Moscow show trials in March 1938. From his jail (where he was allowed to write essays and even a novel), Bukharin wrote several letters to his idol and nemesis. He was one of the very few leaders to address Stalin with the familiar <em>ty</em> and using his underground nickname, Koba. Stalin kept the long letter I quote in a drawer of his personal desk until his death in March 1953. No doubt he considered it a precious document and he was right.</p>
<p>It is precious, however, not for the reasons Stalin might have had in mind, but because it provides a paradigmatic illustration of fanatical zealotry, self-debasement, and moral suicide. Bukharin’s almost hysterical, definitely masochistic memorandum to his murderer is imbued with unmitigated feelings of adoration. He knew that he had no chance to survive and yet he was thanking Koba for his immense kindness. We should not dismiss, however, the possibility that Bukharin tried to obtain leniency for his much younger wife, Anna Larina, and their recently born son, Yuri. But he could have done it with less fervor, less abjectly, more soberly.<strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Let me draw some wisdom from you by coming at this phenomenon from a different angle: Why did the criminal enterprises of Nazism and Communism take on an earthly incarnation?</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu:  </strong>They are secular religions claiming to offer answers to crucial axiological dilemmas. You will pardon my philosophical terminology, but I do not know a better explanation that the one offered by the great political thinker Eric Voegelin: these are revolutionary movements aiming to make this-worldly something that belongs to the transcendent realm, to immanentize the eschaton. Communism carries to an extreme, as noticed by Dostoyevsky, the utopia of the Tower of Babel. National Socialism romanticizes the world, re-enchants it. Both are combinations of political mysticism and historical shamanism.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What are your dreams for this book? What do you hope it might help achieve?</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu: </strong>To bring back the wise insights about totalitarianism, due to major scholars and democratic thinkers, abandoned and derided during the détente years. I do not simply propose a return to positions defended by Hannah Arendt, Norman Cohn, Raymond Aron, Leonard Shapiro, Nathan Leites, Leo Labedz, Carl Friedrich, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Pipes, Martin Malia, Robert Conquest, Leszek Kolakowski, but rather a synthesis that would take into account these major writings, as well as decades of new research and countless documentary proofs that the propaganda state was not a figment of Cold War ideological frenzy and that mass terror was the foundation for this type of state.<strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Final thoughts on your main themes, which you illuminate brilliantly: the consequences of the impulse to build the City of God and the contempt for the individual?</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu: </strong>Nothing can be more harmful to human liberty than state efforts<strong> </strong>to impose an official vision of truth upon defenseless individuals. No state interest can justify explicit or implicit attempts to make the individual an instrument of the government. No state-sanctioned definition of Good should prevail over our own conviction that, through our actions, we are fulfilling our humanity, not degrading and negating it.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Dr. Tismaneanu, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview. It was truly an honor for me to speak with you.</p>
<p><strong>Tismaneanu: </strong>Your questions were an intellectual <em>tour de force</em>. I hope that my responses have met the challenge.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Thank you so much Dr. Tismaneanu. It is quite the opposite in my mind: I hope my questions have met the challenge of your most profound, vital and original contribution to the scholarship on this phenomenon.</p>
<p>I hope to see you again soon at Frontpage Magazine. You are always welcome here.</p>
<p>And we encourage all of our readers to get their hands on <em>The Devil in History</em>. Order it now, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Devil-History-Communism-Twentieth/dp/product-description/0520239725/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&amp;n=283155&amp;s=books"><em>here! </em></a></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Turkey: Zionism, Like Fascism, a &#8216;Crime Against Humanity&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-klein/turkey-zionism-like-fascism-a-crime-against-humanity/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=turkey-zionism-like-fascism-a-crime-against-humanity</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Mar 2013 04:13:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crime against humanity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fascism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamophobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tayyip erdogan]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The UN's alliance of bigots.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-klein/turkey-zionism-like-fascism-a-crime-against-humanity/tayyip-erdogan-libya/" rel="attachment wp-att-179462"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-179462" title="tayyip-erdogan-libya" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/tayyip-erdogan-libya.jpg" alt="" width="264" height="198" /></a>The United Nations &#8220;Alliance of Civilizations,&#8221; co-founded by Turkey and Spain, has an annual budget of approximately four million U.S. dollars.  It just completed its Fifth Global Forum this past week in Vienna. The ostensible theme of the lavish two-day gathering was “Responsible Leadership in Dialogue and Diversity.”</p>
<p>According to its appropriately named &#8220;Vienna Declaration,&#8221; the forum was aimed, among other things, at an informed debate on how responsible leadership can make a difference in promoting and protecting full enjoyment of the right to freedom of religion and belief in &#8220;a context of religious pluralism&#8221; and &#8220;greater diversity.&#8221;</p>
<p>Outlining his vision to make the Alliance of Civilizations more active in addressing acute inter-ethnic and inter-religious tensions, the High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations, Nassir Al-Nasser of Qatar, stated, “We will strive to use the tools at our disposal in the difficult settings around the world.  We will not shy away from them.”</p>
<p>How noble.  Unfortunately, the Alliance of Civilizations&#8217; lavish global forum turned at times into a perversion of its stated mission.  The Emir of Qatar H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, for example, used his speech to complain about “an increase in the manifestations of misunderstanding about Islam and the Islamic civilisation in addition to the Muslims’ suffering from marginalisation, discrimination and hatred in many parts of the globe.”  The Emir called &#8220;the Palestinian cause&#8221; the &#8220;last colonial issue in history.&#8221;</p>
<p>Where, in the interest of inter-faith tolerance and dialogue, was the Emir&#8217;s acknowledgment of manifestations of misunderstanding about Christianity, Judaism and other faiths in the Muslim world, where non-Muslims suffer from marginalization, discrimination and hatred? Where is his call for good faith dialogue towards reaching a viable two-state Palestinian Israeli solution and rejection of the call by Hamas &#8211; whom the Emir visited in Gaza late last year -  to destroy the entire Jewish state?</p>
<p>Irresponsible, bigoted leadership was also on display at the Alliance of Civilizations forum.</p>
<p>Exhibit A was a speech delivered on February 27th by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. His hateful remarks equated Zionism with fascism and, curiously enough, with anti-Semitism. He labeled each of these &#8220;isms,&#8221; starting with Zionism, as &#8220;a crime against humanity” and said that Islamophobia belongs in the same crime against humanity category.</p>
<p>Sadly, UN Secretary General  Ban Ki-moon &#8211; who was present on the stage &#8211; remained silent. I asked his spokesperson whether &#8220;the Secretary General has any comment on Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan&#8217;s inclusion of Zionism as &#8216;a crime against humanity&#8217; during his speech at the Fifth Alliance of Civilizations Forum.” His response was no comment at this time, but that he would let me know if there is any change. Don&#8217;t hold your breath.</p>
<p>Ban Ki-moon&#8217;s silence is reminiscent of his decision to remain in the room during the Durban II Review Conference in 2009 (the official name of the 2009 United Nations World Conference Against Racism) when Iranian President Ahmadinejad opened the conference with an outrageous attack on Israel, which he called the most racist country in the world. At least on that occasion, the Secretary General did condemn Ahmadinijad’s speech after the fact, calling it “unacceptable,” a “very disturbing experience” and “destructive.” So far, he has not done the same with regard to Erdoğan&#8217;s inclusion of Zionism as &#8220;a crime against humanity&#8221; in his Alliance of Civilizations speech.</p>
<p>&#8220;We remind secretary-general Ban Ki-moon that his predecessor Kofi Annan recognized that the UN&#8217;s 1975 Zionism-is-racism resolution was an expression of anti-Semitism, and he welcomed its repeal,&#8221; said the human rights organization UN Watch in its press release denouncing the speech. &#8220;Erdoğan &#8216;s misuse of this global podium to incite hatred, and his resort to Ahmandinejad-style pronouncements appealing to the lowest common denominator in the Muslim world will only strengthen the belief that his government is hewing to a confrontational stance, and fundamentally unwilling to end its four-year-old feud with Israel.&#8221;</p>
<p>Erdoğan would do well to finally apologize to the Armenians for Turkey&#8217;s own crime against humanity &#8211; its genocide perpetrated on the Armenian population in the early part of the twentieth century. The American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time, Henry Morganthau Sr., described the Turks&#8217; mass murders of the Armenians as a &#8220;death warrant to a whole race&#8221; and as “race extermination.”</p>
<p>But Erdoğan, who did not hesitate in branding Zionism as a crime against humanity, told President Obama last year that Turks “are tired” of hearing about the Armenian &#8220;problem.&#8221; And learning little from Turkey&#8217;s bloody past, his government is cracking down on the nearly 20 million-strong Kurdish minority in Turkey. Yet Erdoğan has the audacity to use the UN Alliance of Civilizations platform to brand the Jewish people&#8217;s expression of their right to self-determination in their historic homeland as a &#8220;crime against humanity.&#8221;  Palestinians could have exercised the same right on land of their own sixty-four years ago, an opportunity which they rejected. They still can, if they would only sit down and negotiate a two-state solution in good faith rather than play games at the UN and fire rockets at Israeli civilians.</p>
