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Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews by David Horowitz–Review by Lee Bender

By Lee Bender
June 15, 2015
Originally published in The Philadelphia Jewish Voice

Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews: The Black Book of the American Left Volume 4 is indispensable for anyone who cares about the so-called “War on Terror” and identifying who the real enemies are of the United States and Israel — and nothing less than our Judeo-Christian culture and values are at stake. David Horowitz is an unfairly maligned writer by the mainstream press, liberal-leftists and academia in particular, but he is fearless, daring to go right into the “belly of the beast” and speak at dozens of college campuses about topics that opponents cannot refute on the merits, resorting to name-calling, and lying about his facts, sentiments and record instead.

This quick reading volume, which contains many short chapters and speeches on Islamo-Fascism, The Middle East Conflict, and the Campus War on the Jews, will horrify readers unfamiliar with how academia perverts the very essence of what the university should stand for: freedom of expression and the open market of ideas. Instead, Horowitz shows how he is consistently vilified and misportrayed- to the point he needs armed guards to even enter assembly halls because of the threatening behavior of Muslim student groups in particular, and even some Jewish ones, who only want to shut him down and brand him a racist hater. Why? Because he challenged them to confront the jihadists (he is not afraid to use proper identifiers), who are in a disturbing alliance with anti-American radicals, who cannot stand his use of concepts to counter their empty cries of “Islamophobia” when he points to Islam’s oppression of women and homosexuals, its true goals of Islamizing the world, creating dhimmis (second class citizens) of Jews and Christians, and ultimately to destroy our freedoms and democracy. Their plans to destroy Israel and deny Jews a sovereign state of their own are shown as naked anti-Semitism. And Israel is merely the canary in the coal mine.

Horowitz is a rare, brave and original thinker, and unlike most of his critics, he has the street “cred” to prove it: he himself became a leading Marxist “theorist” in the early 1960s and one of the founders of the New Left. It was after Vietnam, however, that he began to re-examine the damage these views had inflicted upon the country and realized that the Left had left him. But you cannot afford to leave him. This book deserves a serious read by any honest broker.

Review of Volume IV – Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews

By Andrew C. McCarthy

In 1956, Nikita Krushchev, then the leader of world communism, gave what was supposed to be a secret speech about the crimes of Josef Stalin, including millions upon millions murdered. As David Horowitz has often recounted, the page-one publication of that speech byThe New York Times shook American communists to the core. These included such self-styled “Progressives” as Horowitz’s own parents, who were devastated by the news that validated claims long posited by anti-communists of the political right.

Yet, the discredited movement for “social justice” – which Horowitz defines as “equality enforced by government” – did not perish. The next generation, the “destructive generation,” launched a “new left,” fatuously believing its adherents would be untainted by the Soviet legacy of totalitarian repression and unlikely to repeat such crimes. Later, the Soviet empire’s collapse spawned predictions of the movement’s death that have proved greatly exaggerated. Instead, as Horowitz has observed, the collapse proved liberating (perhaps the only thing about social justice that can be said to be liberating) “because the utopian vision is no longer anchored in the reality of an existing socialist state,” enabling the modern left to “indulge its nihilistic agendas without restraint.”

The result has been predictable: The new left, Horowitz explains, is “no different from the old – embracing Communists in Vietnam and Central America and, eventually, Islamic totalitarians in Gaza and the Middle East.”

The last of this group, the vanguard of sharia supremacism, is the focus ofIslamofascism and the War Against the Jews, the recently released fourth volume of Horowitz’s conservative oeuvre, the collection called The Black Book of the American Left.

In it, the author expertly diagnoses Islamo-fascism, a term he undertook to popularize in 2007, amid the remarkably successful campaign by the Islamist-Leftist alliance to suppress examination of the scriptural moorings of jihadist terror. He also relates counter-offensives executed by the indispensible David Horowitz Freedom Center, taking the battle to the alliance’s home turf, America’s universities. The author also explores the alliance’s war of anti-Semitism – not of anti-Zionism, but an unremitting war of hatred for the Jewish people – the top agenda item of modern Islamo-fascism and the fuel for much of its agitation on campuses across the nation.

