Posted on 06/20/2008 5:21:43 AM PDT by SJackson
| The Party of Defeat, and Self-Defeat |
David Horowitz delivered the following speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center retreat in Santa Barbara, which was held at the Four Seasons Resort May 30-June 1. -- The Editors. Evan Sayet: It's good to see a crowd like this, as usual. It's great that we, as conservatives, are gathering to talk about the things that are important to us and all the way across the country, the leftists are gathering to talk about what's important to them. It's called the premiere of Sex and the City. I know that we're going to be talking a little bit about immigration later on. This is all I really want to see happen. David, I want to thank you once again for having me be a part of this. Last night meant so much to me to see that you don't hold grudges, that you had Andy Granatelli in the audience, that you had Andy Granatelli here because I know back in the days when you were SDS and he was STP -- At any rate, I’m going to bring up your main speaker, your host for this event. He's a gentleman who did me the honor of naming me in the title of one of his books, Hating Whitey. I believe that's in all of our kits, isn't that, David? This is a gentleman, who, the first time I met you, and I thanked you from the stage, I said he's a man who went from radical to radical. Everybody, Mr. David Horowitz. David Horowitz: Thank you, Evan. This is a nice turnout for so early in the morning. We're in an election year where a hawkish presidential candidate should win in a walk. Al Qaeda has been roundly defeated in Iraq. It's on the run. Its leadership has been destroyed. Acts of terror these days are videos which it sends to Al Jazeera. The Iraqi military is more and more in control of the security in the country. What the Al Qaeda leaders have called the central front in the War on Terror, which is Iraq, has been denied to them and denied to Iran. And, yet, when McCain runs as a supporter of the war, that's considered a tough argument for him. I've written this book Party of Defeat, and I guess if you just saw the title, it might be about the Republicans. So, I want to talk a little bit about how we got here but just to set the scenery first for a while on what exactly happened in this war. Sean Hannity has given a nice blurb to this book, saying it's about the greatest betrayal, political betrayal in American history, which it is. The first president to call for the violent removal of Saddam Hussein was Bill Clinton, which he did in 1998. He authored and signed the Iraqi Liberation Act, which basically said anybody who wants to overthrow Saddam Hussein by violence, we will provide military and economic support. The entire Clinton national security teams -- State, Defense, CIA -- endorsed the war and the invasion of Iraq. The majority of Democratic senators voted for the war in Iraq, including, of course, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and John Edwards. And, yet, within three months of the start of the war, they had turned around 180 degrees and attacked the war. Now, we live in a democracy, and criticism of government policy is the air we breathe. It's essential to a democracy. And, of course, criticism of war policy is also important because the stakes are so high. But criticism is one thing, and sabotage is quite another. In July 2003, that's three months after the fall of Baghdad or the liberation of Baghdad, the Democratic National Committee ran a national television ad which said, "Read his lips. President Bush deceives the American people." And the gravament of the ad has been the theme of the Democratic attacks on the war for the last five years. Bush lied, people died. Iraq was no threat. United States, in other words, attacked a country that posed no threat to it and did so by deceiving the American people. In other words, the United States is the aggressor in the war. In other words, the United States is a war criminal. Never in the history of this country have we faced a foreign adversary, let alone one as monstrous as the regime of Saddam Hussein and had a major political party accuse us of being the bad guys, of us of being the aggressor, of us being the international war criminal. The Democrats did this, said Bush lied. That was the key to the argument because otherwise they'd have to explain why they supported the war. And just to forecast what I’m going to say throughout this and in the end, they were able to do this because of the ineptitude of the Bush administration itself. The greatest failure of the Bush administration has been the failure to provide political support to our troops in Iraq and to the war in Iraq, and, of course, then ultimately to the War on Terror. Bush lied, people died -- this is itself the biggest lie of the war, that Bush lied to deceive the Democrats into supporting the war, let alone the American people, because every Democratic senator, every single one who voted for or against the war had on his or her desk a 100-page report called the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing all of our intelligence on Iraq. We live in a democracy, and that means that the opposition party gets to see all our secrets. The Senate Intelligence Committee has oversight over the intelligence agencies. The head of the CIA reports to the Senate Intelligence Committee. They're the authority. John Kerry sat on that committee, Diane Feinstein, Jay Rockefeller, and other Democrats. If any of them had any question about the intelligence on Iraq, all they had to do was ask it, and the answer would be on their desk within 24 hours. And this