Posted on 10/24/2002 6:51:31 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
WASHINGTON – If America hates itself, it is ill prepared to beat back the forces of terrorism.
Dan Flynn, author of the newly released book "Why the Left Hates America,” says that as America contemplates war with Iraq and deals with North Korea's illegal nuclear buildup, our country is under relentless attack from the radical America-hating forces, much of whose momentum was put in place by the Soviets during the Cold War.
When the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall fell, the well-funded left-wing attack on America and infiltration of its institutions did not stop.
The hard left in this country did not just go away, Flynn told NewsMax.com. In fact, he said, "it may be actually beneficial to the left that they are no longer burdened with having to defend indefensible nations like the Soviet Union and East Germany. Now, all they really do is attack America.”
"Take a Look in the Mirror, America, and Ask Why,” read one post-9/11 op-ed headline in the student newspaper at New York University just a few blocks away from the attacks on the World Trade Center.
One by one, Flynn knocks down "The Five Big Lies” (the title of one chapter) commonly told by the left: that America is a sexist, racist, classist, environmentally abusing, bloodthirsty empire.
"Looking at the world outside of our borders,” Flynn told NewsMax. "What do we see?
"In Africa, we see a continent where more than 100 million women, according to the United Nations, have been culturally compelled to undergo female genital mutilations.
"In China, for every 117 baby boys who are born, only 100 baby girls are born," because that dictatorship's one-child edict leads to forced abortions and infanticide.
"In the year 2000, there were 2,130 reported rapes in Bangladesh, but a mere 63 rape convictions.
"In India in 1998, almost 7,000 dowry killings took place. "Despite these and other horrors, U.S. feminists continue to carp about such ‘injustices’ as a lack of free abortions and the inequitable number of sports teams for high school boys.”
NewsMax suggested the leftists who try to brainwash students with the "Hate America” credo should be made to defend the egregious curbs on humanity in other countries such as those cited above.
Flynn’s response: "The left’s basic problem is that they compare America to an ideal. Compare anything with an ideal and it’s always going to fall short. Compare America to what actually exists in the world and we look rather exemplary.”
That is precisely what the author does in "Why the Left Hates America.”
"I suppose it’s easier for the Noam Chomskys and the Gore Vidals of the world to attack the United States without pointing to an existing country as a model to strive for.”
Even slavery – which everyone, including the author, acknowledges is "a huge stain on America’s heritage” that deserves "study, attention and condemnation,” but also some "perspective” – is badly distorted in campus lectures.
For all the talk about this historical fact, the reality is that this country’s "role in the international slave trade, however regrettable, was minor.”
Flynn cites David Horowitz’s book "Uncivil Wars,” which documents that America’s involvement in the trade amounted to less that 1 percent of all slaves.
'Abolition Was Unique'
"Cuba, for instance, was one among numerous places in the Western Hemisphere that was more heavily involved. Yet, Americans are taught to believe that their country is uniquely responsible for the sin of slavery. As is often pointed out, slavery was universal, but abolition was unique.”
In his interview with NewsMax, the author noted: "Every other country in the world stresses its virtues and downplays its vices. In America, we exaggerate our sins and overlook our triumphs.”
Japanese children, he points out, "learn next to nothing of the Rape of Nanking, the Baatan Death March or Pearl Harbor.” In the Soviet Union, well into the 1980s, "the killing of millions to impose communism was flushed down the memory hole. Turks still deny the Armenian genocide.”
Dan Flynn is executive director of Accuracy in Academia (AIA) which, as its name suggests, seeks balance at the nation’s institutions of higher learning and what your son or daughter is taught there. He is not of the view that the parent who sacrifices to meet the ever-escalating tuition requirements of his offspring’s education should remain silent, pay the bills and not ask questions.
The leftist establishment, which dominates academia, has often insisted that any protest or criticism of what goes on in the classroom is a threat to "academic freedom.”
'Academic Freedom' for Leftists Only
Very well, says Flynn, let’s see what the left means by "academic freedom.”
At Berkeley, home of the so-called "Free Speech Movement,” a mob orchestrated a campaign to shout him down even before he stepped up to the microphone. A student rushed to the stage and tried to rip the microphone out of its socket. After the lecture ended prematurely, the mob stole large quantities of his writings and held a Nazi-style book burning.
His conference was kicked off the campus at Columbia University.
He was booted out of a meeting of Black Panthers at the University of District of Columbia when he asked uncomfortable questions. The conference organizer told him he was "banned for life” from future organization events. Nonetheless, Flynn does go into the belly of the beast with appearances at left-wing campuses all over the nation, often to the shouts of audiences, who try to drown him out, presumably all in the interest of "free inquiry” in "the marketplace of ideas.”
But the left-wing educators do believe in "academic freedom” for themselves. As an example of what AIA has publicized, they will insist there is nothing wrong with courses whose required readings promote pedophilia and condemn opposition to it as tantamount to racism.
During the summer, NewsMax.com detailed the grotesquely lopsided partisan bias of the professors who claim the right to "enlighten” their captive student audiences, and Flynn reviewed the figures again for us in his NewsMax.com interview. As one example, select departments at UC Santa Barbara showed a 71-1 imbalance of Democrats to Republicans.
NewsMax raised the prospect of a campaign urging alumni to withhold donations, perhaps with the slogan "Don’t Give Them Any Money. It Only Encourages Them.”
Flynn responded that Harvard’s endowment is larger than the individual budgets of more than a dozen U.S. states.
"Even if we organized alumni to withhold donations until, say, the school lifted its 33-year ban on the Reserve Officer Training Corps, it would have very little impact on their day-to-day affairs for many years.”
Having said that, the AIA executive director added that any conservative who donates to his alma mater without paying attention to what is being taught there "is a fool.”
This fall, the author takes his own "invasion” to more than a dozen of America’s campuses to discuss the findings in "Why the Left Hates America.” One has to do more, he says, than "preach to the choir.” Better to "go to the places that contain the most potential converts.”
It is not enough, he says, to prepare for warfare abroad. The battle against the decades-long psychological warfare here at home must also be waged.
"How can a country that hates itself survive?” he asks. "It can’t.”
I find that many communist supporters in academia have done this as well.
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