<p>Iran was represented at the forum by its Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi.  He casted Iran, the world&#8217;s major state sponsor of global terrorism,  as the victim of terrorism.  UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon met with Salehi on the sidelines of the forum. To quote Iran&#8217;s news agency: &#8220;Referring to Iranˈs important role in promoting the dialogue among civilizations, the UN chief appreciated Salehi for attending the 5th United Nations Alliance of Civilizations Forum in Vienna.&#8221;</p>
<p>Was Salehi promoting constructive dialogue when he said in 2011 that “Palestine has, since the beginning, belonged to the Palestinians and we do not agree with partitioning Palestine under no circumstances [sic]?&#8221; He went on to say that Iran &#8220;will never recognize the Zionist regime [of Israel] and this has been the Islamic Republic’s position since the Islamic Revolution [in 1979] until now.”</p>
<p>Apparently, the Iranian leaders&#8217; threats to destroy the Jewish state, their funding and arming of Hezbollah and Hamas, and the regime&#8217;s brutal treatment of religious minorities within Iran don&#8217;t matter so long as Iran&#8217;s foreign minister shows up at the UN conference.</p>
<p>Whatever utopian goals some of its supporters may cherish, the Alliance of Civilizations is yet another in a long string of United Nations forums wasting money with false hopes, and easily manipulated for ends that are a perversion of their stated objectives.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Socialist or Fascist?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/thomas-sowell/socialist-or-fascist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=socialist-or-fascist</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Jun 2012 04:05:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Elites]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Where Obama is really leading us. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Picture-61.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-134847" title="Picture-6" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Picture-61.gif" alt="" width="375" height="249" /></a>It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a &#8220;socialist.&#8221; He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.</p>
<p>What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.</p>
<p>Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama&#8217;s point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.</p>
<p>Government ownership of the means of production means that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face responsibility when those consequences are disastrous — something that Barack Obama avoids like the plague.</p>
<p>Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the &#8220;greed&#8221; of the insurance companies.</p>
<p>The same principle, or lack of principle, applies to many other privately owned businesses. It is a very successful political ploy that can be adapted to all sorts of situations.</p>
<p>One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.</p>
<p>Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left.</p>
<p>Jonah Goldberg&#8217;s great book &#8220;Liberal Fascism&#8221; cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists&#8217; consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left&#8217;s embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.</p>
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		<title>The Decline of the West, and the Rise of the Rest</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/frontpagemag-com/the-decline-of-the-west-and-the-rise-of-the-rest/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-decline-of-the-west-and-the-rise-of-the-rest</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 05 Dec 2011 04:17:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[decline]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A panel discussion that recently took place at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Muslims-carrying-banners-declaring-Islam-will-dominate-the-world-protest-at-the-visit-of-Mr-Wilders-to-the-UK.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-114555" title="Muslims-carrying-banners-declaring-Islam-will-dominate-the-world-protest-at-the-visit-of-Mr-Wilders-to-the-UK" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Muslims-carrying-banners-declaring-Islam-will-dominate-the-world-protest-at-the-visit-of-Mr-Wilders-to-the-UK.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a></p>
<p><em>The panel discussion below recently took place at </em><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/02/arab-spring-muslim-winter-2/#"><em>David Horowitz</em></a><em>’s Restoration Weekend in West Palm Beach, Florida (Nov. 17-20, 2011). The transcript follows. To view the question and answer session, click </em><a href="http://blip.tv/davidhorowitztv/decline-of-the-west-rise-of-the-rest-q-a-5771776"><em>here.</em></a><em></em></p>
<p><strong>Part I</strong></p>
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<p><strong>Part II</strong></p>
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<p>Michael Wienir: We have a lot of things to talk about.  And in particular, we want to have enough time so you can ask questions of the panelists and interact with them, and they can interact with each other.  So, I still see stragglers back there.  It&#8217;s like herding cats trying to do this job.  It is not an easy job, for those of you that think it&#8217;s an easy job.</p>
<p>Come on, stragglers, pull up a chair.  Sit down, the doors are closing.  You don&#8217;t want to be outside anyway, the weather is not particularly good.</p>
<p>My name is Dr. Michael Wienir.  And it is my pleasure as chairman of the Board of Directors of the David Horowitz Freedom Center to welcome you to the 2011 Restoration Weekend.  And let me take this moment to simply thank all of you for your support in the past, in the present and, I know, in the future.</p>
<p>As David Horowitz has said, we are an effective battle tank, we&#8217;re not just a think tank.  And we have a general on the panel.  And the key is that the ammunition that this battle tank uses is generated by David and other members of the Center.  But the fuel to make this tank go is provided by your generosity and the generosity of over 90,000 people who across the country are contributors large and small to the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  We can&#8217;t wage this battle &#8212; we cannot fight, this tank will not run &#8212; without your support and without your help.</p>
<p>The mission of the David Horowitz Freedom Center is quite simply the defense of free society, whose moral and ethical and cultural foundations are under attack by enemies at home and abroad, both secular and religious.  And that&#8217;s what our mission is.  That&#8217;s what we do.  And we&#8217;re a unique organization.</p>
<p>David has defined the values of the Center, and there are a number of them &#8212; very similar to what Herman Cain had to say this morning &#8212; individual freedom, limited government, the rule of law, capitalism, free markets, and equal opportunity.  Not radical egalitarianism; equal opportunity at the starting line, not equal outcome at the finish line.  Not redistribution of wealth, but creation of wealth for all our citizens.  We work to create these opportunities in the private sector, and we support strong defense to preserve and protect these values.  And we reject surrender, appeasement, retreat and defeat.</p>
<p>Dennis Prager, who is not here this weekend but is a friend of the Center, points out what America really is, the trilogy &#8212; liberty &#8212; not what the Left wants, which is equality, and not individual freedom &#8212; E Pluribus Unum &#8212; out of many, one &#8212; not multiculturalism &#8212; and In God We Trust &#8212; not secularism.</p>
<p>This panel, then, is defined as the decline of the West &#8212; meaning these Western values &#8212; and the rise of the rest &#8212; secular socialism, Marxism, Islamofascism, and this Chinese model of &#8212; I didn&#8217;t know how to actually title it, but I guess it&#8217;s totalitarian mercantilism.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So the questions for the panel that I&#8217;ve asked them all to address is &#8212; one, is the West really in decline?  Do you accept the premise of the title of the panel?  If the West is not in decline, I&#8217;ve asked them to defend their position and answer your questions.  Number two, if you agree that the West is in decline, what is the specific cause of that decline?  And if you agree that the West is in decline, what can be done to reverse the trend?  And finally, are you optimistic, or are you pessimistic?  Four simple questions.</p>
<p>Now, each panelist gets 10 minutes to do this.  It&#8217;s better than 30 seconds on that Presidential debate.  And then we should have about 20 or 25 minutes for the panelists to interact with each other and for you to ask your questions, which they will answer.</p>
<p>First panelist is Bruce Bawer, who I just had the pleasure of meeting &#8212; I&#8217;ve read his books.  Bruce is an American literary critic and writer and poet.  He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees, including a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  He&#8217;s taught courses in literature and composition, in search of a tolerant society.  He moved to Amsterdam from New York in 1998, and then to Oslo, Norway &#8212; I believe it&#8217;s 1999 &#8212; only to confront the intolerance of Islam and their tolerance &#8212; European tolerance of intolerance.</p>
<p>Among his many books and writings are &#8220;While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within,&#8221; and, in 2009, &#8220;Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom.&#8221;  Bruce is now a Shillman Fellow &#8212; and you&#8217;ll hear more about Bob Shillman&#8217;s generosity and the Shillman Fellowships later on during this weekend &#8212; and as such is a regular contributor to our website, which I hope you&#8217;re on every day, FrontPageMag.com.</p>
<p>Bruce?</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Bruce Bawer: Thank you, Michael.  Thank you, everybody for being here.  Thank you to the David Horowitz Center for having me at this wonderful place.</p>
<p>First, I think it&#8217;s useful to step back and ask exactly what we mean when we speak of the decline of the West.  Do we mean a decline in raw military power, in freedom, in prosperity, standard of living, quality of life; in security,  in character, in civic virtue, in art and culture?  And when we speak of decline, are we speaking of decline relative to a decade ago, a generation, a century?  And if we are in decline, who is rising, and in what ways, and why?  And what does their rise say about the West?</p>
<p>For example, the rise of China as an economic power, and India as both an economic power and a fledgling democracy &#8212; maybe less a reflection of the innate qualities of Chinese or Indian civilization than of the powerful influence of Western ideas and values in those countries.  Indeed, Western civilization has become, in a very real way, world civilization.  And Western values have come to be recognized very widely as universal values.</p>
<p>Maybe it&#8217;s also useful to remind ourselves that people have been talking about the decline of the West for a long time.  Europe, which reached its zenith of power, [self-competence] and much else in the latter part of the 19th century, was traumatized by the First World War and, in a way, never really recovered.</p>
