Who is David Horowitz?

I’ll allow him to introduce himself: “My name is David Horowitz. I am a well-known author and media commentator and am the president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a non-profit public interest organization supported by the contributions of 40,000 individuals.”

That was the beginning of his testimony in the Kansas state legislature, where he had arranged for hearings to take place about a national initiative he was trying to spearhead called the Academic Bill of Rights. He was being modest–he also runs the Frontpage conservative commentary web site (but not too modest; three months after his testimony, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture was renamed “The David Horowitz Freedom Center”).

David Horowitz, the ex-student radical, had founded a group called “Students for Academic Freedom” and was using it to launch an attack on leftist academia by claiming that the professors were indoctrinating their students with vile anti-Americanism. His 2006 book, entitled “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,” is another in a long list of salvos in Horowitz’s distinguished career as an academic provocateur, the kind liberals want to punch in the face (or at least throw a pie at). In November, he took the “Academic Bill of Rights” road show to the the Pennsylvania State Legislature. Horowitz contributed pages and pages of testimony of pernicious academic bias among liberal professors to a committee report on “academic freedom” which Horowitz himself had engineered.

In the end, the committee ended up throwing out all of Horowitz’s testimony, which they found biased and unverifiable, and concluded that the widespread abuses he cited were non-existent. Horowitz howled that the “union lobby not only rewrote the findings and recommendations of the Academic Freedom Report, they eviscerated the report itself eliminating the summary of what the report found.” But the story of the Committee’s indulgence and rejection of Horowitz’s accusations follows a familiar storyline in his career: when held up to the light, his claims often go up in smoke.

SPUN OF WHOLE CLOTH

Here’s a staple Horowitz retraction:

Horowitz has said several times that a biology professor at Pennsylvania State University used a class session just before the 2004 election to show the Michael Moore documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, but he acknowledged Tuesday that he didn’t have any proof that this took place.

In a phone interview, Horowitz said that he had heard about the alleged incident from a legislative staffer and that there was no evidence to back up the claim.

Not your taste in hype? Perhaps you’d prefer that old chestnut from 2005, entitled “Correction: Some Of Our Facts Were Wrong; Our Point Was Right”:

I have not conducted a “campaign against what [Horowitz] calls political bias in college classrooms.” In fact I have never used the term “political bias in college classrooms.” I assume that everyone has a bias. I am not concerned about bias in the classroom.

…So while we apologize for not having fully checked and corrected this story, we conclude that our complaint about the exam was justified.

For a guy who decries media hoaxes like the Al Sharpton-managed Tawana Brawley spectacle of the 1980s, one wonders what would happen if Horowitz’s campaigns got the same media attention and his advocacy was scrutinized.

Horowitz says that Students for Academic Freedom is a non-partisan group. But its hawk-like scrutiny seems to be narrowly focused on history and political science professors (to say nothing of the idea of a Womens’ Studies department); science professors are curiously exempt from these attacks, unless somebody starts a rumor that a biology professor adjourned class to watch a Michael Moore movie.

For all the posturing about their non-partisanship, SAF is doing a lousy job protecting some of its constituents. The following complaint was lodged against the “U of A” (the “A” wasn’t specified):

I was in a biology class (I have since dropped) and the teacher would let me question her on evolution and said, “Mr. Shelters, if you don’t like it, you can leave” Why can’t we talk about God’s creation in biology since I know my mom wasn’t a monkey. Who is she, the thought police? I didn’t know we became a communist state. The only one that was an ape was her.

Here’s a clear example of the kind of bias against a student Horowitz should be touting. But curiously, SAF has never written about evolution, which is a much more contentious debate in education policy (if not within the ranks of scientists themselves). Horowitz has never really been comfortable with the Religious Right, but he has achieved some sort of non-aggression pact with them. The opponents of Horowitz’s initiative see beyond its ‘libertarian’ roots and into a world where the teaching of accepted scientific fact could be criminalized. Where Holocaust deniers are on the same academic footing as history professors. They wonder whether Derrida could be held against them in a court of law.