is only one of the big Democratic lies about this war. Another lie is, of course, that Iraq was no threat. Well, if Iraq was no threat in 2003, how do you explain that Afghanistan was a threat on September 10, 2001? Al Gore has said Iraq, in his recent book, The Assault on Reason -- which is a perfect description of the book -- he said, "Iraq posed no threat because it was a fragile and unstable nation." Well, Afghanistan is a much poorer country than Iraq, practically just out of the Stone Age. It is fragile and unstable, driven by tribal rivalries. Yet, it didn't invade two countries the way Iraq had. It didn't use poison gas on its own people the way Saddam Hussein had. It hadn't tried to assassinate an American president the way Saddam Hussein had. But it did provide refuge for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. And what 9/11 showed, and what the Democrats are in absolute denial over, is that a very poor and fragile nation, because it has sovereignty, if it provides protection, provides an operating base for an organization like Al Qaeda, it can kill 3,000 Americans in half an hour, could've killed 100,000 in half an hour, and was able to do what the Japanese and the Germans could not do throughout six years of the Second World War, which is to attack America on its mainland. That is the danger that we face. That's why we had to take down Saddam Hussein. Actually, Al Gore was saying something quite different in 2002. On February 2, 2002, which was right after the "Axis of Evil" speech, Bush -- the buildup to this war was a year coming, and really, the first announcement that Bush made of his intentions was the State of the Union speech in January 2002. We went to war the following year in March. What Bush said was there's an axis of evil in the world, and America is not going to allow itself to be attacked again as it was on 9/11, and he puts Saddam Hussein on note that he'd better comply with the arms control agreements from the Gulf War or else. Al Gore -- the Democrats, of course, a lot of them got all hot and bothered over that the same way they got hot and bothered when Ronald Reagan said the Soviet Union was an evil empire because, of course, we're the evil empire. That's what they think. But Al Gore gave his first foreign policy speech after the 2000 election. By the way, has anybody noticed that the Democrats -- remember they were all for the popular vote in 2000 as against the electoral vote, and now Barack Obama is going to be nominated by what essentially is an electoral vote? Enter the delusion that Democrats have any principles whatsoever except power. Al Gore gave a speech in which he supported the notion that Saddam was evil, and he specifically made reference to the "axis of evil" and said that was a good way to describe these countries. But he also said in that speech, and I quote, "Iraq was a virulent threat -- or is a virulent threat in a class by itself, and the United States is justified in pushing the limits in taking down or reining in Saddam Hussein." The third lie of this war is that you can support the troops but not the war. No, you can't. You cannot support the troops if you don't support their mission. You cannot tell a 19-year-old who's risking his life in Iraq, surrounded by terrorists, that he's with the bad guys, that he's the aggressor, that he's the occupier, that it's the wrong war in the wrong place, he shouldn't be there, and not sap his fighting morale, which means getting him killed. If you think that your cause isn't just and you're out there, you take away from a soldier his main strength. You also deprive him of allies, and you also encourage his enemies, and that's what the Democrats have done for the last five years. What changed their attitude on Iraq? In 2003, March, they supported the war. In July, they were against the war and saying that it was basically a rape of Iraq. That's basically what their line was. What changed? Well, nothing in Iraq and nothing in those three months. We had a lightning war, we took down Saddam Hussein, and we were just beginning to face the resistance after the war was over. It was a time to rally around the president and call for more troops if that was what was necessary or whatever other constructive criticism you could offer. What changed for the Democrats was that a left-wing extremist named Howard Dean was about to win the Democratic Party nomination. He got 45% in the MoveOn.org poll. That's what changed the Democratic Party. The anti-Vietnam left had powered the Howard Dean campaign to a front-runner position, and that's when Kerry and Edwards flipped. And if things in the world were right and we had a well-ordered society, John Kerry and John Edwards, for flipping 180 degrees on a war vote, would have been drummed out of public life forever. Instead, this is the -- theirs is the theme now of the Democratic Party, including Hillary, who voted for the war but now says it was George Bush's war. What the Democratic Party has done for five years is conducted a psychological warfare campaign against this country. If you read the psychological warfare textbooks, the first task of a psychological warfare team is to destroy the credibility and moral character of the opposing commander in chief, to destroy the rationale, the justice of the opposing side's war, and that's all the Democratic Party has done for the last five years. And, of course, they've been aided and abetted in this by the nation's press. