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David Horowitz

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For other people named David Horowitz, see David Horowitz (disambiguation).
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David Horowitz

David Horowitz is an author, blogger, and zionist. A biographical article in the Washington post describes his political views as going from "Red to Right". Always controversial, Horowitz identified himself in the 1960s as a Marxist and now as a conservative.

He is the founder of Center for the Study of Popular Culture. He writes for the conservative magazine NewsMax and is the editor of the popular conservative blog FrontPageMag.com. He is affiliated with Students for Academic Freedom and Campus-Watch.

Life and career

He was born in 1939 to a Jewish family in Forest Hills, New York. His parents Phil and Blanche Horowitz were school-teachers in Sunnyside Gardens, in the borough of Queens in New York City. Horowitz attended Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley where he received a Master's degree in English literature. Breaking with his parents who were members of Communist Party USA, he joined the New Left and called himself a Marxist. He worked for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, wrote several books, and was an editor at the now-defunct radical magazine Ramparts. Horowitz closely aligned himself with the Black Panthers, providing financial and legal support, and was a confidant of its leader Huey Newton.

Horowitz turned away from the left in 1974 after the murder of a close friend Betty Van Patter. Horowitz blames the Panthers for her death although no one was charged and the case remains unsolved.

In 2004 he launched Discover the Networks, a conservative watchdog project that monitors funding for U.S. leftists, communists, socialists, Arab terrorists and others he labels "extremist."

With the goal of "a united Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel," Horowitz co-founded One Jerusalem in opposition to the 1993 Israel-Palestine Liberation Organization Agreement, widely known as the Oslo Accord [1].

In the book Unholy Alliance, Horowitz accuses the left of engaging in a conspiracy with Islamic extremists and terrorists. In the first weekend of March, 2006, Horowitz appeared on television to accuse 50,000 (one in eight) U.S. professors of "identify[ing] with terrorists." Horowitz claims, on TV, "50,000 professors" in U.S. "identify with terrorists."

Controversy and Criticism

Horowitz opposes affirmative action programs that would benefit African American descendants of slaves. He distributed an essay claiming reparations for slavery are a "bad idea, and racist too"[2] to more than 50 college and university student newspapers. He argues that slavery was a benefit to African Americans: "The claim for reparations is premised on the false assumption that only whites have benefited from slavery. If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well, including the descendants of slaves...American blacks on average enjoy per capita incomes in the range of twenty to fifty times that of blacks living in any of the African nations from which they were kidnapped." He claims the majority of African-Americans belong to the prosperous middle-class, and that the existence of that class suggests "that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago." Horowitz offered that essay as a paid advertisement.

Few newspapers accepted it, and his advertising drew protest where it was accepted. Demonstrations against college newspapers which did carry the advertisement included destruction and burning of newstand copies by campus groups.

File:David Horowitz.jpg

Horowitz praises Jared Taylor, a self-described white supremacist with the newsletter, American Renaissance, as a "very intelligent and principled man" while calling his racialist views "mistaken".[3] Horowitz reprinted an article from Taylor's newsletter on his web site, along with several articles by white supremacist James Lubinskas, a Taylor protegé.

Horowitz and other Republicans promote his "Academic Bill of Rights," an eight-point manifesto that seeks to eliminate what he sees as political bias in university hiring and grading. Horowitz claims that liberal bias in universities amounts to indoctrination, and charges that conservatives and particularly Republicans are 'systematically excluded' from faculties. He has attempted to prove this by examining party registrations of faculty members[4]. Critics, such as Stanley Fish, have said "academic diversity," as Horowitz describes it, is not a legitimate academic value, and that no endorsement of "diversity" can be absolute. [5]

Others say Horowitz advocates an affirmative action program for conservatives, but he denies this.

Horowitz responded to the August 7, 2005, death of ABC News anchor Peter Jennings with an August 8 post on the Moonbat Central weblog, titled "Peter Jennings Sympathies for the Devil," in which he wrote: Peter Jennings is dead, may he rest in peace. Lest we forget, however, while he was alive Peter Jennings did considerable damage to the cause of civilization and human deceny [sic] by his sympathy for Jew-hating terrorists and their supporters. Media Matters for America and Al Franken of Air America Radio criticized Horowitz for his statement, but it is unclear what they said.