Whether you see him as an articulate champion of conservative values or a smear-merchant with a modest flair for show biz, David Horowitz is a particularly fascinating character. His raison d’etre can be summed up as revenge against his former fellow-travelers on the left. Horowitz once wrote,

[T]he new radicalism is the old Weatherman race war brought up to date (if a reactionary religious fanaticism can ever be said to be “up to date”). Globalization is depicted as the white man’s aggression on the nonwhite races of the world. It is American capitalism vs. Third World victims. The prison networks, the “social justice” organizations, the anti-globalist protesters are the Fifth Column vanguards envisaged by Weatherman, declaring war on the Empire and plotting to tear down its walls from within.

It is no exaggeration to describe Horowitz as a conspiracy theorist. His vision of the left is a network of terrorist and Communist sympathizers at best and traitors at worst. And he knows where to peddle his claims.

DISCOVER THE NETWORK

“Discover the Network” is Horowitz’s crowning achievement. By linking his old Marxist foes to the new spectre of Islamist terrorism, he has updated his signature canard, made it relevant and reinvigorated for the new millenium. His recently published opus in the field, “Unholy Alliance,” is helpfully subtitled, “Radical Islam and the American Left.” The problem is, it’s patent bullshit.

The introduction to the “Visual Maps” where Horowitz literally draws these links is preceded by a methodological disclaimer:

The visual maps indicate direct affiliations between groups, funders, and individuals. Any one of the following criteria is considered sufficient to justify linking one group to another:

1. both groups are officially recognized members of the same coalition or umbrella organization;
2. the groups have endorsed, co-sponsored, or actively worked together on a particular project or event;
3. the groups identify one another as affiliated organizations;
4. one group is a “front” group for the other;
5. the groups are signatories to the same major document regarding their positions on a particular issue;
6. or a prominent official of one group is also a major player in the other group. Each group’s profile will generally make reference to whichever of the aforementioned criteria apply; this will help readers to ascertain the nature of the affiliations between the various groups that are linked together in any given map.

The individuals linked to any given group are those who are (or have been) directly involved in that group’s leadership or its activities. The funders linked to a given group are those foundations which have given financial support to the group, or which have in common with the group a particular individual holding prominent posts in each entity.

If you have 2-5 minutes’ worth of patience, a springy, wobbly Java interface lets you click through a social universe of left-wing acdemics and activists, non-profits, Islamic charities and anti-discrimination groups, coroporate foundations, industry groups and so on. Each click redraws the screen with the selected name as the center of a wobbly jellyfish of names, slowly creeping together to surround their common link. As a computer programmer, I applaud whoever made this application; it’s visual poetry, really.

It’s a pity that it’s merely a toy. DTN shows these links out of context because they would spoil the fun. Horowitz says, “the friend of my enemy is my enemy,” and that’s the impetus for this site.

The center of the leftist universe, according to DTN, is the Ford Foundation, which appears as the first central link. Did you know, according to the site, that the Ford Foundation is directly connected to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman? For some reason, the Ford Foundation isn’t mentioned in DTN’s profile on Abdel-Rahman. A quick Google search turns up the following citation from Horowitz’s Frontpage magazine, written by contributor Alyssa A. Lappen:

The same Ford Foundation that funded anti-Semitic NGOs at the UN Conference Against Racism in Durban also finances CRF’s Service Learning Network. The mainstays of CRF’s Islam section are apologetics. The tolerance segment includes a link to the Council on American Islamic Relations, whose communications director Ibrahim Hooper griped to Seattle’s Times on “misuse” of Arabic script—a month after CAIR friends and affiliates attended a terrorist conference in Beirut.[2] The Times missed that news, meetings CAIR had arranged for radical Bassam Alamoush (for whom murdering a Jew is a “good deed” that needs no religious decree)—and CAIR board member Siraj Wahaj’s testimony in favor of convicted terrorist Sheik Omar Abdul-Rahman. Since 2002, several CAIR officials have been arrested and linked to al-Qaeda.

Already, it seems like the diagram is cheating a little. On Discover the Network, the connection between Ford and Rahman is direct and unmistakable. But according to Frontpage the connection is a bit more complicated: Ford gave money to the Constitutional Rights Foundation (A). The CRF links to CAIR on an educational section about “Civil Liberties in Wartime.” (B) One CAIR member testified as a character witness in the trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (C).