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times have destroyed at least three major national security programs by leaking classified information to the enemy. You're all familiar with these. One was the NSA program -- the NSA program for monitoring the calls. When they captured Sheikh Khalid Muhammad, for example, the mastermind of 9/11, they got his computer. They got Ramsey Youssef's computer, and on the computer is a little phone book. So the -- our intelligence agencies were putting the names of the contacts of Sheikh Khalid Muhammad and these other Al Qaeda terrorists, just put it into a computer and you monitor all international phone calls to see who they're contacting. That's what the program was. The only way the program could work is if it were secret because once you tell them, they take measures to avoid it, which is the same thing that happened with the program to monitor the flow of terrorist money with the cooperation of international financial institutions. The Bush administration, when they were told by The Times' editors that they were going to print these stories, begged them not to do it because it would jeopardize the lives of 300 million Americans, and of course, our forces overseas. The New York Times went ahead and printed this classified information. The government officials -- and we have a huge problem in our government in the State department in the CIA of people like Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson, who are lifelong members of the Left, who want this country to lose -- certainly, they want the Bush administration to lose the War on Terror and are prepared to break this country's laws and commit acts of treason in order to sabotage our programs. The CIA people or whoever it was who leaked this information about these programs committed treason. The New York Times aided and abetted that treason by publishing it. The Bush administration was so spineless in fighting this domestic sabotage movement that it didn't subpoena the editors of the New York Times. Why wasn't there a Justice Department subpoena for the editors of The Times and the Post that say give up the names of these people who have violated our national security and committed treason. They did that with -- to protect Valerie Plame. They put Judith Miller in jail, the Times reporter, to get her to divulge who leaked the name of Valerie Plame. Of course, we now know that the leakage came from a saboteur of the President's policy in the State Department, Richard Armitage. And who did he leak it to? He leaked it to a conservative journalist who happens to be an opponent of the war in Iraq. Now, again, we live in a democracy, and that means we have a procedure for changing policy. If you don't like a policy, you argue, you persuade the American people, you elect a different government, different representatives, and they change the policy. That's the way it's done. You don't publish national security secrets on the front pages of your newspaper so that the terrorists can read it and change their method of operation and go on with their bloody business, but that's exactly what's happened. And the deafening silence of the Bush administration over these acts is why we're in the really troublesome position we're in because we have the possibility now of electing as president of the United States a man who came out of the communist movement. We have -- at Discoverthenetworks.org, which is one of our websites, which is an encyclopedia of the Left -- we have a feature called Barack's World. If you just read the people that he has been associated -- it's not like associated like he signed a statement against capital punishment and a member of the Communist Party also signed it. This is not what we're talking about. These were his political allies. These were the people who made his career. And you will find among them one state legislator in Illinois, Alice Palmer, is a Stalinist. I mean this, in the late '80s, was defending of the Soviet Union. This is very, very troubling. He had just made David Bonier his Middle East expert. David Bonier is a radical. Throughout the '80s he was supporting the communist guerillas in El Salvador, and he was one of the three who went to Iraq to say that Saddam Hussein isn't such a bad guy and our president is a liar right before the war, which was another act of treason. Democrats say, "Oh, you're questioning our patriotism." Well, what else is one to do? I mean you have a retched former president who is told by his own government not to conduct a private foreign policy with the terrorists in Hamas, whom he's busy apologizing for and legitimizing, and he goes and does it anyway. He takes a Nobel Prize that was designed -- a peace prize, so called -- designed by the Leftists who gave it to him to slap his own president in the face, this, when we're in a confrontation with the monster, Saddam Hussein, was an open defiance of international law. And this, of course, is what the war was about. If you look at the authorization, the Congressional authorization for the use of force in Iraq, which the Democrats endorsed, there are 23 whereas clauses. That's why we went to war. Only two of them mention stockpiles of WMDs. 12 of them are about U.N. resolutions, and these U.N. resolutions are all resolutions to try to enforce the Gulf War truce. We left Saddam in power, mistake number one, on the condition that he allow U.N. inspectors into his country and with free access to go anywhere to make sure that he didn't resume his programs to build weapons of mass destruction, which he had already spent 40 or $50 billion on, and the U.N. inspectors went in in the first place, catalogued the weapons that he had actually already built. Saddam threw these inspectors out, and, well, we removed them when he made it impossible