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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; tom hayden</title>
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		<title>New Left Totalitarians Celebrate Castro&#8217;s Victory</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/new-left-totalitarians-celebrate-castros-victory/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=new-left-totalitarians-celebrate-castros-victory</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2014 05:20:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247965</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Tom Hayden hails Obama for completing the objectives of the Cuban "Revolution." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/518024350_15_ov1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247968" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/518024350_15_ov1-406x350.jpg" alt="518024350_15_ov1" width="324" height="279" /></a>“I first went to Cuba in January 1968, during the height of revolutionary aspirations,” writes New Left celebrity Tom Hayden in “50 Years Later It’s Time for Closure,” a <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/california-forum/article4699068.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Dec. 21 oped piece in the <i>Sacramento Bee</i></span></a>. On recent visits Hayden hung out with Cuba’s former minister of foreign affairs Ricardo Alarcon, and that inspired Hayden to write the forthcoming <i>Listen Yankee! Why Cuba Matters</i>. Meanwhile, Tom Hayden is excited about recent moves by President Obama.</p>
<p>“The Cuban Revolution has achieved its aim,” Hayden explains, “recognition of the sovereign right of its people to revolt against the Yankee Goliath and survive as a state in a sea of global solidarity.” Further, “After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a decade of American triumphalism based on the mistaken belief that the Cuban state would collapse like East Germany. We underestimated Cuban nationalism.”</p>
<p>However, “a sticking point on the U.S. side was the persistent funding of ‘democracy promotion,’ or our secret efforts to promote a more open society.” Hayden further explains that Alan Gross “was a covert agent, not a home appliance distributor.”</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">Cuban spies </span>Gerardo Hernandez, Rene Gonzalez, Ramon Labañino, Antonio Guerrero and Fernando Gonzalez, were all tried and imprisoned in the United States for gathering intelligence on U.S. air bases. They also <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/lloyd-billingsley/pastors-for-peaces-shameful-visit-to-cuba/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue and tipped off the Castro regime</span></a>, which scrambled MIG fighters and downed one of the Brothers’ unarmed planes, killing four people. Tom Hayden’s take is rather different: “<span style="color: #000000;">The Cuban Five were protecting Cuba’s security from us, not acting as terrorists.”</span></p>
<p>Hayden contends that key episodes in Cuban history are “best recalled” through Francis Ford Coppola’s <i>The Godfather: Part II.</i> Fortunately, American viewers can gain knowledge of Cuba in films by actual Cubans that cover events Tom Hayden and Ricardo Alarcon prefer to avoid.</p>
<p>When Cuban general Arnaldo Ochoa returned from his military campaign in Africa, “8A,” a play on his name, began to appear on walls all over the island. Long oppressed Cubans believed the popular general was the only one with a chance to topple Fidel Castro’s Communist dictatorship. Fidel knew it too. He held a show trial for Ochoa and put it on satellite television. Cuban filmmaker Orlando Jimenez Leal taped it and made the documentary “8A.”</p>
<p>Viewers can see the regime’s lawyers demanding that their clients get the death penalty. Fidel Castro agreed and on July 12, 1989 duly carried out the sentence by firing squad, just like back in the revolutionary days. No appeal process, and no more threat from Arnaldo Ochoa.</p>
<p>In “Improper Conduct” Jimenez Leal and cinematographer Nestor Almendros portrayed the Castro regime’s repressions against political dissidents, journalists, poets and homosexuals. The <i>New York Times</i> called the film “convincing” and former Castro supporter Susan Sontag said “The discovery that homosexuals were being persecuted in Cuba shows how much the Left needs to evolve.”</p>
<p>It will be interesting to see what Tom Hayden says about this in his new book <i>Listen Yankee! Why Cuba Matters</i>. In the meantime, readers might consult books written by actual Cubans.</p>
<p>In <i>Against All Hope</i>, which has been compared to Arthur Koestler’s <i>Darkness at Noon</i>, Cuban dissident Armando Valladares charts 20 years in Castro’s prisons, and the violence he and other political prisoners suffered. Arrested in 1960, Valladares was not freed until 1982. This came through the efforts of French president Francois Mitterand and human rights organizations. A ballpark figure for the number of Cuban dissidents the American New Left has supported is zero.</p>
<p>In <i>Family Portrait with Fidel</i>, Carlos Franqui charts the Cuban Revolution from 1959 to 1964. Franqui broke ranks over Fidel’s shift to Soviet Communism, after which “nothing worked.” The privations of the regime get extensive treatment in Heberto Padilla’s novel, <i>Heroes are Grazing in My Garden</i>.</p>
<p>In <i>The Longest Romance,</i> Humberto Fontova calculates that between 65,000 and 85,000 people have died trying to escape Cuba, 30 times the number of Berlin Wall casualties. Cuba’s prison population is 90 percent black and includes Eusebio Penlaver, “the world’s longest suffering black political prisoner.” That wasn’t a sticking point for Barack Obama.</p>
<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/lessons-on-the-new-left-from-the-hanoi-hilton/">Tom Hayden recently showed up in <i>Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton</i>.</a></span> Author Lee Ellis was shot down over North Vietnam, imprisoned and tortured. Americans were kept in cages with their legs tied together and arms laced behind the back until the elbows touched and shoulders pulled out of joint. Some Americans were kept awake for two weeks and beaten, but the treatment wasn’t just physical.</p>
<p>As Ellis explains, the prison guards piped in propaganda broadcasts by Tom Hayden, a “regular speaker” who supported the regime and said the reports of torture were nothing but lies.  Given that record, Cuban prisons may soon ring with readings from <i>Listen Yankee! Why Cuba Matters</i>, by Tom Hayden.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><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"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>Lessons on the New Left from the Hanoi Hilton</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/lessons-on-the-new-left-from-the-hanoi-hilton/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=lessons-on-the-new-left-from-the-hanoi-hilton</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Feb 2014 05:45:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A POW's memories of communist torture camp collaborators Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/fondapic1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219907" alt="fondapic1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/fondapic1-450x321.jpg" width="315" height="225" /></a>C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb recently interviewed Lee Ellis, author of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Leading-Honor-Leadership-Lessons-Hilton/dp/098387932X">Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton</a>.</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> The book is a valuable primer on history that many Americans have forgotten or know only in part. </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Leading with Honor</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is also an introduction to characters all Americans should get to know better, such as Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. Ellis came to know the pair under different circumstances.</span></p>
<p>In November of 1967 Ellis was shot down on a mission to destroy the guns that protected the Quang Khe ferry that supplied the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In the Hoa Lao prison, which POWs dubbed the Hanoi Hilton, Ellis learned firsthand about North Vietnam and its systematic torture of American POWs. As the author notes, the North Vietnamese tortured more than 95 percent of American POWs including eight tortured to death. Ellis describes the “Pretzel,” one of the regime’s favorite tortures:</p>