<p>During the Depression, a lot of supposedly smart people in both America and Europe thought democratic capitalism was finished and that they were faced with a choice between communism and fascism.  For awhile during World War II, things didn&#8217;t look good.  And for quite awhile afterwards, many people were betting on the USSR.</p>
<p>I was born into a prosperous, stable, self-confident America.  But by the time I was a teenager, the US seemed to be coming apart at the seams, frazzled by a new culture of protest that transformed American cultural values, mocked the idea of America as the arsenal of democracy and undermined American social stability.  Similar developments, of course, were going on all over Western Europe.</p>
<p>Then came Watergate, and we were told that American democracy was on the rocks.  President Ford reassured us, only to be replaced by Carter, who told us we were afflicted with a deadly malaise that was taking us down the tubes.  Reagan brought us Morning in America, though, at the same time, we were warned that Japan was about to leave us in the dust.</p>
<p>The fall of communism in Europe felt at first like a great triumph for the West.  But for many, it led to a crisis of identity.  We had to find ourselves in opposition to communism &#8212; what were we now?</p>
<p>Then came 9/11.  And after the initial and very brief feeling of Western unity, confusion and division set in.  And that&#8217;s something worth puzzling over.  After all, 9/11 was followed by attacks elsewhere in the West &#8212; Madrid, London.  We were all in it together.  The West should never have been more united in resolve.  But it wasn&#8217;t.  Why?  Because we&#8217;d been poisoned by a decadent thing called multiculturalism that made it impossible for many of us &#8212; especially our cultural elites &#8212; to even name our enemy.</p>
<p>Fear played a part too, of course.  Many European countries were already so heavily populated with Muslims, who they knew were sympathetic to jihadists, that the leaders of those countries didn&#8217;t dare talk honestly about the subject.  Our leaders sent soldiers off to fight but weren&#8217;t always honest with them about what they were fighting.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Europe became increasingly accustomed to Muslim youth crime, so-called no-go zones, and fiery jihadist preachers.  But who was put on trial in Europe, in Canada and in Australia?  The few people who dared to speak bluntly and honestly about Islam.</p>
<p>No wonder, then, that we were plunged into confusion and division.  Not just division among Americans, but division between America and our Western allies.  During the Bush years, anti-Americanism in Europe swelled to unprecedented proportions.  Respected intellectuals equated Bush with Saddam and [Osama].  Then suddenly, China loomed as the world&#8217;s next great power, and the West became gripped by economic crises.</p>
<p>Today, the welfare states of Western Europe face demographic disaster.  The EU is a question mark.  And America consists increasingly &#8212; to quote Charles Murray &#8212; of two classes that don&#8217;t talk to each other.  The Tea Party grasps the importance of freedom to the West&#8217;s survival, while Occupy This-That-and-the-Other is ready to sacrifice freedom for an illusion of equality.</p>
<p>But what about the great majority of Americans who belong to neither movement?  To what extent do they exhibit what used to be known as civic virtues, and understand and respect the Constitutional values on which this country and the entire free West was built?  To what extent, on the other hand, are they the products of a relativist multiculturalism which has taught them that the West&#8217;s history is nothing but a litany of evils, colonialism, imperialism, exploitive capitalism; thereby twisting one of the world&#8217;s great strengths, constructive self-criticism, into a destructive self-hatred?</p>
<p>Instead of preparing to build on the West&#8217;s great heritage, young people are too often taught today to apologize for it.  This is no atmosphere in which to hatch new Dantes and Shakespeares, new Beethovens and Mozarts, new Rembrandts and Michelangelos.  Europe&#8217;s great cities are museums.</p>
<p>And speaking of culture, what about American popular culture?  I grew up in a great age of middlebrow culture which was a force for social unity that prepared young and undereducated people for the higher glories of high culture.  In the first half of the last century, American films and popular [song], at their best, were not only aesthetically meritorious but embodied admirable, even noble, values.</p>
<p>One of the much-discussed cultural topics in the last couple of weeks has been the disappearing taboo against the F-word in the titles of plays, movies and songs.  I don&#8217;t really care that much about the F-word.  Anybody who&#8217;s read Chaucer knows that vulgarity has been a part of English literature from the beginning.  But the kind of cultural products that have the F-word in their titles today might well have been created in order to demonstrate definitively that the West is indeed undergoing a profound decline.</p>
<p>Then again, these things may turn around.  We&#8217;ve faced economic and cultural setbacks before.  Plus the fact we must admit that there have been remarkable developments in our own lifetimes that we shouldn&#8217;t overlook.  Economic crisis or not, most of us are living better than ever.  We live longer than ever.  In America, many of the prejudices I grew up around have faded to a degree I never imagined possible, although the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and its appearance among the Occupy This-and-That crowd is not too heartening.</p>
<p>But thanks to Western science and technology, we live in a world of marvels.  Whenever I&#8217;m bored and taking for granted the everyday wonders of contemporary Western life, I look around me and ask what Benjamin Franklin would make of television, cell phones, e-mail, YouTube, Spotify and Skype.</p>
<p>At this point, however, I suppose I should remind you all of the subtitles of my last two books.  The subtitle of &#8220;While Europe Slept&#8221; is &#8220;How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within.&#8221;  The subtitle of &#8220;Surrender&#8221; is &#8220;Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom.&#8221;</p>
<p>These subtitles describe not only decline but destruction &#8212; the destruction first of the first freedom, freedom of speech, at least speech about Islam &#8212; a widespread submission to the tenet that Muslims have a right to see their religion treated with respect, even deference; a tendency for the cultural and intellectual world, the media establishment, political leaders at every level, the police and military, and society at large, to give in to the demands of Sharia law in a variety of ways big and small; a deep-seated reluctance on the part of authorities to face up to social problems caused by Islamization, a readiness to surrender Muslim enclaves to autocratic government by local patriarchs who follow the dictates of Sharia law.</p>
<p>These developments worry me deeply.  A house divided against itself cannot stand.  And a native culture that doesn&#8217;t believe very much in itself and in its own values cannot survive for long against an imported culture whose members believe in their own cultural values so passionately that now a few of them are prepared to commit suicide or murder their own children in the name of those values.</p>
<p>To put it bluntly, I&#8217;ve seen what Islamization has done to Europe, and I&#8217;ve seen how Europe is responding, and I&#8217;ve started to see the same things happening here.  And I&#8217;m worried.</p>
<p>To answer the four questions with which we began directly, then &#8212; is the West in decline?  Well, I wouldn&#8217;t have written my last couple of books if I weren&#8217;t sincerely worried that it is.  At the same time, I couldn&#8217;t have written them if I didn&#8217;t think that there was hope, if we stop responding to Islam with deference and apology and appeasement.</p>
<p>What can be done to reverse the trend?  Educate our next generation to know Western history, to cherish Western liberty and appreciate the sacrifices of those who bequeathed it to us to practice Western values of discipline, hard work, economic responsibility, sacrifice, tolerance and intelligent self-criticism; to recognize that they are mere stewards of the treasure that is Western civilization, and to be prepared to defend it with their lives.</p>
<p>Finally, the last question &#8212; are you optimistic, or pessimistic?  Well, as I think I&#8217;ve made it clear, that varies.  When I&#8217;m attending a political debate in Europe, where everybody sounds as if they&#8217;re living on another planet than I am, I&#8217;m overcome with despair.  When I&#8217;m in a place like this, which is itself a reminder of the glories that America and the West are capable of, and where I&#8217;m in the company of people who obviously get it, I feel a spark of optimism.  So thank you for that.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Michael Wienir: Thank you very much.  The worst job trying to moderate is trying to keep people to 10 minutes.  But everybody has so many wonderful things to say, and [yeah, that stinks].  Have your questions ready for all these panelists.</p>
<p>Next panelist is Paul Vallely.  Paul is a retired United States major-general, a graduate of West Point.  His training includes &#8212; and you can look at his lapel, because he&#8217;s got a whole bunch of these buttons on there &#8212; infantry, Rangers, Airborne, jumpmaster, command, general staff schools &#8212; he&#8217;s been to all those.  He&#8217;s got experience at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and the Army War College.  He was deputy commanding general of the Pacific Command when he retired in 1993.</p>
<p>In 2004, with our friend, retired Lieutenant General Tom McInerney, he wrote a book called &#8220;The End Game&#8221; &#8212; which he presented at one of our sessions &#8212; &#8220;A Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror.&#8221;  He has served as a senior military analyst for Fox News, Military Committee Chairman of the Center for Security Policy &#8212; Frank Gaffney is around here someplace to say hello to &#8212; he has supported Veteran Defenders of America.  And he founded a wonderful organization called Stand Up America, supporting the First and Second Amendments, strong national defense, secure borders, personal responsibility, individual liberty and limited government.</p>
<p>He&#8217;s been a contributor to FrontPageMag.com and has been a long-term friend of mine and a long-term friend of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.</p>
<p>Paul?</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Paul Vallely: Thank you very much, Michael.  Good morning, everybody.  We came from Montana two days ago, it was nine degrees.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So even if it&#8217;s raining outside, it&#8217;s wonderful.  And I&#8217;ve got my nurse&#8217;s assistant here, Muffin, who you&#8217;ll get to meet.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Michael Ledeen and I won&#8217;t cover with you all of our medical problems last year, but it really put us out of action for a while.  But we&#8217;re standing, Michael, and we&#8217;re here with all of you.  Wonderful friends, you know, we&#8217;ve known you for so long now.  Years.  And it&#8217;s always a pleasure, and appreciate when Michael and David invite us to be a part of this each and every year.</p>