for them to do their work in 1998. That's why there was an Iraqi liberation act. People forget there were no U.N. inspectors there when Bush came to power. Tonight, you're going to hear from Doug Feith. He was Undersecretary of Defense in the Bush administration and was Rumsfeld's Chief Strategist at the Pentagon. He had 1,500 people under him to plan the War on Terror. And Feith has written a book called War and Decision, in which he explains how on 9/11 there were -- already, they -- of course, they were discussing Iraq, and they were discussing Iraq in this context. If we just hit the individuals who blew up 9/11, we would be ignoring the fact that there is a global jihad against the West and against us, that it is not just based in Afghanistan. It is global. This is the -- another thing that, of course, the Democrats are in total denial over. They want to think -- they want people to believe that the War on Terror is about a couple of guys in a cave in Waziristan that we need to hunt down. Well, Osama bin Laden has been effectively neutralized in that cave. The fact that he's in a cave in Waziristan tells you quite a bit already. But the fact is that we're facing a global movement. It could include 10 million, 15 million, 150 million, 750 million people in its pool of support, and its people that they can recruit from. What Feith said was that in their discussions, they said we have to hit, we have to make a decisive blow against world terror. We can't just pick the individuals. We can't just go after Afghanistan. And, therefore, the confrontation with Saddam Hussein was to avoid a purely defensive war. That is, we needed to get a guy who had provided refuge for the people who blew up the World Trade Center, who was holding terrorist conferences, who was in active defiance of these U.N. resolutions, and who had shown that he wanted to build weapons of mass destruction. We have to rein him in. And the reason was this. I think the chapter is called something like, Our Way of Life. If you fight a defensive war, that is, you got hit and you find the individuals who did it, then the only way to keep Americans from -- America from tremendous catastrophes is to fight defensively, and that means to give up all of our liberties. People say Bush destroyed the Constitution; no, he hasn't. This is --, if anything, a too-free country, where a major political party can commit treason and everybody's too polite to mention that. They would have to lock down every major building. You know, you get on trains now. Of course, it worries me a little bit when I get on a train. There's no security on trains. You know, our grids are probably not secure. They would have to take away -- everybody would have to be fingerprinted. You'd have to -- and so forth and so on. It's bad enough what goes on in airports. This would have to go on everywhere. And they said, "We don't want to give up our way of life, and therefore, we have to go on the offensive." And that's why the confrontation with Iraq. Now, I've got news for everybody. There is no peace movement in this country, and there was no peace movement on the war in Iraq. If there was a peace movement before the war in Iraq, why weren't they demonstrating at the Iraqi Embassy and saying, "Saddam Hussein, you need to obey the U.N. Security Council resolutions, all 17 of them." There was not a single demonstration at the Iraqi Embassy. There is an anti-American movement which sucks in well-meaning people, some well-meaning people, to attack the United States and its policies. Feith had an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal, and it's about the way -- it's a milder criticism than I've given this morning about the way the Bush administration has fought the political battle over Iraq. And that is, what's the rationale for the war? Rationale for the war became -- it originally was this. It originally was that Saddam Hussein disobeyed a U.N. Security Council resolution which said, "You will do this or else," and gave him a deadline, which was three months before we actually invaded, which he failed. How do I know that he failed it? Well, because I've read Hans Blix's book. Blix, as you'll remember, was the socialist -- Swedish socialist pacifist who was the U.N. weapons inspector, but at least in his book, he's honest enough to say that Saddam Hussein was given a war ultimatum by a unanimous vote of the Security Council, which he defied. That's the rationale for the war, but the only person that I heard consistently say that is Sean Hannity on Fox. He's the only one. That's why we went to war: because Saddam Hussein defied a Security Council resolution which said, "Do this or else." As soon as he did that, Britain and the United States said that he was in breach of the Security Council resolution, and that's when the war decision was really taken, and that was in December. We went to war in March. The famous Colin Powell speech -- what's happened is that people sabotaged the policy all along the way, and Colin Powell was one of the opponents of the Bush policy, so in England, the Left, the anti-American pro-Jihad Left turned out 700,000-strong. It's like having -- in the streets of London in January. That's like having four million Republicans descend on Washington to oppose a Bush policy. So Tony Blair begged the Bush administration to go back and try to get a second U.N. resolution, and unfortunately -- and of course, Colin Powell was a strong advocate of this -- and, unfortunately, Bush caved, and he went -- we went back to the U.N., and that's when Colin Powell gave the famous speech where he overstated the threat of weapons of