<blockquote><p>After the prisoner’s legs were tied together, his arms were laced tightly behind his back until the elbows touched and the shoulders were virtually pulled out of joint. Then the torturer would push the bound arms up and over the head, while applying pressure with a knee to the victim’s back. During the torture, the circulation is cut off and the limbs to go sleep but the joint pain continues to increase as the ligaments and muscles tear. When the ropes are finally removed, circulation surges back into the &#8220;dead&#8221; limbs, causing excruciating pain.</p></blockquote>
<p>POW Mike McGrath provides a sketch of the practice. The North Vietnamese also used handcuffs that could be ratcheted down tighter until they cut off circulation, even cut into the muscle and on some men, “deep enough to expose bone.” But the torture wasn’t all physical.</p>
<p>The captors piped in propaganda and, Ellis explains, “the afternoon broadcasts were especially disheartening because they featured Americans spouting words that could have been written for them in Moscow and Hanoi.” American <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1334">Tom Hayden</a> “was a regular speaker,” later joined by his wife “film star Jane Fonda.” For this pair, the American POWs were war criminals and their reports of torture were lies.</p>
<p>Ellis charitably calls Fonda an “anti-war activist,” but she and Hayden were not against war in general. They only opposed American participation in a war against the North Vietnamese regime they served as propagandists. Hayden was their voice in the cells of the Hanoi Hilton and Fonda partied it up with a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft squad. But unlike “Axis Sally,” Mildred Gillars, who served jail time for broadcasting Nazi propaganda, “Hanoi Jane” suffered not at all. Her money and prestige helped Hayden gain public office in California.</p>
<p>The war in Vietnam continued after the United States pulled out in 1973 and in 1975 South Vietnam fell to the Communists.  Hayden and Fonda celebrated the victory and remained uncritical of a Stalinist regime more repressive than its Soviet sponsors. Fonda even sought to slam the door on the “boat people” who fled the regime. Hayden called their defenders, such as Joan Baez, tools of the CIA.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, one of Tom Hayden’s comrades, John Froines, was recently the subject of a <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/2013/11/24/5938492/dan-morain-from-an-obscure-panel.html">glowing profile in the <i>Sacramento Bee</i></a> describing him as a “social justice and civil rights advocate” but a stickler for facts and completely impartial.</p>
<p>Froines was a minor Zelig-like figure in the New Left but achieved a measure of fame for disrupting the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He was acquitted on rioting charges and, armed with a PhD in chemistry from Yale, went on to work for the federal government. He later landed in California, where his Scientific Review Panel on Toxic Air Contaminants used suspect data to impose an onerous regulatory regime that punishes California workers</p>
<p>Froines’ panel championed a study by Hien Tran of the California Air Resources Board, who claimed to have a PhD from UC Davis. Actually, Tran bought his degree from a diploma mill in a New York UPS office. Froines also fought epidemiologist James Enstrom of the UCLA School of Public Health, who exposed Tran’s fakery and pointed out problems in his study.</p>
<p>Even so, Froines was duly reappointed to the panel by Assembly Speaker John Perez who claimed to have earned a degree from UC Berkeley, a claim backed by state officials and federal Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis. But that too was wrong. Perez, a “Chicano Studies” major, <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Assembly-Speaker-John-Perez-a-Cal-dropout-not-2371239.php">did not earn a degree at UC Berkeley</a>. In politically correct California, a virtual one-party state, the falsehood hurt him not at all.</p>
<p>The California Environmental Protection Agency honored John Froines in a private ceremony and the Italian city of Capri gave him the prestigious Ramazzini Award as a “public health hero.” New Left hero Tom Hayden went on to teach at UCLA and Occidental College. And Jane Fonda of course remains a Big Star.</p>
<p>To find out how Tom and Jane came across from the cells of the Hanoi Hilton, and to learn what kind of regime they defended, readers might consult <i>Leading with Honor</i> by Lee Ellis. Yes, there’s a lesson or two in there somewhere.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><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"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Port Huron at 50: Still Communist After All These Years</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jlaksin/port-huron-at-50-still-communist-after-all-these-years/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=port-huron-at-50-still-communist-after-all-these-years</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Apr 2012 04:45:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[An NYU conference celebrates the founding document of the sixties-era radical left.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/hayden.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-129040" title="hayden" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/hayden-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a>Before there was <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7694">Occupy Wall Street</a> and Zuccotti Park there was Students for a Democratic Society and Port Huron. When it was written in 1962, the <a href="http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html">Port Huron Statement</a> announced the birth of the radical student group <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=7496">Students for a Democratic Society</a> (SDS), and with it the launch of what would become the so-called New Left. The manifesto’s legacy has since been sullied by the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/DESTRUCTIVE-GENERATION-Second-Thoughts-About/dp/0684826410">destructive history of SDS</a>, which within a few years splintered into a bevy of revolutionary Marxist and militant organizations – most notoriously the terrorist <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=6808">Weather Underground</a> – that came to embrace the very form of communist totalitarianism the Port Huron Statement professed to reject.</p>
<p>That morally stained history has not prevented SDS veterans, led by the document’s principal author, Tom Hayden, from periodically celebrating the Port Huron Statement as something it never was: a reformist treatise that succeeded in spirit even as it failed to transform America in line with SDS’s radical vision. Hayden has been the leading propagandist of the Port Huron Statement’s supposedly lasting cultural importance, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/port-huron-statement-40">penning</a> and <a href="http://vimeo.com/16326064">delivering</a> near-annual tributes to the document while divulging little about its troubling history. The latest of these commemorative efforts occurred last week at New York University in New York City, which hosted <a href="http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/tam/events/huron_schedule.pdf">a two-day conference on the Port Huron Statement</a> to celebrate its 50-year anniversary and to reflect on its historical impact.</p>
<p>Headlined by Hayden, who delivered the keynote address, the conference was a class reunion of sorts of 60-era radicals. The audience was full of aging activists, their nostalgia for the political currents of the sixties betrayed by their graying ponytails, Che Guevara T-shirts, and well-thumbed copies of <em>The Nation</em>. Several said they had been present when the Port Huron Statement was issued in 1962.</p>
<p>Their goal seemed to be to convince themselves that the Port Huron Statement still mattered. Hayden touched on the point directly in his keynote remarks, when he suggested that the document remained historically relevant. “To understand history, you can’t leave it to the historians,” he said. Instead, Hayden left it to himself, and the resulting account was woefully incomplete. Rather than revisit the past, Hayden preferred to rewrite it.</p>