I guess DTN lists a direct connection between Abdel-Rahman and the Ford Foundation because they want to get the point across, but the link fails to qualify under their own criteria as “direct.” The “Blind Sheikh” who was convicted of aiding the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 is neither an officially recognized member nor major player at the Ford Foundation. They have not “endorsed, co-sponsored, or actively worked together on a particular project or event.” Neither the sheikh nor the non-profit identify one another as affiliated organizations and neither one can be said to be a “front” for the other, and they are not “signatories to the same major document regarding their positions on a particular issue.”

The Ford-Blind Sheikh connection just happened to be the first link I noticed, and it’s not fair to assume the whole site is based on this kind of chicanery. (I still have some questions about the Saddam-Al Qaeda link in the database, however.) More importantly, DTN has a deep design flaw: the “map” exists in its own universe, an amorphous blob of vanishing connections which purport to map the left without coordinates or perspective. The word ‘nebulous’ comes to mind; a hazy cloud of innuendo and loose links.The entire left becomes morally equivalent, revolving around each other without a sense of where these groups fall ideologically with respect to each other and the political landscape.

But that’s not the biggest problem with the idea of DTN. The major issue is that their link-based analysis is worthless, a trifle on the level of the party game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” In fact, the link between Kevin Bacon and, say, Elvis Presley, is stronger than the featured link between the Ford Foundation and Omar Abdel-Rahman, and it makes about as much sense. DTN’s method of linkages resemble Rube Goldberg cartoons, and it’s easily manipulated. Consider the following examples:

Much of Horowitz’s funding comes from Richard Mellon Scaife (A), billionaire philanthropist to mostly right-wing causes. But Scaife’s charitable foundations also fund Planned Parenthood (B) which DTN profiles as part of the network, and the pro-abortion group is also funded by dozens of “liberal” non-profits (C), not to mention in bed with the Democratic party and the apparently notorious American Express Foundation.

The Jack Abramoff affair (A) has implicated “Ralph Reed,” (B) a former head of the Christian Coalition (C), who recently co-signed a Net Neutrality document with MoveOn.org as well as Media Channel ourselves (D). Are we in bed with the disgraced GOP lobbyist? I suppose only time will tell.

Since DTN premiered a year ago, Horowitz has offered several half-hearted defenses of his methodology and presentation. Here’s a telling one:

The mere listing of these figures in the database was not intended to suggest that there are organizational links or common agendas or coinciding agendas between these individuals. On the other hand, Michael Moore has called the “resisters” in Fallujah “patriots” and “revolutionaries,” while denying that they are terrorists. Do Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Michael Moore have a common agenda? Evidently Michael Moore thinks so. Let’s name it: defeating the Great Satan — the imperialistic, invading and occupying war machine of the United States. It should be obvious that even the otherwise innocent Barbra Streisand shares negative views of the Bush Administration and its mission of liberating Iraq with anti-American jihadists like the aforementioned Zarqawi, even though we are sure that she deplores some of his methods. She also is a fan of Moore’s anti-American propaganda piece, Farenheit 9/11 and is not on record so far as we know condemning Moore’s film or his sympathies for the terrorists. If one were to read the profile of Ms. Streisand in the database, however, one would never make the mistake of regarding her as a Muslim fanatic bent on exterminating infidels. Our critics so far have not bothered to take this step or check what DiscoverTheNetwork actually says.

Horowitz, who crusades for academic standards, would surely get poor marks for his equivocation here. There is no subtlety to the link Hororwitz makes in the above excerpt between Michael Moore and Zarqawi, but if you want to use DTN to make the same point, you have to be willing to explain that Michael Moore (A) is connected to Gold Star Families For Peace (B), which has some association with “Al-Awda (Palestine Right to Return Coalition)”, a duplicate entry of “Palestine Right to Return Coalition (Al-Awda)” (C) which is linked to the Islamic Cricle of North America (D), [which is accused on Frontpage of being a front group for Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan (E) but on DTN is linked directly to Al-Qaeda (F)] who is then connected to Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi (G).