The neologism “Islamo-fascism” was made necessary by the United States government’s obtuse determination not to acknowledge, much less examine, the ideological basis of Muslim terrorism. This willful blindness has hardened into unbending policy – indeed, into farce – during the Obama years. Horowitz, however, correctly traces its origins to the George W. Bush administration’s preternatural indulgence of Muslim sensibilities even after jihadists killed nearly 3,000 Americans in the atrocities of September 11, 2001. Of course, it was not Muslim sensibilities the administration was seeking to placate; it was the cleverly orchestrated grievance-mongering ofthe Muslim Brotherhood.

Since its founding in Egypt in 1928, Horowitz relates that the Brotherhood has been the world’s most influential font of sharia supremacism, sharia being classical Islam’s repressive societal framework and legal code, rooted in Muslim scripture – the Koran, as well as sacralized accounts of the prophet Mohammed’s life, words and deeds. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the Brotherhood has methodically built an infrastructure of satellite organizations in the United States, much of which was laid bare in the Justice Department’s 2007-08 prosecution of a Hamas financing operation, the Holy Land Foundation case. Hamas self-identifies as the Brotherhood’s Palestinian jihadist wing, and support for its war to eradicate the Jewish state has been a top priority of the Brotherhood’s American network since the late 1980s.

Among the most significant of the Brotherhood satellites have been the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The MSA, which now boasts hundreds of chapters in universities throughout North America, is a Brotherhood breeding ground, indoctrinating students in organizational protocols as well as the virulently anti-Western, pro-jihadist writings of Islamist thinkers. Several top MSA leaders have gone on to become prominent members of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Chiefly, though, the MSA colludes with the left to undermine support for policies that promote American interests in the world and security at home.

CAIR was established in the early 1990s because the Brotherhood shrewdly perceived the need for a public relations arm that could, by masquerading as a civil rights organization, leverage American liberties against American interests – not least, the interest in combating jihadism both domestically and overseas.

The most effective gambit of the Islamist alliance with the left has been the promotion of an illusion, “Islamophobia.” As Horowitz illustrates, this contrivance was born in Islamist think-tanks for the specific purpose of smearing as racists commentators who engage in negative criticism of Islam – in particular, any effort to demonstrate Islamic doctrine’s straight-line nexus not only to jihadist terror but to the repression of women, the killing of homosexuals and apostates, and deep-seated animus against non-Muslims, especially Jews and Christians. Because these are undeniable features of their scripturally-rooted ideology, Islamists knew it was imperative to discourage public examination of their principles. The “Islamophobia” canard, exploiting the founding American tradition of religious tolerance, was an ingenious strategy to discredit and thus silence the messengers.

It worked to a fare thee well. Not only was the examination of our enemy’s ideology vilified on campus and in the media; the government – even as it fought jihadists on the battlefield and prosecuted them in the courts – accepted the fraudulent premises of Islamophobia. Turning for guidance to “Muslim community leaders” (i.e., Brotherhood-connected organizations like CAIR), law-enforcement and intelligence agencies suppressed mention of such terms “Islam” and “jihad” in connection with, well, Islamic jihad.

Moreover, as Horowitz shows in various contexts, nothing serves the Islamist-leftist alliance like a vacuum. With examination and discussion of the actual cause of jihadist terror – sharia supremacist ideology – muzzled, Islamists and leftists had an open field to offer their competing version of terrorism’s causes: American support for Israel, American counterterrorism policies, American aggression, American support of pro-Western dictators in Muslim countries, and the lack of social justice, which, of course, we are to believe is the beating heart of Islam.

Horowitz’s promotion of the term “Islamo-fascism” was a vital pushback against this onslaught. As he posits, the term “properly identified the religious nature of the jihadist threat along with its totalitarian implications – two hitherto-suppressed realities that were vital to understanding the enemy we faced.” The government retreated from the effort when a single utterance of the term by President Bush produced uproar from the Islamist-leftist alliance. Horowitz decided the best response was to take the fight to the source: the universities where the MSA was succeeding in banning scrutiny of the Islamists’ tyrannical creed.

Much of the book details these efforts and the unvarnished anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism they were met with on campuses across the country. At Columbia University, which happily played host to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – the then-president of Iran with decades of American blood on his hands, Islamists and leftists rabidly protested against Horowitz’s “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” Making space for “Islamophobic” arguments in the marketplace of ideas, they fretted, would prompt “hate crimes” against innocent Muslims and justify America’s wars of “aggression” and “occupation” – not liberation – in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At the University of California at San Diego, which has made an academic icon of Angela Davis (a lifelong communist, Soviet apologist, Black Panther confederate, and spewer of anti-white, anti-Jew and anti-American bile), Horowitz appeared during the libelous “Israeli Apartheid” week. In a post-speech question-and-answer session, he engaged a Muslim student with whom, following her commonplace refusal to condemn Hamas’s genocidal aspirations, he had the following exchange:

 Horowitz: … I am a Jew. The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. For it or against it?