<p>Stand Up America, just to tell you a little bit &#8212; we have 16 research intelligence analysts that work for us around the United States.  And that&#8217;s what&#8217;s the basis of us being able to produce and publish a lot of articles that are pertinent to the subjects that we&#8217;ll be discussing this weekend.</p>
<p>But specifically, let me try to address the decline of the West and answer the questions, Michael, as best I can.  But certainly, we really want to have a heavy question-and-answer period, where we can get more into the Middle East and more specificity of some of the major issues that we&#8217;re looking at today.</p>
<p>But you know, when you look historically back &#8212; and I learned as a cadet at West Point, when we studied all the great battles &#8212; all the revolutions that had taken place, the tactics and the strategies that were used to restore a society or a culture &#8212; we certainly have to look at what were the root causes of the decline.  And if you typically look back at revolutions and the demise of empires, the fall of empires over the centuries, you will see it comes back basically &#8212; something has happened in that culture with those people, from tyrannical governments, dictatorial governments.  And it comes down a lot to the economics, and what kind of pain that is placed on any kind of society.</p>
<p>So when we look at what&#8217;s happening around the world &#8212; and I&#8217;ll talk more specifically about it, and what I call a chessboard, the international global chessboard, to lay out exactly how we see things as the world exists today.  But examining the past again, and reflecting &#8212; yes, we have been in a decline.</p>
<p>If you track back culturally in America, I can track it back to the &#8217;60s.  And then, when we look at the financial &#8212; the stability of our markets over a period of time.  But mixed in with that was the innovation of America, and the high-technology developments.  So as a decline occurred in certain parts of our structure, even the political decline of effective leadership over the years, effective government.</p>
<p>So you tie all of those things in together while you&#8217;re trying out there in the private sector, and those that do have common sense and are innovative, to be creating products, activities, corporations and organizations &#8212; really still today, that&#8217;s the glue that&#8217;s holding us together.</p>
<p>We did a strategic study &#8212; we completed it two months ago.  I&#8217;ll be happy to provide you a copy of it.  But guess what the four or five major threats to America are, when we look at this decline?  Number one, the greatest threat to America is an inept and a dysfunctional government.  Okay, think about that.  The second major threat in the decline &#8212; as we&#8217;ve seen, and we&#8217;re experiencing right now &#8212; is the financial collapse of the United States and the Western countries.  Third, the greatest threat was our southern borders and our borders.  The fourth was Iran and what&#8217;s happening in the Middle East.  And fifth was Afghanistan and Pakistan.  So when you analyze that, and you talk about the decline politically, when you look at a dysfunctional government that we have so bureaucratized, and we&#8217;ve so over legislated, then our hands are almost tied.</p>
<p>So the question is, as we come back &#8212; what are the solutions?  And I call it the restoration.  As we&#8217;ve seen a decline now with still a strengthening of the glue within the American society, still with many of us having what I call the warrior spirit, the ability to restore the Constitution, the ability to restore the republic, and get back to the basic values and traditions &#8212; that&#8217;s how you get after the root cause.</p>
<p>But let me tell you a little bit of difference. As you restore, and as countries, as societies, restore themselves after tremendous upheaval and tremendous pain, it all comes back to superb leadership.  But above that &#8212; I define it even further &#8212; is the warrior.  And the difference between warriors and leaders &#8212; warriors will fall on their sword.  I will die for you, I will die for your children, to restore this country and to make it what it should be today to deal with today and tomorrow.</p>
<p>So we all need to have that warrior spirit.  Because, as Herman Cain pointed out, we are in the battle for America.  It&#8217;s not business as usual.  This is a different situation in 2011, going into 2012.  And your neighbors, your local communities, have to realize they&#8217;ve got to get out of their bubble.</p>
<p>I talked to 60 corporate leaders yesterday.  Honest to goodness, I couldn&#8217;t believe it.  It&#8217;s like they&#8217;re all in their corporate bubble, except for a few.  And I find that amongst many intelligent, educated individuals.  So in this restoration, to go from the decline that we&#8217;ve seen across the board to restoration now, and coming back up &#8212; and Michael Ledeen and I talked earlier this morning &#8212; we want to be on a positive note.</p>
<p>Yes, we have to look at the threats out there.  We have to understand that we&#8217;ve got to have a government, we&#8217;ve got to have an organization within this country, that can meet those threats.  Because listen, you can talk about unemployment, you can talk about economics, you can talk about all those other issues out there.  They mean nothing, unless we can secure you and your families.  The security of you and your families is the utmost important thing we can do.  Because once we have the security of America, we have strong leadership and we have strong warriors leading our country, we can do anything.  And that&#8217;s the key to it all.</p>
<p>So within my 10 minutes, that&#8217;s it.  And very happy to address the Middle East and some other things.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Michael Wienir: That was exciting.  That&#8217;s less than 10 minutes.  So lots of questions.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m looking at my introduction to Michael Ledeen, which has just been edited, which is a good thing.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Michael is a noted political analyst.  He was Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute, where he worked for over 20 years.  He&#8217;s now the Freedom Scholar chair at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.  He was a founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.  He is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Fox News; and was a consultant to the National Security Council, Department of Defense and Department of State.</p>
<p>His books include &#8220;Grave New World,&#8221; &#8220;Tocqueville on American Character,&#8221; &#8220;Machiavelli on Modern Leadership,&#8221; and, in 2007, &#8220;The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots&#8217; Quest for Destruction.&#8221;</p>
<p>Michael Ledeen.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Michael Ledeen: Thank you, Michael.  It&#8217;s great to be on a panel with another Michael and two Bruces.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>When I was a teenager, the Bruce was one of my heroes.  There was a radio show in New York that was run by a DJ called Bruce, and I thought it was great.</p>
<p>Good morning. Happy Friday to all of you.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m a historian.  I have a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin, about which you&#8217;ve all heard.  And it was great to get a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin because there was real debate.  We fought with each other every day about almost everything.  And I think everybody who came out of that program in those years came out toughened by it.</p>
<p>But I stress to you that I&#8217;m a historian, not a prophet.  So I will say to you what I say to the young kids that I work with at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies &#8212; that we don&#8217;t know.  We don&#8217;t know if America is in decline or on the rise.  Nobody knows.  Most things that people talk about &#8212; that we talk about, that pundits write about, and on which they pronounce all the time &#8212; are unknowable.  We won&#8217;t know for quite awhile whether we&#8217;re rising or falling, how our enemies are doing, and so forth.</p>
<p>There have been &#8212; if you go back and read cultural history, the conviction that America has been in decline starts the day after Plymouth Rock.  Europeans said about Americans from the beginning that America was created by failed people and biological rejects &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; that America &#8212; no, really.  Scientific essays on how Americans were shorter than Europeans and weaker than Europeans, and more prone to disease than Europeans, and so forth &#8212; we&#8217;ve always been written off.  And there&#8217;s a whole strain in American intellectual history that of course rewards this point of view.  And intellectuals in particular love it.  Because the real secret about American intellectuals is that they&#8217;re miserably unhappy because they&#8217;re not Europeans.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And European intellectuals are on top of the status heap.  They get good salaries, they get high prestige, they&#8217;re on television all the time.  People bow to them, people respect them, pretty women run after them &#8212; or pretty men, depending.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And it&#8217;s a great life.  And over here, you know, Americans by and large really don&#8217;t give a damn about intellectuals.  And the way the &#8212; the adjectives we applied to them, as in pointy-headed, et cetera &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; show all of this.  And when I was in college, there was a very famous book emerge by Professor Hofstadter at Columbia University, called &#8220;The Anti-Intellectual Tradition in American Life,&#8221; which went through all of this stuff.  And that book was obviously intended to show us how terrible all of this was.  And it&#8217;s only later in life that I came to realize that it was a very good thing, this anti-intellectual tradition.</p>
<p>So I say all this in order to stress &#8212; we don&#8217;t know.  We don&#8217;t know how it&#8217;s all going to turn out.  However, if you look at it from the standpoint of global conflict &#8212; us against them &#8212; there&#8217;s every reason to be not only optimistic, but even wildly optimistic.</p>
<p>The first important point is the basic fact of American history in the world.  We have always been [saved] by our enemies.  We have never intervened in a global matter because we figured it out, because we thought we were at risk, and we acted to save us, our values, our allies, et cetera.  Never.</p>
<p>We were torpedoed into the First World War in the North Atlantic by the Germans.  We were providentially bombed into World War II just in the nick of time by the Japanese.  We were dragged kicking and screaming into the Cold War by Stalin, who just couldn&#8217;t wait to get his fangs into Greece and Turkey at the end of the war, and to gobble up all the satellites in Central and Eastern Europe, at which point we had to do something.  So the Cold War &#8212; we were a reluctant, very reluctant, participant.  And the so-called war against terror &#8212; the evil phrase we are not even permitted to pronounce anymore &#8212; was famously something that we didn&#8217;t choose; they chose us on 11th of September, 2001.</p>