The recent election has thrown another wrench in Horowitz’s doctrinaire view of politics in America. If the majority of Americans hold the positions now that Michael Moore held in 2003 about the war in Iraq, does that mean the Fifth Pillar Horowitz is always warning us about is now the majority of the population? Horowitz talks a lot about “the left,” but what does that even mean anymore?

Let’s return to the idea of ‘mapping’ the left. America’s two-party system masks the fact that ‘left’ and ‘right’ don’t quite cover the range of debate. One simple way to visualize the interplay of social and economic politics is the political compass–a Cartesian plane where Authoritarianism is north and Libertarianism is south; Communism is west and neoliberalism is east.

David Horowitz, for example, seems to inhabit a certain niche on the right as a secular neoconservative. On the compass, he falls near Milton Friedman and the Libertarian Party: far to the right in economic terms, not far from center when it comes to social issues. A free-market economist with a slight preference for libertarianism over authoritarianism. A Republican loyalist who prefers the Bush spying program to the Clinton one and is still defending the war in Iraq.

The diagram at left is a map giving a little context to the political landscape. Here we see that the Democratic and Republican messages are closer than Horowitz’s own distance from Bush on social issues. (It is speculatively based on the research at the political compass site and my own approximation of Horowitz’s published views on the subjects of the questionnaire.)

Now that Republicans are on the retreat and seem to have alienated many libertarian loyalists who decry the record deficits and spending while having many conservatives are having second thoughts about the efficacy of ‘neocon’ military thinking — a double whammy. Horowitz’s audience would seem to be at an ebb tide for the next few years.

TERRORISTS FLANK FROM THE RIGHT

If we are to take Horowitz thesis seriously, the links between the groups on DTN have to mean something in and of themselves, not merely because they exist between two target groups. The five-link chain between Michael Moore and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi is used to back up the assertion that both men “have a common agenda.” Horowitz cites this goal as “defeating the Great Satan — the imperialistic, invading and occupying war machine of the United States.” The fact that Moore is an American citizen who wants to change his country’s foreign policy through democratic means and that Zarqawi wanted to beat back foreign troops (from an Arab country which was not his own) is not a useful distinction for Horowitz’s argument. As for Michael Moore’s declaration of war against the United States, I dug through the Frontpage archives and found a rhetorical connection between the filmmaker and the terrorist, in a letter to fans written in 2004:

The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not “insurgents” or “terrorists” or “The Enemy.” They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush?

Does saying “they will win” mark Moore as a fifth columnist because he wasn’t sufficiently optimistic? Is likening Islamists to the Founding Fathers in any way simply too much for a patriot to bear? And most importantly, does forecasting a defeat automatically put you on the side of those who stand to gain from this forseeable loss? What really holds the left and jihadists together?

Where DTN tries to quantify the connections between the left and jihadism; Frontpage attempts to qualify those links (they don’t always agree). The underlying assumption to both sites is that because the American left and the hard-right Islamist radicals share a common agenda point (US withdrawal from Iraq), that they must be complicit in a common front against America.

Is that all there is? What about social conservatives and Al-Qaeda? Islamism may have a cribbed some of their critique of American foreign policy from Noam Chomsky, but they are much more in sync with the theocratic movement in America than with the likes of Sean Penn or Nancy Pelosi. Chomsky’s notoriety among American conservatives is derived less from the fact that he criticizes U.S. foreign policy in no uncertain terms, but that he is himself an American writing from America. If Chomsky had been French or even Canadian, his “anti-Americanism” would have been much less notable. The strong hand the U.S. has used in foreign policy has garnered friends and enemies all over the world from across the political spectrum. Our national interest cannot be the same as every other countries’ national interests, and foreign opposition to our policies isn’t quite relevant to the left-right spectrum in America.

Both Islamic radicals and the Green party want the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq–a relatively narrow point of agreement, even if the position enjoys broad support all over the world. The question is, what else do they agree upon? In social terms, precious little. (In economic terms, Islamists advocate a market economy tempered by the religious obligation of Zakat, or charity, at odds with both the economic left and right.) In terms of social policy, Islamists are right-wingers both at home and compared to their counterparts in America; and one of Horowitz’s associates is about to make a bold connection between the Religious Right and radical Islam.