Student: For it.

Horowitz thanked the student for showing anyone who cared to see exactly what is really going on in America’s universities. He could equally well have thanked her for clarifying what the jihad in Israel is really about: not the vindication of Palestinian human rights but the extermination of Jews.

For decades, and with singular clarity, Horowitz has exposed what is popularly rendered as “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” In reality, it is a continuation of the jihad seeking the Jewish state’s destruction begun in 1948. From the start, Arab Muslim states sought Israel’s annihilation, and the failure to achieve it in a war of naked aggression was considered the nakba – the catastrophe. With the help of the American left, Islamists have falsely portrayed the ceaseless jihad as a political conflict over disputed territory and a struggle against “occupation.” In point of fact, Islamists will be satisfied with nothing less than Israel’s destruction – and leftists with nothing left than the eradication of a liberty success story where Arabs live with more freedom and dignity than in any Islamic state.

Israel, Horowitz underscores, is the canary in America’s coalmine. Islamists and leftists seamlessly confederate in the West, notwithstanding significant differences (on, e.g., women’s rights, gay rights, and abortion), because our liberty culture is the chief obstacle to their totalitarian designs.

Islamists and Leftists see the war clearly and understand the imperative of keeping us blind, or at least silent. David Horowitz has made a career of unmasking our enemies, who cannot be defeated absent recognition of who and what they are.

Review:  David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: Volume IV:  Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews

In this spirited and savvy collection of recent essays and speeches, David Horowitz argues that progressives, that is, left of center politicians, journalists and intellectuals have contributed to “undermining the defense of Western civilization against the totalitarian forces determined to destroy it.” Specifically, the threat comes from “the holy war or jihad waged by totalitarian Islamists in their quest for a global empire.” (p.1) These essays, many of which are lectures at university campuses or reports about those lectures, will reinforce the views of those who already agree that “Western civilization” is a good thing, that Islamism is a form of totalitarianism and that its Jihad is quest for a “global empire.” They may not convince those who think Western civilization is another name for racism, imperialism and war, that totalitarianism is an ideological relic of the Cold War and that an otherwise peaceful and tolerant Islam has been “hijacked” by violent extremists who misconstrue its texts and their meanings. Yet they may strike a nerve with those liberals who think it is absurd to deny the clear links between Islamism and terror and who, especially after the murders in Paris in January, understand that Islamism is a threat to the liberal traditions of Western politics and culture.

This volume addresses a by now much discussed paradox of our political and intellectual life. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, the liberal intellectual Paul Berman in Terror and Liberalism made the compelling case that the Islamist ideology that inspired the Al Qaeda terrorists emerged from a profoundly reactionary set of ideas which had lineages to Nazism and fascism. In Germany, Matthias Kuentzel, in his Jihad and Jew-Hatred:  Nazism, Islamism and the Roots of 9/11 examined in more detail the illiberal views of the 9/11 terrorists as well as the political and ideological connections between Islamism and Nazism. A number of us historians have documented those connections. The irony of the years since 2001, and especially of the Obama years, is that, with some exceptions, much of the sharpest criticism of the reactionary nature of Islamism and defense of classically liberal values has not come from the historic home of anti-fascism among leftists and liberals. Rather, as the 55, mostly short essays in this collection indicate, that critique has migrated to centrists and conservatives or those who are now called conservatives.

“Islamophobia,” the longest essay in the collection is co-written with Robert Spencer, also importantly draws attention to the international connections of Islamist organizations in the United States. The authors write that “the purpose of inserting the term ‘phobia’ is to suggest that any fear associated with Islam is irrational” and thus to discredit arguments that suggest a connection between Islamism and terror as themselves forms of bigotry. Horowitz and Spencer connect this criticism of the concept to discussion of the organizational connections between the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2005, the FBI seized the Northern Virginia headquarters of the Holy Land Foundation, then the largest Islamic “charity” in the United States. In a trial in 2007 that led to the conviction of the Foundation’s leaders on charges of supporting a terrorist organization, the prosecution entered a seized a remarkable document entitled “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.”(18)  The group’s goal was the establishment of “an effective and stable Islamic Movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood, which adopts Muslim causes domestically and globally, and which works to expand the observant Muslim base, aims at directing and unifying Muslim’s efforts, presents Islam as a civilizational alternative, and supports the global Islam state wherever it is.”  Muslims, it continued “must understand their work in American is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” Horowitz and Spencer perform an important service in drawing attention to this document and to the political campaign that it has inspired.