<p>So we rely on our enemies.  And on this you can be prophetically sound.  Because our enemies will attack us, they have to attack us, they will continue to attack us.  And so eventually, some American President will get up one day and say &#8212; you know, we really have to do something.</p>
<p>And I will say only one line about that.  We are &#8212; Barbara and I have three children, all of whom have served in this war, two of whom are male marine officers, one of whom is in Afghanistan today.  And on the subject of Iran, where the entire debate involves around nukes &#8212; should we let them have nukes, can they be permitted to have nukes, is it acceptable, tolerable, et cetera &#8212; the fact of the matter is that the Iranians kill Americans every day.  Let me say it again &#8212; Iranians kill Americans every day.  Nobody cares.  Only the military guys care.  And for the most part, they&#8217;re muzzled by the politicians.  So I just want to put that out there.</p>
<p>So what are we facing, and what is the threat to us?  We&#8217;re facing a corrupt elite here at home, both political and intellectual.  The theme of universities, as Bruce Bawer said, is absolutely central to the success of the United States.  And success of universities means &#8212; the word they use but don&#8217;t mean, which is &#8220;diversity&#8221; &#8212; intellectual diversity.</p>
<p>The really great thing about David Horowitz, who I&#8217;ve known for very long time &#8212; but I mean, the greatest thing about David Horowitz is that he has gone onto university campuses and fought for intellectual diversity.  That is to say you have to have debates on campus.  Our children have to hear every issue argued out.  They have to hear why people believe things that we don&#8217;t, and why people believe things that we do.  They have to hear the full range of debate.  They&#8217;re not getting it.</p>
<p>College campuses are boring today.  Their monolithic, they&#8217;re heteronomic, and they [hand to] the left.  And so they don&#8217;t hear the range of discussion.  That&#8217;s stultifying.  That&#8217;s bad for what America needs most of all, which is creativity, energy, self confidence and so forth.</p>
<p>I have an answer to &#8212; was it Paul&#8217;s remark &#8212; what is China?  Totalitarian mercantilism, which is a great phrase that I&#8217;m going to steal and plagiarize and use often in the future.  I never heard it before, but I love it.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>China is the world&#8217;s first mature fascist dictatorship.  It&#8217;s what happens when the ideology burns out, and you&#8217;re left with this kind of structure, with the remnants of a kind of traditional racism.  That&#8217;s what China is today.  China now has legitimized private property, certain amount of private business, a lot of what we would call crony capitalism.  But China certainly no longer has any vestige of communist state, nor do they talk about revolution anymore, communist or otherwise.  It&#8217;s now an imperial power trying to expand its outreach.</p>
<p>And I will tell you, without taking any particular pleasure in it, that that system, as all [subsystems], are in a terrible crisis.  Because as Machiavelli said, quite rightly &#8212; almost everything accurately said was quite right &#8212; but one of his central themes is that tyranny is the most unstable of all forms of government.  Tyranny is the least likely to last a long time.  The most likely to last a long time is what we&#8217;ve got &#8212; a mixed system, a mixed Constitution.</p>
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		<title>Noam Chomsky, Darling of Haaretz</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidhornik/noam-chomsky-darling-of-haaretz/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=noam-chomsky-darling-of-haaretz</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidhornik/noam-chomsky-darling-of-haaretz/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 May 2010 04:05:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[P. David Hornik]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The infamous Israel-hater is denied entry into Israel; the Israeli Left is up in arms.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/chomsky3.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-60801" title="chomsky3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/chomsky3.gif" alt="" width="400" height="489" /></a></p>
<p>This week Noam Chomsky, the famed MIT linguist and radical political writer and activist, was denied entry into Israel. The Israeli Left is up in arms.</p>
<p>Boaz Okon, legal commentator for left-leaning <em>Yediot   Aharonot</em>, Israel’s largest daily, <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3890586,00.html">called</a> the barring of Chomsky “a foolish act in a…series of recent follies” that “may mark the end of Israel as a law-abiding and freedom-loving state, or at least place a large question mark over this notion.” Going on to call Chomsky a “globally recognized intellectual,” Okon claimed “it would not be exaggerated to say that the decision to silence Professor Noam Chomsky is an attempt to put an end to freedom in the State of Israel.”</p>
<p>For his efforts, Okon made it to the <em>New York Times</em> where he was <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/world/middleeast/18chomsky.html">quoted</a> by its Israel correspondent Ethan Bronner. Bronner called Chomsky “an outspoken critic both of American and Israeli policy.” Bronner was also able to quote Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, that “The idea that Israel is preventing people from entering whose opinions are critical of the state is ludicrous; it is not happening. This was a mishap. A guy at the border overstepped his authority.”</p>
<p>In Bronner’s telling, “Mr. Regev suggested that if Professor Chomsky tried to enter again, he would succeed.”</p>
<p>If it wasn’t paranoid, one might suspect that even the “right-wing” Netanyahu government has a special department for tripping up people who are loyal to Israel and want to defend it. In 2008—under the left-of-center Olmert government—Israel barred two other virulent enemies, Richard Falk and Chomsky’s disciple Norman Finkelstein, from entering. Regev—in the name of his boss—should either explain that those, too, were mistakes and Israel should gladly welcome all of its worst slanderers, or not speak until he and his boss work out some sort of coherent policy.</p>
<p>But to get back to the Israeli Left’s reactions, Bradley Burston of the far-Left daily <em>Haaretz</em> also quoted Okon on the barring of Chomsky. In doing so, Burston kicked off an <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/special-place-in-hell/special-place-in-hell-rebranding-israel-as-a-state-headed-for-fascism-1.290977">1100-word diatribe</a> against Israel as a “state headed for fascism” that uses the words fascism, fascist, and fascistic a total of twelve times, including calling Chomsky’s exclusion “fascism by rubber stamp.” Another <em>Haaretz </em>commentator, Gideon Levy, was more precise, <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/democracy-according-to-reichman-1.291143">asserting</a> that “When Israel closes its gates to anyone who doesn’t fall in line with our official positions, we are quickly becoming similar to North   Korea.”</p>
<p>But the honors went to <em>Haaretz</em>’s <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/declaring-war-on-the-intellect-israel-and-noam-chomsky-1.290903">editorial</a> on the issue, haughtily titled “Declaring War on the Intellect: Israel and Noam Chomsky.”</p>
<p>“By stopping the illustrious American scholar Prof. Noam Chomsky at the Allenby  Bridge,” <em>Haaretz</em> wrote,</p>
<blockquote><p>and barring his entry into Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the government’s outrageous treatment of those with the audacity to criticize its policies has reached new heights. Israel looks like a bully who has been insulted by a superior intellect and is now trying to fight it, arrest it and expel it.</p></blockquote>
<p>Going on to call Chomsky “a controversial and bold intellectual” who “bluntly and acerbically attacks any government that he thinks deserves it,” <em>Haaretz</em> said it would be</p>
<blockquote><p>hard to imagine any country that would not feel honored to be visited by Chomsky, apart from Israel, which has its own accounts to settle with him…. Chomsky has roundly condemned the occupation and displayed sympathy for the Palestinian struggle against it.… Israel, however, has lost its last remnants of tolerance for anyone who does not join its shrinking chorus of supporters.</p></blockquote>
<p>So there you have it. Chomsky, according to Okon, Bronner, Regev (speaking for Netanyahu), Burston, Levy, and <em>Haaretz</em> is at most a “critic,” but more significantly, for some of them, an “illustrious scholar,” a “superior intellect,” and a “bold intellectual” whose presence should honor anyone including the state of Israel, which could only have barred him in an act of careless folly or fascistic madness.</p>
<p>Who, actually, is Noam Chomsky? This <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1232">useful overview</a> notes, among much else, his admiration and apologetics, sustained over a decade and a half, for the genocidal Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Closer to Israeli concerns, Chomsky—an American Jew who lived briefly in Israel during the 1960s and knows Hebrew—has made the following statements (again, among many others) over the years, each of them documented on <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/noamchomskyprofile.html">this site</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>* “I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the holocaust. Nor would there be anti-Semitic implications, per se, in the claim that the holocaust (whether one believes it took place or not) is being exploited, viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence.”</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>* “I objected to the founding of Israel as a Jewish state. I don’t think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United   States as a Christian state.”</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>* “The Hebrew press is much more open than the English language press, and there’s a very obvious reason: Hebrew is a secret language, you only read it if you’re inside the tribe.”</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>* “Of course [suicide bombers are] terrorists and there’s been Palestinian terrorism all the way through. I have always opposed it….But it’s very small as compared with the US-backed Israeli terrorism.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Robert Wistrich, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, notes in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lethal-Obsession-Anti-Semitism-Antiquity-Global/dp/1400060974/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1274285320&amp;sr=1-1">A Lethal Obsession</a></em>, a widely praised overview of contemporary anti-Semitism published in January, that Chomsky “stooped to the level of offering support to [notorious French] Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson and defending his credentials.” Chomsky, who contributed a preface to a 1980 Holocaust-denial book by Faurisson,</p>