mass destruction. So that when they weren't discovered because, thanks to the Democratic opposition, we couldn't go into Syria and get them, when they weren't discovered, that rationale for the war was gone, and the Bush administration switched to the democracy rationale. Very, very hard to convince the American people that the Iraqis are going to be Democrats in the near future. Of course, it's much better than having Saddam Hussein as a dictator, but when you try to sell the war as a democracy movement and it goes on for five years, people get tired, and they just don't -- and I think there's a lot of conservatives who don't understand why we're in that war. This is not a minor failure of the Bush administration; this is a colossal failure of the Bush administration in the selling of the war. This war was to protect the American people, and it still is to protect the American people, and that's the only thing that you're going to win a political battle on in this country. The Bush administration has collapsed totally on the War on Terror in its second term except for the surge in Iraq. Remember, we went into Afghanistan to deny the terrorists a sovereign base, a territorial base. That's why we did it. That's why we put the screws on Saddam Hussein. That is our big victory in the war in Iraq to deny Iraq to the terrorists. But in the last two years, there have been two new terrorist states created, Lebanon and Gaza. And the Bush administration, its response to this, well, it's nothing in Lebanon, nothing in Gaza, but to prevent the West Bank from also becoming a part of this jihad, they are propping up a terrorist named Mahmoud Abbas and spending your dollars to do it, half a billion dollars to support a terrorist army. So we are losing -- while we're winning the battle in Iraq, we're losing the battle in the Middle East, and the next president or maybe this president is going to face a huge crisis as Iran moves to get its nuclear weapon. So, sorry to begin the morning with such a gloomy picture. I don't know what it is with Republicans. I don't understand why they [won't fight]. I mean there are really good people in the Republican Party. One of them is here today, Ed Royce. This is a really good man. Those of you who can support party people, I hope you will support Ed. There are good people. We don't have a visible national leader. I think for all his many faults, John McCain has been good on the war. There were two contrasting interviews that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly by Jeffrey Goldberg, who's an exceptionally good reporter -- one, an interview with Barack Obama, and the other with McCain. And when asked about the Middle East, Barack Obama says it's a sore that's infecting American policy. That means that he accepts the rationale for their movement for a new genocide of the Jews by the Arabs and the Muslims. Iran, as you know, is not an Arab country, but it is a Muslim country -- accepts their rationale. And, obviously, since we have no leverage whatsoever with the terrorists, that means that Israel will be pressured to give up more territory and bring itself closer to national suicide. That's the Barack Obama Middle East policy. McCain understands. He says this is the terrorist challenge. That is who we're facing. When you're looking at Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran, you are looking at the Jihad. And people have somewhat forgotten Jimmy Carter. Iran used to be our greatest ally in the Middle East. Jimmy Carter made Iran the target of his human rights campaign and caused the Shah's regime to topple. Jimmy Carter supported the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose revolution was to create the first Islamic radical -- Islamofascist state. Andrew Young, our Ambassador in the United Nations in the Carter administration, called the Ayatollah Khomeini a saint. That's how this all began. Well, although -- I'm open for questions. I just wanted to give us a little optimism because, as Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Stalinist, who was the darling of American faculty, once said that the task of the revolutionary is to have pessimism of the intellect -- conservatives can understand that -- but optimism of the will. This is a very resilient country. We don't wake up quickly. America is too happy a country, and there are too many things to do in it. If you remember, Hitler occupied all of Europe. In April 1941, all of Western Europe was controlled by Hitler except for England. The Japanese controlled all of Southeast Asia, Manchuria. And Gallup took a poll. In April 1941, 81% of the American people wanted to stay out of the war. We went to war because of Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, I mean that's what it takes. This atrocity that wakes Americans up would be much greater. Our task is to try to wake up the country before that happens. I'll take a few questions. Unidentified Audience Participant: Thank you, David. That was amazing. You mentioned there were three acts of treason. One was the computers thing. I know one was the cell phone thing. David Horowitz: It's the CIA interrogations. Yeah, the rendition. Unidentified Audience Participant: The camps in Eastern Europe. Unidentified Audience Participant: If we are in a global movement of a war here, where did the Saudis fit in? Where do open borders fit in? Where does massive Muslim integration on skids fit in? And where does Steven [Conklin] -- fired from our State Department fit in? David Horowitz: Yeah, if you can't name the enemy, to take the last one, as the kind of template -- of the collapse of the Bush