The memo called for the creation of front organizations including the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Students Association, and the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Islamic Association for Palestine and the parent group of the Council on American-Islamic Relations or CAIR. Another front group identified in the Holy Land memo was the International Institute for Islamic Thought, said to have invented the term “Islamophobia.” Horowitz and Spencer’s discussion of CAIR’s “Islamophobia campaign” is particularly interesting. In the Holy Land case, the US Department of Justice named CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator and produced evidence that it has received $500,000 dollars from the Holy Land Foundation to set itself up.  CAIR was created in 1994 as a spinoff of a Hamas front group, the Islamic Association for Palestine, a group that the US government shut down in 2005 for funding terrorism. CAIR has defined Islamophobia as “closed minded prejudice against or hatred of Islam and Muslims” and has described anti-terror measures adopted by the US government as forms of “prejudice” and “hatred.” The authors argue that the use of such terms has been an effective instrument in blunting or stifling criticism of Islamism.

On American university and college campuses, the Muslim Students Association and “Students for Justice in Palestine” have sponsored “Israel Apartheid Weeks.” In recent years, the MSA has been particularly active at the campuses of the University of California in Davis, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles in the anti-Islamophobia campaigns. Remarkably, such efforts have received support from coalitions of leftwing student groups active in student governments. The authors write that “perhaps the chief asset possessed by the jihadists is a coalition of non-Muslims-European and American progressives—who support the anti-Islamophobia campaign,” one that “had a venerable antecedent in the support that progressives provided to Soviet totalitarians during the Cold War.” (p.48) Again, the remarkable aspect of the current coalitions between Islamists and leftists was that these leftists were making common cause with organizations famous for anti-Semitism, subordination of women to second class status or worse and deep religious conviction, a set of beliefs at odds with some of the classic values of the radical left in the twentieth century. Then again, in view of the anti-Zionist campaigns of the Soviet Union and its allies during the Cold War and the hostility of the global radical left to Israel in recent decades, such “Red-Green” leftist-Islamist coalitions of recent years are not so surprising.

Horowitz sees a parallel between the “secular messianic movements like communism, socialism and progressivism” and the religious creeds they replaced. “It is not surprising therefore, that the chief sponsors of the blasphemy laws and the attitudes associated with them have been movements associated with the political left. It is no accident that the movement to outlaw Islamophobia should be deeply indebted to the secular left and its campaign to stigmatize its opponents by indiscriminately applying repugnant terms to them like ‘racist.’”  The invention and application of the concept of Islamophobia “is the first step in outlawing freedom of speech, and therefore freedom itself, in the name of religious tolerance.”(55)

The remainder of this volume elaborates on these themes with twenty essays on Islamo-fascism, thirteen on the Middle East Conflict and eleven on “the Campus War against the Jews.” Horowitz’ reports on his many speeches at various campuses where some of the above mentioned Islamic organizations turn up to protest. There the front organizations of the Muslim Brotherhood, especially the Muslim Students Association, emerged to challenge his arguments about the links between Islamism and fascism. Two essays are particularly important—and depressing. In “Suicidal Jews” and “”Hillel”s Coalitions with Israel’s Enemies,” Horowitz describes instances in which liberal and left-leaning Jewish undergraduates turn their criticism towards him rather than towards the anti-Israeli activists on campus.

This fourth volume of Horowitz’s essays depicts the bizarre nature of our contemporary political culture in which leftists make common cause with Islamists, Israel is denounced as a racist entity while the anti-Semitism of the Muslim Brothers, Hamas and the government of Iran are non-issues for leftists, and the United States government refuses to state the obvious about the connection between Islamist ideology and the practice of terrorism. The defense of liberal principles has liberal advocates but as this valuable collection indicates the core of the defense has become a preoccupation of the center and right of American intellectual and political life. This volume is an important document of that endeavor.

Jeffrey Herf, Distinguished University Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park. His most recent book is Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. His work in progress is entitled “At War with Israel: East Germany and the West German Radical Left, 1967-1989.”