<blockquote><p>told <em>Le Monde</em> on January 19, 1981, that he was personally “agnostic” about the Nazi massacres. He did not want people “to have religious or dogmatic positions about the existence of the Holocaust.” This, too, was grist to the mill of many Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis, who eagerly promote Chomsky’s books and speeches condemning American and Israeli imperialism on their websites. They understand that Chomsky’s backing for Faurisson and such left-wing libertarian Holocaust deniers as Pierre Guillaume has considerably bolstered the “revisionist” cause. (Wistrich, <em>A Lethal Obsession</em>, Random House, 2010, p. 532)</p></blockquote>
<p>Two and a half decades later, in May 2006, Chomsky’s enthusiasm for Jew-hatred was again on display when he <a href="http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&amp;x_issue=11&amp;x_article=1151">paid a fawning visit to Hezbollah</a> in Lebanon and said “Hezbollah’s insistence on keeping its arms is justified.” Chomsky was also quoted (see the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-jh2R-_eQY">video</a>) as telling his hosts that “the victory achieved by the resistance is a victory for all the peoples that fight injustice and oppression,” and had himself filmed standing beside a destroyed Israeli vehicle.</p>
<p>Less than two months later, when Hezbollah used its arms to mount the murderous cross-border attack against Israel that triggered the Second Lebanon War, Chomsky <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2006/7/14/noam_chomsky_u_s_backed_israeli#transcript">told a radio interviewer</a> that he hoped Hezbollah’s actions could yield results.</p>
<p>Okon’s and <em>Haaretz</em>’s reactions, then, to Israel denying entry to Chomsky—an apologist for genocide, exponent and promoter of Holocaust denial, and terror groupie—can <em>at best</em> be ascribed to gross, inexcusable ignorance. Or, if it is not ignorance, one does not like to think what else could drive them to verbally pommel their government and country and extol Chomsky in this episode.</p>
<p>And, to repeat, the Prime Minister’s Office has acquitted itself miserably in this affair as well.</p>
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		<title>An Open Letter to Charles Johnson</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dennis-prager/an-open-letter-to-charles-johnson/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-open-letter-to-charles-johnson</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:00:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Your reasons for breaking with the Right don't add up. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47639" title="Charles" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Charles.gif" alt="Charles" width="450" height="322" /></p>
<p><em>On Sunday, The New York Times Magazine featured an article on Charles Johnson, whose website &#8212; littlegreenfootballs &#8212; had for years been very popular among conservatives and among all those who believed that Islamic terror and Islamic religious totalitarianism were the greatest expressions of contemporary evil. The reason for the article was that Mr. Johnson has made a 180-degree turn and is now profoundly, even stridently, anti-right. This is my letter to him.</em></p>
<p>Dear Charles:</p>
<p>As you know, over the years, I was so impressed with your near-daily documentation of developments in the Islamist world that I twice had you on my national radio show &#8212; both times face to face in my studio. And you, in turn, periodically cited my radio show and would tell your many readers when they could hear you on my show.</p>
<p>So it came as somewhat of a shock to see your 180-degree turn from waging war on Islamist evil to waging war on your erstwhile allies and supporters on the right. You attempted to explain this reversal on Nov. 30, 2009, when you published &#8220;Why I Parted Ways With The Right.&#8221;</p>
<p>You offered 10 reasons, and I would like to respond to them.</p>
<p>First, as disappointed as I am with your metamorphosis, I still have gratitude for all the good you did and I respect your change as a sincere act of conscience. But neither this gratitude nor this respect elevates my regard for your 10 points. They are well beneath the intellectual and moral level of your prior work. They sound like something Keith Olbermann would write if he were given 10 minutes to come up with an attack on conservatives.</p>
<p>1. <em>Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, etc.). </em></p>
<p>Associating the American right with fascism is done only by leftist ideologues and propagandists, not by serious critics. It is akin to calling everyone on the left a Communist. As for the specific examples, forgive me, but in 28 years as a talk show host and columnist, I had never heard of Robert Stacy McCain or of Vlaams Belang. Nor did the BNP or SIOE register on my intellectual radar screen.</p>
<p>I looked them up and found that McCain is a former editor at the Washington Times charged with racist views. So what?</p>
<p>The BNP is the British National Party, a racist group that in the last U.K. general election received 0.7 percent of the popular vote. So what?</p>
<p>SIOE stands for Stop Islamisation of Europe. I perused its website, and while there are ideas I disagree with (e.g., the group does not believe that there are any Muslim moderates), the desire to stop the &#8220;Islamization&#8221; of Europe is hardly fascist; it is more likely animated by anti-fascism.</p>
<p>Vlaams Belang is a Flemish nationalist political party that won 17 out of 150 seats in Belgium &#8216;s Chamber of Representatives. From what I could gather from a cursory glance at the party&#8217;s platform, it is an ultra-nationalist Flemish party, many of whose language protection and secessionist ideals are virtually identical to those of the Party Quebecois, a party passionately supported by the left.</p>
<p>In any event, what do any of these groups have to do with mainstream American right institutions such the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute; or with mainstream conservative publications and websites such as the National Review, the Weekly Standard, Townhall.com or Commentary; or with mainstream American conservatives such as Bill Kristol, Thomas Sowell, Hugh Hewitt, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Bill Bennett, Michael Medved, Dennis Prager, as well as Sean Hannity, Bill O&#8217;Reilly and Rush Limbaugh?</p>
<p>2. <em>Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.). </em></p>
<p>I agree with the late William Buckley that some of Pat Buchanan&#8217;s views could be construed as anti-Jewish; I don&#8217;t know who McCain or Lew Rockwell represent among mainstream conservatives; and to label Ann Coulter a white supremacist (or bigot) is slander.</p>
<p>3. <em>Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.). </em></p>
<p>&#8220;The entire religious right&#8221; wants to throw &#8220;women back into the dark ages?&#8221; As a religious (Jewish) conservative, perhaps I am a member of that group, and I find the charge absurd. The one example you give &#8212; anti-abortion &#8212; is invalid. To those who regard the unborn as worthy of life (except in the almost never occurring case of it being a threat to its mother&#8217;s life), opposition to abortion is no more anti-woman than opposition to rape is anti-man. The only people who wish to throw women into the dark ages are the people you, Charles, used to fight. That is why your change of heart has actually hurt the battle for women&#8217;s dignity and equality.</p>
<p>4. <em>Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.). </em></p>
<p>So, Charles, all those scientists who question or deny that human activity is causing a global warming that will render much of life on earth extinct are &#8220;anti-science?&#8221;</p>
<p>Has the possibility occurred to you that those who are skeptical of what they consider hysteria cherish science at least as much as you do? In fact, they suspect that &#8212; for political, social, financial, psychological and/or herd-following reasons &#8212; it is the &#8220;global warming&#8221; hysterics who are more likely to be anti-science.</p>
<p>Activist scientists, liberal media and leftist interest groups brought us the false alarm of an imminent heterosexual AIDS pandemic in America , the false alarm about silicon breast implants leading to disease and the nonsense about how dangerous nuclear power is. They were anti-science, not us skeptics who have been right every time I can think of.</p>
<p>5. <em>Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.). </em></p>
<p>This charge is particularly ugly. It appears that you have decided to fight all the &#8220;hate&#8221; you allege to be on the right with your own hate. Why exactly is it &#8220;homophobic bigotry&#8221; to want to maintain the millennia-old definition of marriage as the union of men and women? The hubris of those who not only want to change the definition of the most important institution in society but believe everyone who ever advocated male-female marriage was a bigot &#8212; meaning everyone who ever lived before you, Charles &#8212; is as breathtaking as it is speech-suppressing.</p>
<p>6. <em>Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.). </em></p>
<p>What you call &#8220;anti-government lunacy&#8221; most Americans regard as preserving the greatest protector of individual liberty &#8212; limited government.</p>
<p>7. <em>Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.). </em></p>
<p>I am no fan of Alex Jones, who, coincidentally, has attacked me on his website as a &#8220;Jewish propagandist.&#8221; But please. The amount of hate speech in one Keith Olbermann commentary dwarfs any 12 months of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. In any event, the real irony here is that before your inexplicable change, it was you who devoted years to documenting the greatest amount of hate speech on earth today &#8212; that coming from within the Islamic world. If you still hated hate speech, you would still be doing that important work.</p>
<p>As for believing in conspiracy theories, your new team wins hands down &#8212; from multiple assassins of JFK to the American government being behind 9-11 (it was even believed by a high-ranking member of the Obama administration) to the war in Iraq waged on behalf of Halliburton.</p>
<p>8. <em>A right-wing blogosphere that is almost universally dominated by raging hate speech (see: Hot Air, Free Republic , Ace of Spades, etc.). </em></p>
<p>From what I have seen, your examples do not justify your charge. Moreover, for every right-wing &#8220;raging hate&#8221; speech website, there are probably three on the left. The major conservative sites are overwhelmingly rational and devoid of &#8220;raging hate.&#8221; Given my longtime respect for you, Charles, it pains me that it is your list of 10 reasons for abandoning the right that is a prime example of &#8220;raging hate.&#8221;</p>
<p>9. <em>Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.). </em></p>
<p>I saw Pamela Geller&#8217;s site (The New York Times Magazine article about you cited it &#8212; Atlas Shrugs &#8212; and mentioned nothing remotely approaching your charges against her or her site) and I&#8217;ve interviewed Robert Spencer. Your charges against them only cheapen the words &#8220;fascism,&#8221; violence&#8221; and &#8220;genocide.&#8221;</p>