administration's War on Terror -- they now have a policy of not using the word Islam in connection with terror -- we are facing a fanatical religious global movement-- of course, whenever there's a genocide, Jews seem to be first in line, but the Christians are close behind. Hindus -- this is an imperial religion. It's not a religion of peace. Of course, there are lots of Muslims that want peace. That's not the issue. The issue is a religion whose prophet was not a carpenter preaching peace but a warrior preaching the destruction of every other religion. That's what Muhammad was about. There was a saying of the prophet [Muhammad Ahadeef], which we have taken on in college campuses. You can find it on the University of Southern California website. The Muslim Students Association quotes the [Ahadeef], which says, "Redemption will come when Muslims fight Jews and kill them, when Jews hide behind the rocks and the trees, and the rocks and the trees cry out, "Oh, Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him." Now, you will search the Old and New Testaments forever to find a genocidal incitement like that. Of course, borders are part of this issue. This is the only country in the world which doesn't have borders that are controlled. Mexico has them, but we don't. And the fact that this is a political battle is just again a sign of the problem. Now, it's, of course, one of the virtues of America to be a tolerant society and to give everybody the benefit of the doubt, but we also suffer from that virtue. And the -- you know, again, the positive thing is that the American people are waking up on that issue and that they stop this terrible immigration bill. There is no immigration bill that is going to be a decent bill until they start deporting illegals, and I don't know why the Bush administration doesn't understand this, and I hope the McCain one will, and if it doesn't, we're going to have to fight on that issue. And I forgot, Sandy, your other two. Unidentified Audience Participant: We have 50,000 Somali Muslims in Columbus, Ohio. David Horowitz: Yes. I mean this is, again, this is the -- this is connected to the border issues, the whole immigration issue. There was a soft jihad going on, which we are finding on the college campuses, that needs to be fought. I mean you're absolutely right. That is a huge -- it's a huge problem. It's all part of the political problem. If you don’t know who your enemy is, you can't defend yourself against them. And the enemy is radical Islam, or Daniel calls it Militant Islam or Solafi Islam, Mohabi Islam. We know exactly what it is, but there is a general problem in Islam. If they're going to come into our societies, they need to accept our ways. We don't accept -- we don’t have to accept their ways. We're not having people wearing burkas getting drivers licenses. We're not going to change our ways because we are a multi-religious, multi-ethnic society. And the first thing for American citizenship is will you accept the fact that this is not a Muslim country and may never want to be one. If we did that, we would have organizations like CAIR, which is an arm of the Muslim brotherhood, not have FBI heads come to their dinners and legitimize them. We have an enormous political battle in this country, and the fact of the matter is that it's not just our organization but Daniel's organization and others -- Steve Emerson, and Frank Gafney. This is where the battle is going to be taking place, the immigration organizations. [Chris Bergard] here is fighting the immigration battle. It's going to be a grassroots battle because the minute somebody is running for office, they have to think about their coalition they have to put together. And our society is set up to assimilate people and to bring them into our coalitions, but you can't bring it to your coalition a group whose intention is to destroy you. [Mike Cutler]: Good morning. I'm Mike Cutler. You know, we're going to be talking tomorrow about immigration, but what concerns me, and I've been around the country talking to people, is that when you have 20 million people in your country whose identities are unknown and unknowable, you have a major national security risk, and we've been sending border patrol agents to secure the Iraqi border and leaving our own border wide open. And I think that this also -- and maybe you disagree with me -- but I think this has led to the people that fight against the war in Iraq saying, listen, if we were serious about terrorism, how can we have our borders wide open, how do we naturalize people who wind up working for the FBI who are really spying on us for Hezbollah and so forth? So I think it's made it harder to sell the war and sell the other aspects of the counter-terrorism movement. David Horowitz: I mean the selling of the war has to do with why are we fighting? You know, are we fighting to create a democracy in a country which is Muslim, -- I mean the president is a Jew-hating Shia of Iraq. You know, it's a total political battle. It's not one or the other. And I wouldn't pay very much attention to the arguments used by the Left because the argument -- there was an SDS issue. It was called, whatever, SDS notes, and somebody wrote, "The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution." The issue is never the issue. The issue is always defeating the United States. We are the great Satan. That is -- the United States is the fount of evil in the world. It's corporate America that is the enemy. And every principle -- every argument in the Left flows from that. I mean they'll go on either side of any question if it serves that end. That's what guides