Dinesh D’Souza has been a professional conservative since founding the unabashedly right-wing Dartmouth Review in his college days. D’Souza (A) has written for Frontpage (B) and was a speaker at Horowitz’s Wednesday Morning Club (C); his latest book is entitled, “The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11″ and will be coming out in January. According to D’Souza,

“In this book I make a claim that will seem startling at the outset. The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11. … In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world. The Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage—some of it based on legitimate concerns, some of it based on wrongful prejudice, but all of it fueled and encouraged by the cultural left. Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.”

The books’ blurb continues:

We are accustomed to thinking of the war on terror and the culture war as two distinct and separate struggles. D’Souza shows that they are really one and the same. Conservatives must recognize that the left is now allied with the Islamic radicals in a combined effort to defeat Bush’s war on terror. A whole new strategy is therefore needed to fight both wars. “In order to defeat the Islamic radicals abroad,” D’Souza writes, “we must defeat the enemy at home.”

Surely this statement of solidarity with Islamists is on par with anything Michael Moore has said. In the same breath, D’Souza accepts Horowitz’s fifth columnist thesis and declares his alliegence to the goals of the Islamic right. Whether or not the argument holds water is another subject, but at least D’Souza can allow for some complexity in his worldview.

Horowitz is no social conservative. He supports gay rights and the separation of church and state, which places him squarely in the “cultural left,” even if he doesn’t campaign for socially progressive causes. Is Horowitz’s libertarian permissiveness contributing to terrorism? If it is, D’Souza will probably forgive him (being the Christian thing to do), but the irony remains–D’Souza has picked the weak link in Horowitz’s conservative armor in declaring his socially conservative Islamist sympathies.

As the Republican party struggles to bounce back from their defeat in the November 2006 elections, party unity has never seemed weaker. In the past, a coalition between libertarians like Horowitz and social conservatives (like D’Souza) has sustained the GOP. But the Bush presidency seems to be unravelling the Republican party by offending both fiscal conservatives outraged at record spending and religious conservatives disappointed by the lack of progress with their agenda, not to mention a wildly unpopular war. It remains to be seen how the internal power struggles within the party will affect the next Republican party platform.

Horowitz will continue his struggle against the left as long as he retains funding from the likes of Scaife and the Bradley Foundation (The John Olin Foundation, another of Horowitz’s big contributors, recently announced it is going out of business). Since the majority of his funding comes from a few foundations linked to right-wing stalwarts, he is financially immune to criticism. And as long as there are leftists in America, he will continue to harangue them.

But if, as Horowitz says, the friend of my enemy is his enemy, he’s running pretty low on friends.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Sorry, I should have sourced that map to the Political Compass project, at http://www.politicalcompass.org/

Eric, your own website says “Fiscally Conservative, Socially Tolerant” — wouldn’t that put you on the right economically and center-left socially? According to the Compass site, I’ve put the libertarian party in the same place Milton Friedman and Michael Badnarik appeared on their charts:

Horowitz is not worth the time and trouble. The mere fact that his books can be so easily debunked lets you know all you need to know. The fools and true believers who desperately want to put a positive spin on the Republicans make-the wealthy-wealthier-by-telling-lies strategy. The sad part is that a part of the democrats support this strategy. Enough to make certain it will succeed most of the time. Do I support tax cuts? A healthy economy? Of course, but these objectives don’t exist in a vacuum. The economy is going fine yet we still have billions in tax cuts? That might also be fine if we weren’t swimming in debt. The worst part of it is that the rich won’t suffer as they will simply move their money outside of the U.S. if the dollar and the economy tank. An option not open to most. Still, they may be cutting their own throats if they own large quantities of stock which will lose value as the dollar drops. Someone like Bill Gates comes to mind. If he were to sell all of stock rapidly, Microsoft’s stock would drop and he would lose Billions. Horowitz is just a loser trying to make a living. Either he’s intelligent enough to know he’s lying or he’s a fool.