<p>10. <em>Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source). </em></p>
<p>The charge is a lie. Period. Those who cannot argue with the right always accuse it of racism. It used to work, Charles. But it is increasingly obvious to all but fellow leftists that the charge is specious. Opposition to President Obama has nothing to do with his race. Indeed, he continues to be more popular than his policies.</p>
<p>When you were on the politically and morally right side, Charles, you provided massive evidence for your positions. Now you throw verbal bombs. What happened? If you would like to tell me on my radio show, you are invited to do so. I miss you.</p>
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		<title>The Persistence of Islamic Anti-Semitism &#8211; by Robert Spencer</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/robert-spencer/the-persistence-of-islamic-anti-semitism-by-robert-spencer/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-persistence-of-islamic-anti-semitism-by-robert-spencer</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:07:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Setting the historical record straight.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-41004" title="islamhitler" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/islamhitler.jpg" alt="islamhitler" width="450" height="328" /></p>
<p>A new study released Sunday shows that anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe. The “German Situation” study, which is conducted by the University of Bielefeld Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, found that across Europe in the last year, “Islamophobia” has declined, while anti-Semitic incidents have increased. True to form for such studies, however, it ignored the persistence and strength of Islamic anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Anti-Semitism in the Islamic world has often been attributed to the baneful influence of Christianity. Many analysts assert that the Islamic designation of Jews (as well as Christians) as “People of the Book” indicates a higher level of respect for them than was manifested by Christians who derided Jews as bestial “Christ-killers.” Journalist Lawrence Wright asserts in this vein in <em>The </em><em>Looming</em><em> </em><em>Tower</em><em>: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11</em>:</p>
<blockquote><p>Until the end of World War II … Jews lived safely—although submissively—under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language shortwave radio, coupled with slanders by Christian missionaries in the region, infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice [anti-Semitism]. After the war, Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is a common view, but in reality there is a strong native strain of anti-Semitism in Islam, which is rooted in the Qur’an. The Muslim holy book contains a great deal of material that forms the foundation for a hatred of Jews that exists independently of the Christian variety. It is also, in many ways, more virulent and harder to eradicate. The Qur’an portrays the Jews as the craftiest, most persistent, and most implacable enemies of the Muslims—and there is no Muslim equivalent of the Second Vatican Council to mitigate against destructive interpretations. The Qur’anic material on the Jews remains the prism through which far too many Muslims see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and Jews in general—to this day.</p>
<p>A vivid illustration of this came in 2004 from Islam Online, a website founded by, among others, the internationally influential Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi in 1997. Although al-Qaradawi has won praise from Islamic scholar John Esposito for engaging in a “reformist interpretation of Islam and its relationship to democracy, pluralism, and human rights,” that “reformist” impulse doesn’t seem to carry over to his view of Jews (he has justified suicide bombings against Israeli civilians), or the view of them he has allowed to be published on Islam Online. In 2004 the site posted an article titled “Jews as Depicted in the Qur’an,” in which Sheikh ‘Atiyyah Saqr, the former head of the Fatwa Committee at the most respected institution in Sunni Islam, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, depicts Jews in a chillingly negative light, illustrated with abundant quotations from the Qur’an. Among other charges he levels at the Jews, Saqr says that they “used to fabricate things and falsely ascribe them to Allah”; they “love to listen to lies”; they disobey Allah and ignore his commands; they wish “evil for people” and try to “mislead them”; and they “feel pain to see others in happiness and are gleeful when others are afflicted with a calamity.” He adds that “it is easy for them to slay people and kill innocents,” for “they are merciless and heartless.” And each charge he follows with Qur’anic citations.</p>
<p>Though he offers many examples of the alleged evil traits of the Jews supported by the Qur’an, Saqr doesn’t mention the notorious Qur’anic passages that depict an angry Allah transforming Jews into apes and pigs: 2:63–66; 5:59–60; and 7:166. The first of those passages depicts Allah telling the Jews who “profaned the Sabbath”: “Be as apes despicable!” It goes on to say that these accursed ones serve “as a warning example for their time and for all times to come.” The second has Allah directing Muhammad to remind the “People of the Book” about “those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil.” The third essentially repeats this, saying of the Sabbath-breaking Jews that when “in their insolence they transgressed (all) prohibitions,” Allah said to them, “Be ye apes, despised and rejected.”</p>
<p>In traditional Islamic theology these passages have not been considered to apply to all Jews. The classic Qur’anic commentator Isma’il bin ‘Amr bin Kathir al Dimashqi (Ibn Kathir), whose commentary is widely distributed and respected among Muslims today, quotes earlier authorities saying that “those who violated the sanctity of the Sabbath were turned into monkeys, then they perished without offspring,” and that they “only lived on the earth for three days, for no transformed person ever lives more than three days.” While parts of the Qur’an are hostile to the Jews, Muhammad’s curse, in this case, was limited to these Sabbath-breakers, not to all Jews.</p>
<p>However, that hasn’t stopped contemporary jihadists from frequently referring to Jews as the “descendants of apes and swine.” The implication is that today’s Jews are bestial in character and are the enemies of Allah, just as the Sabbath-breakers were. The grand sheikh of Al-Azhar, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the most respected cleric in the world among Sunni Muslims today, has called Jews “the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs.” Saudi sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Sudayyis, imam of the principal mosque in the holiest city in Islam, Mecca, said in a sermon that Jews are “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.”</p>
<p>Another Saudi sheikh, Ba’d bin Abdallah al-Ajameh al-Ghamidi, made the connection explicit: “The current behavior of the brothers of apes and pigs, their treachery, violation of agreements, and defiling of holy places … is connected with the deeds of their forefathers during the early period of Islam—which proves the great similarity between all the Jews living today and the Jews who lived at the dawn of Islam.” A 1996 Hamas publication says that today’s Jews are bestial in spirit, and this is a manifestation of the punishment of their forefathers. In January 2007, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas stated, “The sons of Israel are mentioned as those who are corrupting humanity on earth,” referring to Qur’an 5:64.</p>
<p>All this shows that leading Muslim authorities approach the Qur’an not as a document rooted in history, but as a blueprint for understanding the world today. Likewise, Sheikh ‘Atiyyah Saqr describes the Qur’anic teachings that because Jews “revolted against the Divine ordinances … they found no warm reception in all countries where they tried to reside. Rather, they would either be driven out or live in isolation.” Moreover, “Almighty Allah told us that He’d send to them people who’d pour on them rain of severe punishment that would last till the Day of Resurrection.” Then comes a threat: “All this gives us glad tidings of the coming victory of Muslims over them once Muslims stick to strong faith and belief in Allah and adopt the modern means of technology.” The “rain of severe punishment” resulting from adoption of the “modern means of technology” may come to fruition in Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nuclear ambitions and implacable hostility to Israel. In January 2007 he warned that the “demise” of the “Zionist regime” is “imminent.” Does he plan to bring about that demise with a nuclear “rain of severe punishment”?</p>
<p>In the 1970s Sheikh Tantawi wrote a 700-page treatise, Jews in the Qur’an and the Traditions, in which he concluded:</p>
<blockquote><p>[The] Qur’an describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness … only a minority of the Jews keep their word. … [A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not.</p></blockquote>
<p>Nor is this just a modern view. The classic Qur’anic commentators not do not mitigate the Qur’an’s words against Jews, but only add fuel to the fire. Ibn Kathir explained Qur’an 2:61 (“They were covered with humiliation and misery; they drew on themselves the wrath of Allah”) this way: “This Ayah [verse] indicates that the Children of Israel were plagued with humiliation, and that this will continue, meaning that it will never cease. They will continue to suffer humiliation at the hands of all who interact with them, along with the disgrace that they feel inwardly.” Another Middle Ages commentator of lingering influence, ‘Abdallah ibn ‘Umar al-Baidawi, explains the same verse this way: “The Jews are mostly humiliated and wretched either of their own accord, or out of coercion of the fear of having their jizya [punitive tax] doubled.”</p>
<p>Ibn Kathir notes Islamic traditions that predict that at the end of the world, “the Jews will support the Dajjal (False Messiah), and the Muslims, along with ‘Isa [Jesus], son of Mary, will kill the Jews.” The idea in Islam that the end times will be marked by Muslims killing Jews comes from the prophet Muhammad himself, who said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’” This is, not unexpectedly, a favorite motif among contemporary jihadists. On March 30, 2007, a spokesman for Hamas, Dr. Ismail Radwan, said on Palestinian Authority television:</p>
<blockquote><p>The Hour [Resurrection] will not take place until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them, and the rock and the tree will say: “Oh, Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, kill him!”</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>We must remind our Arab and Muslim nation, its leaders and people, its scholars and students, remind them that Palestine and the Al Aqsa mosque will not be liberated through summits nor by international resolutions, but it will be liberated through the rifle. It will not be liberated through negotiations, but through the rifle, since this occupation knows no language but the language of force.… O Allah, strengthen Islam and Muslims, and bring victory to your Jihad-fighting worshipers, in Palestine and everywhere.… Allah take the oppressor Jews and Americans and their supporters!</p></blockquote>