<p>Hayden stressed that the major contribution of the Port Huron Statement was introducing the world to the notion of “participatory democracy.” Hayden described the term in bland terms to mean a call for greater social and economic participation. But as an honest reading of the Port Huron Statement confirms, “participatory democracy” was never a call for democracy at all, but rather a coded prescription for a radical insurrection against established democratic institutions. Thus, it’s not surprising that all of the movements that have embraced “participatory democracy” – from Mexico’s anarcho-communist Zapatista guerillas, to Nicaragua’s communist Sandinistas, to most recently the street thugs and hooligans of Occupy Wall Street – have been unabashedly radical.</p>
<p>Hayden could not bring himself to be more honest about another aspect of the Port Huron Statement, namely it’s opposition to “anti-communism.” As Hayden told it, SDS came under criticism in the 60s for being insufficiently supportive of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. “We were on trial because our views were not anti-communist enough,” Hayden explained ruefully, to sympathetic agreement from the audience.</p>
<p>But that too was a historical whitewash. Not only did the Port Huron Statement reject liberal anti-communism but it embraced its converse, “anti-anti-communism.” The Soviet Union might have been totalitarian and repressive, the authors’ conceded, but it was wrong to “blame only communism” for the Cold War given that the United States, with it’s “monstrous” military structure, its “corporate economy,” and its “imperialist” foreign policy, was not clearly better – and in any case had “done a great deal to foment” Soviet suppression and aggression.</p>
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		<title>The Left Celebrates the End of the War on Terror</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/rich-trzupek/the-left-celebrates-the-end-of-the-war-on-terror-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-left-celebrates-the-end-of-the-war-on-terror-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 06 May 2011 04:10:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rich Trzupek]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Progressives bestow intriguing perspectives on our post-Osama world. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/medea_benjamin.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-92518" title="medea_benjamin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/medea_benjamin.gif" alt="" width="375" height="255" /></a></p>
<p>The Left would dearly like to see two things happen now that Osama bin Laden has scored his virgins in Islamic paradise. First, leftists hope that the event will convince America that Barack Obama is a strong decisive leader and thus see him re-elected in 2012. Second, they want Obama to use this moment to declare victory in the War on Terror and to pull all troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq, thus effectively ending a war that they believe was &#8220;manufactured&#8221; in the first place. These progressive hopes metastasized throughout left-wing precincts within a few blinks of the news of bin Laden&#8217;s death.</p>
<p>“Let us not sink into a false sense of triumphalism in the wake of Bin Laden&#8217;s passing,” the Hamas-loving Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/medea-benjamin/osama-bin-laden-is-dead-l_b_856408.html">wrote at the Huffington Post</a>. “His death will only have meaning if it marks the beginning of the end of this ruthless cycle of violence.” She went on to explain that now that bin Laden is dead, there was no need to maintain a US military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. The fanatics will simply fade away, in Benjamin’s view, and we will have peace in our time.</p>
<p>The <em>National Journal’s</em> Yochi Dreazen <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42880439/ns/world_news-death_of_bin_laden/">speculated that bin Laden’s death</a> “could have an even bigger impact on public support for the Afghan war itself, as many Americans take bin Laden&#8217;s death as a sign that the United States has accomplished its mission in Afghanistan and should now begin winding down the unpopular conflict.”</p>
<p>Writing for <em>The Nation</em>, unrepentant sixties radical (and devoted facilitator of Vietcong mass-slaughter) <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/160313/bin-laden-dead-will-long-war-terror-live?rel=emailNation">Tom Hayden wondered</a>: “If bin Laden is gone, and his network heavily damaged, what is left of the terrorist threat to our national security that justifies so many trillions of dollars and costs in thousands of lives?”</p>
<p>Contrast that sort of wishful thinking to what certain other people with a particular interest in imposing their will on the rest of the world are saying in the wake of bin Laden’s demise:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/02/us-binladen-militants-idUSTRE74147320110502">In a Reuters story</a> entitled “Islamists vow bin Laden death will not mute Jihad call,” the following post from an Arab language website was highlighted: &#8220;Oh God, please make this news not true&#8230; God curse you Obama,&#8221; said one message posted on an Arabic language forum. &#8220;Oh Americans&#8230; it is still legal for us to cut your necks.&#8221; Indeed, the Quran – the Incarnate Word of God according to Islam – directs Muslims to treat infidel necks in just such a fashion.</p>
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		<title>Tom Campbell’s Troubling Ties</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/john-perazzo/tom-campbell%e2%80%99s-troubling-ties/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=tom-campbell%25e2%2580%2599s-troubling-ties</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:08:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Perazzo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Abu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Al]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=54145</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Republican Senate candidate's record includes connections to Islamists.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/campbell.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54172" title="campbell" alt="" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/campbell.jpg" width="450" height="438" /></a></p>
<p>Republican Tom Campbell, who served in the House of Representatives for ten years between 1989 and 2001, is currently running for the U.S. Senate seat occupied by California Democrat Barbara Boxer. While the incumbent has acted as little more than a rubber stamp for the Obama agenda, it is by no means clear that Campbell would represent much of an improvement.</p>
<p>His credentials as a self-anointed “fiscal conservative” are tainted by several unsavory elements: an apparent hostility toward America&#8217;s staunch ally, Israel; an inability to comprehend the aggressive and hateful nature of radical Islam; an eagerness to appease Islamists who have intimate ties to known terrorists; and a propensity to repeatedly massage the truth until such time as his prevarications are publicly discredited with clear and compelling evidence – at which point Campbell typically concedes that he may have inadvertently goofed. These are hardly the qualities of a man who could be depended upon to help advance a conservative resurgence in America.</p>
<p>Consider, to start, Campbell&#8217;s most recent falsehood. In a February 24<sup>th </sup>interview, the candidate was asked whether there was any truth to an allegation that in 2000 he had accepted a campaign donation from Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida professor who was, at that time, the North American leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) – a terrorist organization whose objectives include the destruction of Israel.</p>
<p>Campbell replied emphatically, “I received no contribution from Sami Al-Arian,” though he did concede it was possible that Al-Arian&#8217;s wife had given him some money that year. When a Federal Election Commission report subsequently showed that Al-Arian had in fact made a $1,000 donation to Campbell on May 2, 2000 – and that Al-Arian&#8217;s wife, Nahla, had given an additional $300 – Campbell reluctantly let the truth drip out:</p>
<blockquote><p>“I apologize, but I made a mistake. I was aware that Sami Al-Arian had asked others to contribute to me … I did not realize that [he] had contributed himself. It was an honest mistake, with no attempt to mislead.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Campbell&#8217;s supporters have pointed out that when the then-congressman took Al-Arian’s money, the latter had not yet been charged with any terrorism-related crimes. That&#8217;s true enough, but media accounts speculating about Al-Arian&#8217;s inks to PIJ dated back to as early as 1994. Campbell was undoubtedly aware of those rumors but accepted the professor&#8217;s money anyway. Why?</p>