them, so don't pay too much attention to their arguments. Unidentified Audience Participant: You used a word that's fallen out of favor, assimilation. The code word now is integration, which is multi-culturalism. It's taking the colored marbles and just shaking them up, but they're separate and distinct. David Horowitz: This is part of the entire battle. Look, the battle is about America. That's what the battle is about. Assimilation meant you become an American, which means you accept certain values. One of them is tolerance. Now, you know, I've probably met all of the moderate Muslims. The issue is accepting American tolerance, and that's part of this whole issue. Of course, to say they should assimilate to America, what, to the beast? Come on. This is what the Left is about. You have to step inside the Left's mentality. The first principle of the Left is America is wrong. You know, they'll say they love America. You know, they love the prairies and the purple mountains, and they also love t the America that they envision when we're all socialists. This America, they don't love. Unidentified Audience Participant: Well, one of the things you bring up, that the Left is so clever in their tactics. For example, the ACLU is behind this "recreate 68" to disrupt the Democratic convention in Denver. Unidentified Audience Participant: They have asked -- they have had the audacity to ask to sue the City of Denver for the police to reveal their tactics and how they're going to deal with dissidents. When they were told the police wouldn't reveal their tactics, they backed up, and they said, "Well, we don't want to know exactly what tactics they're going to use; we want to know how the police are spending our taxpayer money, what are their budgets being used for." So I mean how do you counter such clever sabotage? We're not there. David Horowitz: Well, I don't know, in this particular case, I like the sabotage. The Left is devilish in its arguments. I agree that it's a problem. Everything is specific. We need to protect the police. We need to protect our military. If we can't protect our national security secrets, how can we protect the local police in there? It is a completely holistic problem that is all connected. The first issue is the political battle. Who is the enemy? That's the first thing. And the second is -- and I've written a book on this, Unholy Alliance -- who are our domestic enemies. And, yes, we have them. When the issue of patriotism comes up, you don't have to look into somebody's heart and see what their true intentions are. You see what their acts are, and if they're not respecting our constitutional democracy, which means instead of electing people who disagree with the policy, they sabotage the policy by leaking national security secrets, they're not patriots. They're disloyal, and they need to be treated that way. Unidentified Audience Participant: David, I read a book a few years ago called While Europe Slept. Did you read that? David Horowitz: Bruce Bawer's book. Unidentified Audience Participant: Yes. Thank you. I think that there's a lot to be learned from what he said and what Europe has learned is where they let the Sharia law in their communities. David Horowitz: Europe has historically, obviously, a much more powerful Left. The Left in this country is more powerful than it's ever, ever, ever been. It has totally infiltrated the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. Europe is worse. I was at a conference last year at Pepperdine, where a European said Islam will never take over Europe because -- I mean there was a little bit of a, shall we say, paternalistic view -- but because European societies are so complex, Islamists wouldn't be able to understand them. And I pointed out that the whole European Left is their ally, and they certainly understand the complexity of European societies and know how to subvert them. And that's what's happened in all these countries.
david horowitz used to be a heavy duty leftist.
it would be interesting to know what turned him the other way.
ping for later
Saving BUMP. Every college indoctrinated young adult and each leftist of any age should have this as required reading; those who simply don’t know any better and are intellectually honest (there HAVE to be a few) will change their stripes.
mark for later reading
thanks for the reply. (will get to the library today to borrow it.)
thanks again.
One of the things that turned him was the brutal murder of one of his friends by the Black Panthers.
No fair “Sex and the City” always stayed off politics.
Bkmrk for future reference!
“one of the things that turned him was the brutal murder of one of his friends by the black panthers.”
thanks for the reply.
just got the book from the library. can’t wait to read about the circumstances.
good summer
Long read, but well worth the effort. Terrifying stuff.
Too bad that the STupid Party will not follow David’s splendid advice on how to defeat the socialist pacifist Dems. He makes too much sense.
Yup, we should be absolutely relentless, and it’s anything but. It’s as if we’ve almostly completely lost the will to fight for what’s right.
You know, I used to think the country would be better off with Hussein Obama as POTUS so that the GOP can rise from the ashes of a failed Obama administration rather than allow a RINO to be POTUS (and there is no doubt that Obama would fail).
Now, I am wondering if this is such a good idea because Hussein is so terrible we may not recover.
I am not sure whether to vote for McCain or stay home. I guess the VEEP will be the tiebreaker for me.
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