Chip Berlet, an author who tracks potentially dangerous right-wing ideologues, identified Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture as one of 17 "right-wing foundations and think tanks support[ing] efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable." Berlet's article, "Into the Mainstream" was published in 2003 by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). [6] Berlet cited Horowitz for rejecting the idea that some African Americans "could be the victims of lingering racism."

In reply, Horowitz asked that Berlet's criticism of him be suppressed. He wrote to Morris Dees, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has played a pivotal role in gaining the arrests and convictions of white supremacists accused of hate crimes. In his letter published on his web site, Horowitz urged Dees to remove the article from the law center's website, alleging that it was "so tendentious, so filled with transparent misrepresentations and smears that if you continue to post the report you will create for your Southern Poverty Law Center a well-earned reputation as a hate group itself." [7] Dees refused, and in response, Horowitz has continue to blog his differences with Dees and the law center on his web pages.

The communist Progressive Labor Party has targeted Horowitz as a scientific racist and a proto-fascist. In an April 25, 2001 issue of its bi-lingual newspaper, Challenge-Desafio, it said,

PLP students and friends from Boston University (BU), Harvard and MIT and Boston area workers demonstrated today outside the lecture at BU by fascist journalist David Horowitz to protest his racist ad in college newspapers around the country. Horowitz angered thousands of students with his ad entitled, "10 Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea — And Racist Too!" He claims that black people should be "thankful" for what the U.S. has "given" them; that black poverty is "the result of failures of individual character rather than...of racial discrimination and a slave system"; and that "there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians – Englishmen and Americans – created one." (!) He uses the "reparations debate" as a cover for his racist lies. ... We worked for a mass protest against Horowitz at BU, raising the idea with members of Students Together Against Racism, and Unite, a progressive coalition of BU student groups. Their leaders said students should peacefully question Horowitz’s views. PLP was the only group at BU to publicly protest Horowitz.

Jack E. White of TIME magazine, described Horowitz as a "real live bigot." Horowitz was hit with a pie in the face by protesters during a lecture given at Butler University.

Gay Rights

Despite arguably being a hardlining social conservative Horowitz has rejected the extreme approach common among religious conservatives to advocate sodomy laws, and attacked laws that were still existing on the books. He additionally condemned the Republican party for being unwilling to gear itself towards the civil rights of homosexuals, noting that more homosexuals voted for George W. Bush in 2000 than African-Americans or Jews, and that while he disagrees with gay marriage, he believes homosexuals have a fundamental right to privacy in their own homes and that the term "homosexual agenda", very common among right-wing pundits, is an "intolerant" one.[8]

Books

With Peter Collier he wrote four best-selling profiles of prominent American families:

Article

  • "A Radical's Disenchantment," The Nation, December 8, 1979

Quotations

  • If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus? - from the 1999 Salon article "Guns don't kill black people, other blacks do"
  • The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago? - From the article: Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks and Racist Too
  • Real human flesh and blood had been sacrificed on the altar of utopian ideals. A collusive silence had followed. - Concerning Betty Van Patter's murder from Jamie Glazov's introduction to "Left Illusions"
  • For the sake of the poorest peasants in this Godforsaken country, I can't wait for the contras to march into this town and liberate it from these fucking Sandinistas! - In the dining room of the Intercontinental Hotel in Nicaragua, during the fall of 1987
  • Intelligent people who read his book will discover for themselves what a second-rate ideologue and empty intellectual suit he ( Cornel West ) is without anyone's help. - from an article in FrontPageMagazine.com, October 18, 2004.
  • What about the debt blacks owe to America—to white America—for liberating them from slavery?- from "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks—and Racist Too," an article in FrontPageMagazine.com, January 3, 2001.
  • Liberation is no longer, and can be no longer, merely a national concern. The dimension of the struggle, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks so clearly saw, is international: its road is the socialist revolution. - from the 1969 essay "Imperialism and Revolution"
  • Black Africans and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans. - from "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks—and Racist Too," an article in FrontPageMagazine.com, January 3, 2001.
  • The claim for reparations is premised on the false assumption that only whites have benefited from slavery. If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well, including the descendants of slaves. - from "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks—and Racist Too," an article in FrontPageMagazine.com, January 3, 2001.

See also

External links

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