<p>Perhaps it was because he shared at least some of Al-Arian&#8217;s agendas. At a May 2000 congressional hearing, for instance, Campbell testified in support of Al-Arian&#8217;s campaign to repeal the provisions of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. This law permitted federal authorities to detain foreign terrorist suspects on the basis of classified information, and to withhold that information from the suspects’ defense attorneys on the rationale that full disclosure could conceivably place the sources of the information in physical danger. Later that year, Campbell penned a letter to immigration judge R. Kevin McHugh, on behalf of Al-Arian&#8217;s brother-in-law and terrorist collaborator Mazen Al-Najjar, who was busy protesting the federal government&#8217;s plan to use classified evidence to prosecute him. A number of years earlier, Al-Najjar and Al-Arian together had established the World Islam Study Enterprise (WISE), an Islamic think tank that was shut down in 1995 for its suspected ties to terrorism.</p>
<p>According to Campbell spokesman Jamie Fisfis, there was nothing nefarious about Campbell&#8217;s actions on behalf of these terrorists. It was just a case of good intentions poorly executed. “A lot of folks [at that time] were involved in trying to improve relations with the Muslim world,” explains Fisfis, “and this is one of those initiatives Tom Campbell regrets being involved in.”</p>
<p>In September 2000, Campbell continued to advocate for Al-Arian&#8217;s (and Al-Najjar&#8217;s) agenda when he attended the Islamic Society of North America&#8217;s 36th annual conference and participated in a panel discussion focusing on how the Muslim community could organize to prevent the U.S. government from using secret evidence against Islamic terror suspects. Other panel members included Agha Saeed of the American Muslim Alliance (which has pledged “to condemn [Israeli] atrocities and to expose the hideous nature of this neo-colonial occupation”); Salam Al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (which opposes the shutdown of Muslim charities suspected of supporting terrorism); Nihad Awad of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (an outgrowth of the Islamic Association for Palestine, which was established by senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and functioned as Hamas&#8217; public relations and recruitment arm in the United States); and Najir Khaja of the American Muslim Council, (whose founder and former chairman Abdurahman Alamoudi was a supporter of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic Association for Palestine, and Islamic Group leader Omar Abdel Rahman, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Even longtime anti-America radical Ramsey Clark made an appearance at the conference.</p>
<p>The following month, Campbell and Al-Arian crossed paths again, when both spoke at an American Muslim Alliance gathering in Irvine, California.</p>
<p>Campbell&#8217;s questionable moves as a congressman were not limited to his efforts on behalf of Al-Arian and Al-Najjar. Indeed, in April 2000 his Senate campaign gave $1,000 to the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), in support of that organization&#8217;s lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of President Bill Clinton’s military action in Yugoslavia. CCR is a pro-Castro outfit that only represents defendants whose political views it supports. Among its more notable clients have been such luminaries as Tom Hayden, co-founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society; Leonard Peltier, an American Indian rights activist who murdered two FBI agents in 1975; and attorney Lynne Stewart, who illegally facilitated and concealed communications between her client, the incarcerated &#8220;blind sheik&#8221; Omar Abdel Rahman, and members of his Egyptian terrorist organization. CCR has also taken up the cause of such groups as the Black Liberation Movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Communist Party USA, the Black Panther Party, the Chicago Seven, and the Hamas-linked Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.</p>
<p>Just one month after the 9/11 attacks, Campbell received a lifetime achievement award at the American Muslim Association&#8217;s national convention. At that event, speakers reportedly suggested that the United States should respond to the al-Qaeda attacks by “re-evaluat[ing] its foreign policy—specifically its positions on Israel and Iraq.”</p>
<p>We can learn a great deal about an individual by taking note of who his friends and supporters are. When it was recently shown that Campbell had indeed accepted Sami Al-Arian&#8217;s money during his 2000 political campaign, none other than the aforementioned Salam Al-Marayati, Executive Director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, rushed to Campbell&#8217;s defense. “It’s an unfortunate pattern in the campaigning to attack people because of their association with the Muslim community,” Al-Marayati said. “People are using it selectively to scare voters&#8230;. It’s just an unfortunate exploitation of people’s fears.”</p>
<p>This was the same Salam Al-Marayati who, a few hours after the 9/11 attacks, told a radio audience:</p>
<blockquote><p>“If we&#8217;re going to look at suspects, we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list because I think this diverts attention from what&#8217;s happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies.”</p></blockquote>
<p>It was also the same man who in 2004 demanded that the Treasury Department allow the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, whose assets had been frozen because of the organization&#8217;s terrorist ties, to transfer $50,000 to the Palestine Children&#8217;s Relief Fund (PCRF). “This is the donors&#8217; money and it should go where donors wanted it to go, to good, charitable causes,” said Al-Marayati. But PCRF is an organization with some heavy ideological baggage of its own. Most notably, it is headed by Stephen Sosebee, who depicts Israel as a murderous Zionist regime that Palestinians must resist by means of “armed struggle.”</p>
<p>Equally troubling is that Campbell is an admirer of Alison Weir (not to be confused with the British historian and author <a href="http://alisonweir.org.uk/">Alison Weir</a>), an activist who contends that America&#8217;s support for Israel “makes us an accomplice to war crimes and an accessory to oppression”; who depicts the Israeli-Arab conflict as a battle between “the brutalizer and the brutalized”; who states that “Israel will keep shooting kids in the back until we all say, Enough”; and who likens Israel&#8217;s security barrier in the West Bank to the “Berlin Wall.” Notwithstanding – or perhaps because of – Weir&#8217;s views, Campbell considers her “an intelligent, careful, and critical” scholar and suggests that “American policy makers would benefit greatly from hearing her first-hand observations and attempting to answer the questions she poses.”</p>
<p>And then, of course, there is the matter of Campbell&#8217;s voting record during his time in the House of Representatives. In 1990 he opposed a resolution (which was passed 378-34) expressing support for Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, but it’s wrong to say it can’t also be the capital of Palestine,” he once stated. In 1997 and 1999, Campbell introduced separate amendments to cut foreign aid to Israel; one failed in committee by a margin of 9 to 32, the other was defeated on the House floor by a vote of 13-414. Also in 1999, he was one of just 24 House members to vote against a resolution expressing congressional opposition to the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state.</p>
<p>Before would-be Republican voters resolve to throw their support behind Tom Campbell in this November&#8217;s election, they ought to look long and hard at his rather troubling record.</p>
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		<title>Revisiting Party of Defeat on Kindle for $4.99</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-swindle/the-sledgehammer-comes-down-on-the-party-of-defeat/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-sledgehammer-comes-down-on-the-party-of-defeat</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:17:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Swindle]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=52776</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[David Horowitz and Ben Johnson's 2008 demonstrated the Left's sabotage of the War on Terror.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/may09_partyofdefeat_horowitz.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-52778" title="may09_partyofdefeat_horowitz" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/may09_partyofdefeat_horowitz.jpg" alt="" width="346" height="500" /></a></p>