<p>The history of Jews who lived under Muslim rule is a more or less unbroken record of theologically sanctioned humiliation and wretchedness. Although, like the Christians, Jews were allowed to practice their religion within restrictions, they were seldom allowed to forget their humiliation. Although the strictness with which the laws of dhimmitude (the subservient status of Jews and Christians) were enforced varied, they were never abolished, and during times of relaxation the subject populations always lived in fear that they would be enforced with new stringency. Muslim rulers did not forget that the Qur’an mandates that both Jews and Christians must “feel themselves subdued.” One notable instance is recounted by the Arab historian Phillip Hitti: “The caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 and 854 decreed that Christians and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to their houses, level their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey color, i.e. yellow, put two honey-colored patches on the clothes of their slaves, … and ride only on mules and asses with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle.” A millennium later, in 1888, little had changed. A Tunisian Jew noted:</p>
<blockquote><p>The Jew is prohibited in this country to wear the same clothes as a Muslim and may not wear a red tarbush. He can be seen to bow down with his whole body to a Muslim child and permit him the traditional privilege of striking him in the face, a gesture that can prove to be of the gravest consequence. Indeed, the present writer has received such blows. In such matters the offenders act with complete impunity, for this has been the custom from time immemorial.</p></blockquote>
<p>In 1291 Isaac ben Samuel, a noted Kabbalist and Palestinian Jew, sought refuge in a Christian-controlled area of Spain after the collapse of the last Crusader kingdom in the Levant. He explained, “For, in the eyes of the Muslims, the children of Israel are as open to abuse as an unprotected field. Even in their law and statutes they rule that the testimony of a Muslim is always to be believed against that of a Jew. For this reason our rabbis of blessed memory have said, ‘Rather beneath the yoke of Edom [Christendom] than that of Ishmael [Islam]. They [the rabbis] plead for mercy before the Holy One, Blessed be He, saying, ‘Master of the World, either let us live beneath Thy shadow or else beneath that of the children of Edom’ (Talmud, Gittin 17a).”</p>
<p>Ben Samuel’s choice of Christian Spain is paradoxical, as Muslim Spain was supposed to have been a famous exception to the oppression of Jews that prevailed elsewhere among both Muslims and Christians. Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong enunciates the common wisdom when she says that “until 1492, Jews and Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain—a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe.” Even the U.S. State Department has proclaimed that “during the Islamic period in Spain, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace and mutual respect, creating a diverse society in which vibrant exchanges of ideas took place.”</p>
<p>Yet the philosopher Maimonides, a Jew who lived for a time in Muslim Spain and then fled that supposedly tolerant and pluralistic land, remarked, “You know, my brethren, that on account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and to debase us.…No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us as they have.…We have borne their imposed degradation, their lies, and absurdities, which are beyond human power to bear.”</p>
<p>Notably, Maimonides directed that Jews could teach rabbinic law to Christians, but not to Muslims. For Muslims, he said, will interpret what they are taught “according to their erroneous principles and they will oppress us. [F]or this reason … they hate all [non-Muslims] who live among them.” But the Christians, he said, “admit that the text of the Torah, such as we have it, is intact”—as opposed to the Islamic view that the Jews and Christians have corrupted their scriptures. Christians, continued Maimonides, “do not find in their religious law any contradiction with ours.”</p>
<p>Even María Rosa Menocal, in her romantic and fantastic hagiography of Muslim Spain, <em>The Ornament of the World</em>, acknowledges the second-class status to which Jews and Christians were relegated there. “In return for this freedom of religious conscience the Peoples of the Book (pagans had no such privilege) were required to pay a special tax—no Muslims paid taxes—and to observe a number of restrictive regulations: Christians and Jews were prohibited from attempting to proselytize Muslims, from building new places of worship, from displaying crosses or ringing bells. In sum, they were forbidden most public displays of their religious rituals.”</p>
<p>According to historian Richard Fletcher, “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.” On December 30, 1066, about four thousand Jews in Granada were murdered by rioting Muslim mobs—more than would be killed in the Crusaders’ infamous Rhineland pogroms of the mid-twelfth century. What enraged the Granadan Muslims was the political power of the Jewish vizier Samuel ibn Naghrila and his son Joseph: the mob resented the fact that these men had authority over Muslims, which they saw as a “breach of sharia.” The mob was incited to kill the Jews by a poem composed by Muslim jurist Abu Ishaq: “I myself arrived in Granada and saw that these Jews were meddling in its affairs. … So hasten to slaughter them as a good work whereby you will earn God’s favor, and offer them up in sacrifice, a well-fattened ram.” The mob heeded his call. A Muslim chronicler (and later sultan of Granada), ‘Abd Allah, said that “both the common people and the nobles were disgusted by the cunning of the Jews, the notorious changes they had brought in the order of things, and the positions they occupied in violation of their pact [of second-class status].” He recounted that the mob “put every Jew in the city to the sword and took vast quantities of their property.”</p>
<p>In <em>The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism</em>, Andrew Bostom amasses an enormous amount of documentary evidence establishing the degradations the Jews suffered at the hands of Muslims throughout Islamic history. Bostom notes that jihadist designation of Jews as “apes and pigs,” in accord with the Qur’an, has ample historical precedent. Muhammad himself used it before ordering that every adult male of the Banu Qurayza, a Jewish tribe, be killed, calling the Jews “you brothers of monkeys.” The poem that inspired the Muslims to massacre the Jews in Granada in 1066 included the line, “Many a pious Muslim is in awe of the vilest infidel ape,” (referring to the Jewish vizier). Zaynu’d-Din ‘Ali b. Said, praised the anti-Jewish riots and massacres in Baghdad in 1291 (which spread widely in the region), saying, “These apish Jews are done away and shent [ruined].” Bostom mentions another slaughter:</p>
<blockquote><p>Referring to the Jews as “brothers of apes,” who repeatedly blasphemed the prophet Muhammad, and whose overall conduct reflected their hatred of Muslims, the Moroccan cleric al-Maghili (d. 1505) fomented, and then personally led, a Muslim pogrom (in ~1490) against the Jews of the southern Moroccan oasis of Touat, plundering and killing Jews en masse, and destroying their synagogue in neighboring Tamantit. Al-Maghili’s virulent Islamic antisemitism was perhaps captured best in a line from a verse diatribe he composed: “Love of the Prophet requires hatred of the Jews.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Nevertheless, historian Bernard Lewis asserts that overall, Jews had it better in the Islamic world than they did in Catholic Europe. “There is nothing in Islamic history,” he says, “to compare with the Spanish expulsion of Jews and Muslims, the Inquisition, the Auto da fe’s, the wars of religion, not to speak of more recent crimes of commission and acquiescence. There were occasional persecutions, but they were rare, and usually of brief duration, related to local and specific circumstances.” Dinesh D’Souza has made much of this in his recent attempts to portray Islam and Christianity as equally likely to give rise to violent impulses.</p>
<p>However, such judgments betray less about the historical data than they do about Westerners judging Christians more severely than Muslims. This is a venerable tradition, going back, as the Islamic scholar Ibn Warraq points out, to Voltaire and Edward Gibbon:</p>
<blockquote><p>Gibbon, like Voltaire, painted Islam in as favorable a light as possible to better contrast it with Christianity. The English historian emphasized Muhammad’s humanity as a means of indirectly criticizing the Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ. Gibbon’s anticlericalism led him to underline Islam’s supposed freedom from that accursed class, the priesthood. Indeed, the familiar pattern is reemerging—Islam is being used as a weapon against Christianity. Gibbon’s deistic view of Islam as a rational, priest-free religion, with Muhammad as a wise and tolerant lawgiver, enormously influenced the way all Europeans perceived their sister religion for years to come. Indeed, it established myths that are still accepted totally uncritically by scholars and laymen alike. Both Voltaire and Gibbon subscribed to the myth of Muslim tolerance, which to them meant Turkish tolerance.</p></blockquote>
<p>Yet a question that is much more important than the respective awarding of historical points or demerits is whether Christian or Islamic anti-Semitism is likely to recur. Europe has in recent years grown hostile to Jews to an extent not seen since Nazism’s heyday, but the anti-Semites today are principally not native European Christians, but Muslim immigrants (and Muslims, by mid-century, could be the majority population of several European states).</p>
<p>In Britain, there were three times more anti-Semitic incidents in 2007 than there were in 1997. A December 2006 study, according to the Telegraph, determined that “in London and Manchester, where Muslims outnumber Jews by four to one, anti-Semitic offenses exceeded anti-Muslim offenses.” One rabbi was attacked in July 2006 by seven Pakistani Muslim teenagers, who shouted, “We are Pakistani, you are Jewish. We are going to kill you.” In Belgium in November 2006, according to Flanders News, “a group of young Turkish immigrants in the Limburg municipality of Beringen attacked a group of Jewish school children by throwing stones at them, shouting anti-Semitic slogans.” In summer 2006, after a Jewish man was assaulted in Oslo, Norwegian Jews were warned not to wear kippahs on the street, for fear they would be physically attacked.</p>
<p>And these are just a few recent examples of a long and ever lengthening string of such incidents. The European Union commissioned a report about the new rise of anti-Semitism in Europe in 2003, but buried it when its findings showed that anti-Semitic acts were largely the province of young Muslims. After an outcry, the report was released in 2004, but journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard noted that the results “had been consistently massaged by the EU watchdog to play down the role of North African youth.”</p>
<p>As time goes by, however, these new realities will be harder and harder to ignore.</p>
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