<p>The books that David Horowitz has written as a conservative fall into three general categories.</p>
<p>The first is analytical. It focuses on the radicalism of the Left, its effects and how to oppose the Left’s agendas. In this category are <em>The Politics of Bad Faith, Left Illusions</em>, and <em>Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left</em>, and several co-authored books, including <em>Destructive Generation</em> (with Peter Collier), <em>Deconstructing the Left</em> (with Peter Collier), <em>The Shadow Party</em> (with Richard Poe) and <em>Party of Defeat</em> (with Ben Johnson). Also in this analytical category are four compilations of articles: <em>Sex, Lies and Vast Conspiracies</em>, <em>Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes</em>, <em>The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits</em> and <em>How to Beat the Democrats and Other Subversive Ideas</em>.</p>
<p>The second category is also analytical, but its subject is a very specific dominion of the Left: American universities. There are five books in this category, which represent a comprehensive critique of the radicalized academic campus and its curriculum: <em>Uncivil Wars</em>, <em>The Professors</em>, <em>Indoctrination U.</em>, <em>One-Party Classroom</em> (with Jacob Laksin) and the forthcoming <em>Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights</em>, which will be published by Regnery in fall 2010.</p>
<p>The third category is biographical and philosophical. These are Horowitz&#8217;s most lyrical writings: <em>Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey</em> (1997), <em>The End of Time</em> (2005) and <em>A Cracking of the Heart</em> (2009).</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Party-of-Defeat-ebook/dp/B0039PU9XQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;s=digital-text&amp;qid=1267648072&amp;sr=8-2" target="_blank"><em>Party of Defeat</em></a>, co-written with Ben Johnson and published in 2008, is tightly argued, carefully focused, and precisely documented. It is 164 pages of argumentation with more than 20 pages in footnotes. <em>Party of Defeat</em> makes its case in two parts each divided into two chapters.</p>
<p>Part 1 is titled “The War Against America and the West.” The first chapter describes the Path to 9/11. The disastrous <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1655" target="_blank">Jimmy Carter</a> presidency, <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=804" target="_blank">Ted Kennedy’</a>s attempts to undermine Ronald Reagan’s successful Cold War strategy, and <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=644" target="_blank">Bill Clinton</a>’s head-in-the-sand syndrome are all examined. The second chapter focuses on 9/11 itself and the Left’s response. We see a distinction here between the radical, anti-American Left of <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1334" target="_blank">Tom Hayden</a> and <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=899" target="_blank">Michael Moore</a> and the more sane liberal Left of mainstream Democrats in congress and the Senate. One group rabidly opposed the Afghanistan war; the other did not. It would not be long before this distinction vaporized.</p>
<p>Part 2 examines Operation Iraqi Freedom specifically. Chapter 3 lays out the justifications for the mission. This is a particularly important segment because Horowitz and Johnson explain the difference between the actual justifications for removing Saddam Hussein and the political task of selling the war to the American public. Understanding this distinction is critical and is something leftists and Democrats completely miss even today in their tunnel vision of WMDs. Chapter 4, the heart of the book, then shows how the Left and the Democrats sought to sabotage that task once America began it. Horowitz and Johnson hit all the bases: <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2064" target="_blank">Ambassador Joe Wilson</a>, yellowcake uranium, <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=32" target="_blank">Valerie Plame</a>, the influential slander of “Zionist neo-cons” “distorting” intelligence, Democrats claiming they were misled, <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2140" target="_blank">Al Gore’s</a> The Assault on Reason, the New York Times printing classified information, <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2031" target="_blank">“Mother” Cindy Sheehan</a>, and finally <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6201" target="_blank">MoveOn.Org’s</a> disgusting General “Betray-Us.”</p>
<p><em>Party of Defeat</em> thus serves as a conclusive defense of the legitimacy of the Bush administration’s push to implement regime change in Iraq — a policy initially proposed by a Democratic president. Further, Horowitz and Johnson meticulously establish that not long after initially supporting the war the Democratic Party adopted the positions of the anti-American Left — while America’s troops were in harm’s way. Considered in the context of the historical information from the first chapter, it’s clear that this shift to the Left is not an aberration but a consistent march that’s proceeded over the last 35 years. (See <em><a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6706" target="_blank">The Shadow Party</a> b</em>y Horowitz and Richard Poe for more on this.)</p>
<p>And how can the Left and Democratic Party apologists respond?</p>
<p>The book itself is only the first part of the Party of Defeat intellectual experience. After <em>Party of Defeat</em> was published Horowitz and Johnson set up the $500 <em>FrontPage </em>Challenge. Noted foreign policy analysts and journalists could debate Horowitz and Johnson’s thesis at <em>FrontPage</em>. These debates are in many ways as enlightening as the book itself. The Left’s attempt to defend itself from the charges is at times stunning, predictable, and ultimately sad. Read all of these debates here:</p>
<p>To read Ethan Porter’s exchange with the authors, <a href="../articles/Read.aspx?GUID=F54E10E2-B441-4F3C-AA3A-E8E4E127624D" target="_blank">click here</a>.<br />
To read Lawrence Korb’s exchange with the  authors, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C2C0AB1C-424C-4E11-A23A-577E543A717C" target="_blank">click here</a>.<br />
To read Andrew Grotto’s exchange with the  authors, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=3A42AEE6-218F-4869-B83B-A51266121CFC" target="_blank">click here</a>.<br />
To read Jordan Smith’s exchange with the  authors, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=EAD45B04-27F8-42B7-9B53-6CB8DD3764E5" target="_blank">click here.</a><br />
To read Robert Farley’s exchange with  the authors, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=A14B6072-1DDE-4EC6-AB2C-8A9728BC0861" target="_blank">click here</a>.<br />
To read Michael Isikoff’s exchange  with the authors, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=8EF70EB2-F364-4CD6-ABE8-4E3A93AAE0A1" target="_blank">click here</a>.<br />
To read Ben Johnson’s exchange with  William Blum, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=DFA30931-CCD2-49E3-B02B-66529B9A6722" target="_blank">click here.</a><br />
See also <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=11146A68-D874-4607-BAFE-EBAFFEA2FD91" target="_blank">Nick Cohen’s</a>, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=6DD89034-49E9-4C00-B5F6-7716B3AE8578" target="_blank">Jeffrey Herf’s</a><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=6DD89034-49E9-4C00-B5F6-7716B3AE8578" target="_blank"> </a>and <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=1F3DD064-93F2-4CCB-812D-23DD4E834B42" target="_blank">Bruce Thornton’s</a> critiques of the book.</p>
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		<title>The Ramparts I Watched</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/sol-stern/the-ramparts-i-watched/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-ramparts-i-watched</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:08:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sol Stern]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Our storied radical magazine did transform the nation—for the worse.]]></description>
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<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46947" title="ramparts" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/ramparts.jpg" alt="ramparts" width="450" height="547" /></p>
<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/">City Journal</a>]</strong></p>
<p><span>I</span>n 1965, I was a Berkeley graduate student, on track to become a tenured radical. Instead, I dropped out and joined an obscure, liberal Catholic magazine called <em>Ramparts</em>, headquartered in the sleepy Bay Area suburb of Menlo Park. A little more than a year later, I wrote a story exposing the CIA’s secret penetration and financing of the National Student Association (NSA). The article helped catapult our now-radical, San Francisco–based monthly to national attention and to a catalytic role in the protest movements of the time. The mainstream press celebrated my leftist colleagues and me as heroes of American journalism. <em>Ramparts</em>’ rise to celebrity status seemed to herald a new era of the media’s speaking truth to power. The reality was far less luminous, and <em>Ramparts</em>’ legacy, which a new book celebrates, was not a positive one for the country.</p>
<p><span>I</span> still remember the phone call I received one evening in February 1967 from an old classmate at the City College of New York. He had just picked up the next day’s <em>New York Times</em> at a Manhattan newsstand and noticed a front-page picture of me and fellow <em>Ramparts</em> editors Warren Hinckle and Robert Scheer. “It’s above the fold,” my friend exulted, and then read out the headline on the accompanying article: <span>ramparts: gadfly to the establishment</span>. The photograph, taken in <em>Ramparts</em>’ San Francisco office, was captioned <span>planning the next expose</span>.</p>
<p>There would be no more <em>Ramparts</em> exposés of CIA front groups. The media heavyweights now pursued the story far more effectively than our monthly magazine could have. Tom Wicker, the <em>Times</em>’s prizewinning D.C. bureau chief, assembled a team of experienced reporters to follow the money trail from the CIA-connected foundations named in my <em>Ramparts</em> article. The <em>Washington Post</em> jumped in with its own reporting team. Turning up new connections almost every day, the newspapers described how legitimate tax-exempt foundations laundered millions of dollars from the CIA and passed the funds to an agency-designated list of civic and cultural groups, labor unions, magazines, and book publishers.</p>
<p>It soon became clear that the CIA/NSA relationship was just one thread in an elaborate web of citizen front groups secretly supported, and sometimes even created, by the spy agency in the early days of the Cold War. Other beneficiaries of CIA largesse were highbrow magazines like <em>The New Leader</em> and <em>Encounter</em>; the international operations arm of the American Federation of Labor; and the American and European sections of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the anti-Communist organization founded in 1949 by public intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The top-secret project had been approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government.</p>
<p>Until the <em>Ramparts</em> story broke, the government could count on the mandarins of Washington journalism to protect national-security secrets. But as details of the front groups spilled out, editorials in the <em>Times</em> and the <em>Post</em> skewered the secret funding arrangement and compared it with the methods used by America’s Cold War enemies. CBS News broadcast a program narrated by Mike Wallace, “In the Pay of the CIA: An American Dilemma,” which described the maze of CIA-connected foundations and civic groups that had received agency money. Wallace interviewed apologetic American liberals who had been active in the funded organizations, including feminist stalwart Gloria Steinem and socialist leader Norman Thomas. According to one CIA operative, the <em>Ramparts</em> scoop led to “the biggest security leak of the Cold War.”</p>
<p><em><span>R</span>amparts</em> won a prestigious George Polk Award in Journalism that year, and newsstand sales shot up to more than 200,000 per issue, unheard-of circulation for a leftist publication. Paid advertising picked up, and so did the number of wealthy liberals eager to invest in our exotic venture. For <em>Ramparts</em>, the mission continued to be part journalism, part radical activism. Student rebellions and antiwar protests were sweeping campuses, and the Black Panthers were stirring up inner-city ghettos. <em>Ramparts</em> reported on and advocated for these outbreaks with a flair for publicity that we leftists would otherwise have denounced as a malignancy of consumer capitalism.</p>
<p>The magazine’s resident marketing genius was our flamboyant editor in chief, Warren Hinckle. Still in his twenties, Hinckle was a third-generation San Franciscan with working-class roots, a former city reporter for the <em>San Francisco Chronicle</em>, and the only <em>Ramparts</em> editor with traditional journalism training. He wore a black eye patch (the result of a childhood injury), expensively tailored three-piece suits, and patent-leather dancing pumps. He looked like a dandy, yet hung out with cops in the city’s Irish bars.</p>
<p>When we had learned from our source inside the NSA that the student group was about to preempt our story by announcing that it had severed the CIA relationship, it was Hinckle who came up with a brilliant maneuver to save our scoop. The full article, scheduled for the March 1967 issue, was tied up in the monthly production cycle. So Hinckle purchased a full-page ad in the <em>New York Times</em> that detailed most of the exposé. His counterstroke caught NSA and CIA officials off guard, as reporters for the <em>Times</em> and other papers began calling with questions about the secret funding.</p>
<p><span>L</span>ater that year, some of us were sitting around Hinckle’s office, discussing how to dramatize the story of the young protesters burning their draft cards at antiwar rallies. I proposed that we burn our own draft cards in solidarity. Hinckle agreed and then put his P. T. Barnum gloss on the idea. He collected the draft cards of the four editors listed at the top of the magazine’s masthead—Hinckle, Scheer, myself, and art director Dugald Stermer—and shipped them off to Carl Fischer, one of New York’s leading photographers. Fischer hired professional models and shot a studio photo of four raised hands holding our burning draft cards, with our names clearly visible. The image became the cover—no text—of the December 1967 issue. Hinckle then ran the photo as an ad on the sides of New York City buses.</p>
<p>I don’t know if burning our draft cards advanced the antiwar cause, but it surely added to <em>Ramparts</em>’ media luster. <em>Time</em> blasted our “publicity stunt,” giving us lots more free publicity. Then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York apparently concluded that we had violated the Selective Service Act. His inclination to pursue the matter in court was doubtless reinforced after FBI agents visited our photographer’s studio and were told that our partly burned cards had been conveniently preserved in a drawer.</p>
<p>The four of us soon had invitations to appear at a federal grand jury convened at the Foley Square courthouse in lower Manhattan. The government paid our round-trip airfare from San Francisco. On the way, we stopped in Washington to hire Edward Bennett Williams, a celebrity defense lawyer and D.C. power broker. In New York, we checked into the stylish Algonquin Hotel for a few fun-filled days in Gotham. The Algonquin was virtually our second headquarters; we stayed there whenever we were in town, no doubt because Hinckle liked the association with the legendary <em>New Yorker</em> writers of the Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s and 1930s.</p>
<p>Even before our grand-jury date, <em>Ramparts</em> received yet another publicity boost from the <em>New York Times</em>. The paper’s legal reporter, Sidney Zion, was friendly with several <em>Ramparts</em> editors, so we gave him the scoop on the government’s draft-card investigation. His story ran on the <em>Times</em>’s front page and quoted legal scholars speculating that prosecution of the <em>Ramparts</em> editors would be a landmark free-press case. After the <em>Times</em> made us look like incipient First Amendment heroes, we appeared before the grand jury, took the Fifth Amendment on advice of counsel, and flew back to San Francisco. We never heard from the government again.</p>
<p><span>B</span>ut the press attention and the surging circulation couldn’t save <em>Ramparts</em> from a fall from grace—and it wasn’t government repression that brought us down (though CIA snoops did penetrate our office) but our own folly. The changing media climate could certainly have sustained a fiscally responsible mass-circulation New Left publication. But responsibility and restraint were alien words in the <em>Ramparts</em> offices. There were too many Algonquin Hotel junkets, flights around the world chasing stories that never panned out, and three-hour, booze-filled lunches at the priciest restaurants in our San Francisco neighborhood. Anyone who came to <em>Ramparts</em> with an “inside-the-establishment” exposé—like the Green Beret from Vietnam who wrote about why he had quit, or the ex–FBI agent who promised to prove that the CIA was behind President Kennedy’s assassination—not only wrote for the magazine but became a permanent staffer, adding to <em>Ramparts</em>’ ever-swelling payroll.</p>
<p><em>Ramparts</em>’ final binge came in August 1968. Throughout that politically tumultuous year, we had sought to cover the street protests and the antiwar insurgencies roiling the Democratic Party. Now, with <em>Ramparts</em> running on fumes and the great American credit card, Hinckle decided that we had to be in Chicago to do a special issue on the Democratic National Convention. After all the ferment that <em>Ramparts</em> helped stir up, it seemed inconceivable that we would miss the ruling party’s <em>Götterdämmerung</em>. Hinckle not only sent at least ten <em>Ramparts</em> writers, editors, and photographers to the Windy City; he also invited a cadre of our media friends to join the festivities, including Zion, future Pulitzer Prize winner Sydney Schanberg, and an about-to-be-famous writer named Hunter Thompson.</p>
<p>Our close ties to the radical antiwar movement led us to believe that we would have an insider’s perspective on the street combat. But we spent little time on the streets. Instead, we took a dozen rooms at the luxurious Ambassador East Hotel on the Gold Coast and often took our meals at the hotel’s Pump Room, where a huge black man, dressed in the full regalia (including scimitar) of a palace guard for an Ottoman sultan, greeted guests. Not surprisingly, our radical friends out on the streets expressed outrage at our flagrantly decadent quarters. After a week of bloody riots, Hinckle moved the entire operation to the Algonquin in New York—our home away from home—to write the Chicago story.</p>
<p>The project was doomed from the start. Even if <em>Ramparts</em> had been financially solvent, our monthly magazine had little chance of adding any insight to one of the decade’s most thoroughly covered events. Moreover, many mainstream reporters, now feeling liberated by the CIA revelations and their own newspapers’ increasingly critical coverage of the Vietnam War, were as sympathetic to the protesters as we were. And for political reasons, <em>Ramparts</em> was unwilling to publish the one story we <em>did</em> have exclusively: how Tom Hayden and a small group of radicals had set up shop in Chicago four months earlier to plan a massive violent confrontation with the “war machine,” otherwise known as the Chicago Police Department. When our 20,000-word convention spread came out at the end of September, it was stale news. By then, the creditors were pounding on <em>Ramparts</em>’ doors, and our financial backers were asking pointed questions about how their money had disappeared down the drain at places like the Pump Room.</p>
<p><span>I</span> never understood why Hinckle was so reckless with the magazine’s future. What I do know is that the miracle of the capitalist system’s bankruptcy laws insulated the editors from the consequences of that recklessness. Hinckle went off with Zion to start another muckraking magazine called <em>Scanlans</em>. The new monthly raised $1 million and published nine issues. The remaining <em>Ramparts</em> editors filed for protection and reorganization under Chapter 11. The court-ordered financial oversight allowed the magazine to continue publishing. But <em>Ramparts</em> soon found itself beset by internal strife—a common occurrence in the radical movements of the time. Scheer briefly became the new chief editor, but was ousted in a coup orchestrated by David Horowitz, Peter Collier, and other staffers, many of them former Berkeley graduate students whom Scheer himself had recruited.</p>
<p>I wasn’t around for the bloodletting. After the convention fiasco, <em>Ramparts</em> began to feel like a straitjacket, and I decided to try my hand at freelancing. I hadn’t yet broken with the Left, but it disturbed me that <em>Ramparts</em> would stretch or deny the truth to sell our counternarrative about America and the world. After all, we were keeping secrets for Tom Hayden as loyally as the mainstream-media barons had once kept them for the CIA. I winced when Scheer made a deal with the Cuban government for the rights to Che Guevara’s diaries that required us to publish a Fidel Castro rant, filled with Communist propaganda and denunciations of American “barbarism.” Other rosy articles we ran about the true socialism supposedly emerging in Castro’s Cuba also appalled me. Weren’t we supposed to be the <em>New</em> Left, as opposed to Communist tyranny as we were to U.S. imperialism?</p>
<p>I also felt partly responsible for creating the myth of the Black Panthers as righteous rebels fighting off brutal police oppression. In 1967, I wrote a hagiographic profile for <em>Ramparts</em> of Huey Newton, the Panthers’ “minister of defense,” and then published basically the same article in the <em>New York Times Magazine</em>—yet another indication of the changes in the mainstream media. It soon become clear to anyone who cared to look, however, that Newton and the Panthers were clever street thugs who used revolutionary slogans to avoid accountability for their crimes. As one of the New Left’s favorite black criminals, Soledad Prison inmate George Jackson, once put it, “Marxism is my hustle.” After my Newton article, <em>Ramparts</em> ran three more celebratory cover stories on Panther leaders—Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and (again) Newton.</p>
<p>When I learned that Horowitz and Collier had taken the <em>Ramparts</em> helm, I assumed that the magazine would become more intellectually serious, if somewhat duller. Unfortunately, Horowitz and Collier drank the Kool-Aid served by the Left’s most destructive elements. They published Hayden’s drivel calling the Black Panthers America’s “internal Viet Cong,” along with his exhortation for radical white youth to create “liberated zones” in cities and on campuses to serve as sanctuaries for their heroic Panther allies. <em>Ramparts</em>’ new editors then topped this foolishness with their own, proclaiming Hayden “one of the country’s most serious revolutionaries.” To me, the lasting image of <em>Ramparts</em>’ second incarnation was a cover depicting a burning Bank of America branch in Southern California. The radical students who firebombed it, said the accompanying text, “may have done more for saving the environment than all the teach-ins put together.”</p>
<p><span>I</span> was living and reporting in Israel in 1975 when I learned that <em>Ramparts</em> had finally closed its doors. I breathed a sigh of relief. By then, I no longer considered myself a leftist—in no small measure because of the Left’s growing hostility to Israel. In the early 1980s, Horowitz and Collier also had their much-publicized <em>Second Thoughts</em>, as they titled their book, and became prominent movement conservatives. In his powerful 1997 memoir, <em>Radical Son</em>, Horowitz devoted several chapters to his years at <em>Ramparts</em>. With brutal honesty, he explored the catastrophic consequences for the possibility of a decent Left that resulted from <em>Ramparts</em>’ misalliance with the Panthers and Hayden.</p>
<p>The more romantic assessment of <em>Ramparts</em>—that its spectacular rise in the 1960s represented a great leap forward for American democracy—runs through a new book by California writer and historian Peter Richardson. <em>A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of <em>Ramparts</em> Magazine Changed America</em> has stirred renewed interest in the magazine’s legacy, particularly in California, and has been reviewed favorably (twice) in the <em>New York Times</em>. To publicize the book, the author organized several public forums featuring Hinckle, Scheer, and other <em>Ramparts</em> alumni.</p>
<p>Collier, Horowitz, and I weren’t part of the conversation. Too bad, since we might have forced a reality check on the celebrations. At one recent session on the Berkeley campus, Scheer (who became the resident leftist columnist for the <em>Los Angeles Times</em> after leaving <em>Ramparts</em>) assured the audience that <em>Ramparts</em> not only smashed retrograde national taboos but “had very high standards. No question we were putting out as good a journal as anyone in the country. . . . We were edited by professionals, it had to be well written, fact-checked. And the fact is that we did not screw up. I can’t think of a major error.”</p>
<p>Richardson nodded approvingly as Scheer spoke. Yet as I watched the forum online, I wondered what he was really thinking. I knew Richardson only through a long telephone interview he did with me in March 2008. My impression then was that he was a California “progressive” and that his book would reflect the judgments of the vast majority of the magazine’s former staffers who remained on the left. Nevertheless, I shared everything I could remember with Richardson, gave him my view of <em>Ramparts</em>’ legacy, and hoped for the best.</p>
<p>When I read his book a few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised. Richardson gets most of the facts right about the major developments in the magazine’s 13-year history. He quotes at length my comments on the Chicago convention fiasco, which stand in the book without refutation. Perhaps unwittingly, Richardson also provides sufficient material to make a mockery of Scheer’s claims of rigorous fact-checking and no major errors. Readers can learn from the book, for example, that Hinckle indulged every crackpot conspiracy theorist on the JFK assassination. Early in 1967, <em>Ramparts</em> published staff member David Welsh’s claim that there were three assassins in Dallas in 1963. Our resident ex–FBI agent, Bill Turner, then wrote two articles supporting New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA agent controlled by conspirators deep within the U.S. government. “Very high standards,” indeed.</p>
<p><span>B</span>ut more important than <em>Ramparts</em>’ accuracy or lack of it is the historical claim in Richardson’s subtitle—that <em>Ramparts</em> “changed America.” Richardson argues that it was Scheer’s arrival at <em>Ramparts</em> in 1965 that “would change the magazine’s trajectory and the nation’s.” But when Richardson tries to specify what national changes Scheer and <em>Ramparts</em> actually stood for, the best he can offer is that for Scheer, “the main point of <em>Ramparts</em> was to apply what he had learned at City College about the American system, including the first amendment, limited government and checks and balances. . . . As for foreign policy Scheer’s main point was that other countries, including Cuba and Vietnam, should be allowed to make their own histories without interference from the United States.”</p>
<p>This is either naive or deliberately misleading. I speak with some expertise here, since Scheer and I were friends at City College in the late 1950s. We worked together in campus political groups in what was, for us, a prelude to the next decade’s New Left. We also took the same classes in the college’s government department, which did teach us about the Republic’s founding principles of checks and balances and limited government. But the passions that moved us were not those that moved the Founders. We were not liberals. We were socialists and anti-imperialists—though we distinguished our brand of socialism from that of the pro-Stalinist Left, which was still well represented at City College.</p>
<p>In 1962, Scheer and I reunited as Berkeley graduate students and, together with David Horowitz, started one of the first campus New Left journals, <em>Root and Branch</em>. Our signature issue was support for the Cuban Revolution, but it wasn’t because we thought Cubans “should be allowed to make their own history.” Rather, we believed that the revolution was a great leap forward for the socialist cause. We followed the lead of one of our intellectual heroes, Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills, in arguing that Fidel Castro was a new breed of revolutionary leader—more humanist, more open, even more hip than old-style bureaucratic Communists. In fact, we imagined Fidel and Che as fellow New Leftists.</p>
<p>Long before American liberals took up the cause, Scheer argued eloquently in <em>Ramparts</em> for getting out of Vietnam. I suppose you might say that such a withdrawal would have let the Vietnamese people “make their own history.” But the real reason that <em>Ramparts</em> was for total withdrawal of American troops was that we wanted the Communists to win and were sure that they would. In the view of most of the editors, the Communists were Vietnam’s rightful rulers. One of the most effective <em>Ramparts</em> covers was an illustration of Ho Chi Minh as George Washington crossing the Delaware.</p>
<p><span>T</span>he magazine’s liberal Catholic founder, Edward Keating, had chosen the name “<em>Ramparts</em>” in 1962 because it evoked the national anthem’s patriotic themes. Just so, Richardson argues, “<em>Ramparts</em> in its heyday was centrally concerned with American ideals—and especially the nation’s collective failure to live up to them.” I wish that were true. But like so much else about <em>Ramparts</em>, this claim is posthumous spin. Instead of urging Americans to take pride in the founding ideals of the Republic, <em>Ramparts</em>’ editors and writers were preoccupied with attacking America’s liberal institutions.</p>
<p>Above all, we hated the “Cold War liberals”—at times, even more than we did the political Right. Under assault from <em>Ramparts</em> and the rest of the youthful New Left, these liberals lost their nerve. The CIA revelations and the Vietnam debacle left them chagrined and repentant. Soon, many lost faith that American power could ever be used for good. That liberal failure of nerve has been harmful to the country. Worse, it rests on a faulty reading of history. Contrary to the <em>Ramparts</em> line, Cold War liberalism deserves credit for the greatest American achievement since World War II—winning the Cold War.</p>
<p>Philip Graham’s oft-quoted observation that journalism is the first draft of history applies with particular emphasis to the story of the CIA front groups. In the second draft of the story, historians plumbing the archives are learning that the American government’s secret decision to mobilize and fund anti-Communist groups was an indispensable part of the Truman administration’s policy of “containment” against the Soviet threat. George F. Kennan, the foreign-service officer who famously authored the policy, assigned to the CIA-funded groups the most crucial role in the strategy.</p>
<p>To understand why Kennan (with President Truman’s support) initiated the secret CIA program, recall that in 1949, Communist regimes, most of them closely allied with Moscow, ruled a third of the world’s people. The Soviets could count on a vast network of its own front groups, well organized from Moscow and already hard at work trying to undermine the fragile postwar democracies of Western Europe. The theory of containment assumed that America would block any Soviet military encroachments while carrying on the anti-Communist struggle in the political, economic, and cultural spheres. If the U.S. succeeded, we could defeat Soviet Communism without risking nuclear confrontation.</p>
<p>And that’s exactly what happened. One can argue about the ethics of the secrecy used to carry out the operation, but not about the results. It’s not a stretch to say that the full success of the containment policy, with its front-group component, was symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall two decades ago.</p>
<p><span>B</span>ut this wasn’t yet clear in 1967. In an early iteration of the moral-equivalency syndrome that many liberals today still embrace, <em>Ramparts</em> could pitch the CIA/NSA story as a morality tale exposing the perfidy of Cold War liberals. The CIA was no better than the KGB. They spy, we spy. They manipulate their students and intellectuals for national advantage, and we do, too. Logically, then, it’s the Cold War itself that’s the threat to American values, not our Cold War enemies.</p>
<p>The updated version of that syndrome maintains that the War on Terror, not the Islamist movement that seeks to bring down our civilization, is the greatest threat to our values. So I concede that Richardson is right in saying that <em>Ramparts</em> changed America, particularly the nation’s political and media culture. But the influence was mostly baleful. The liberal failure of nerve that <em>Ramparts</em> helped engender lives on, hampering the country at a time when our leaders must consider courageous policies, including the possible use of force, to prevent catastrophic threats to our nation and the West in far-off places like Iran.</p>
<p><em>Sol Stern is a contributing editor of </em>City Journal<em>, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of </em>Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.</div>
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