RUTHFULLY YOURS

Below is Richard Baehr’s review of David Horowitz’s new book, The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama (reprinted from American Thinker with permission). The book is volume 7 of The Black Book of the American Left, a multi-volume collection of David Horowitz’s conservative writings that will, when completed, be the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda. (Order HERE.) We encourage our readers to visit BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com which features Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1-7 of this 9-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.

Every year, there is some report of the blissful ignorance of American history demonstrated by the supposedly best and brightest at elite American universities. Suffice it to say the collected writings of David Horowitz on the American Left, which constitute part of a solid foundation for understanding the last half century of American politics, are nowhere to be found on any college or high school reading list.

Horowitz’s latest book, The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama, is the seventh volume in his nine-volume collection, The Black Book of the American Left. This new volume provides a collection of his writings over the last quarter century, focusing primarily on the Left’s control in our government and culture. As Horowitz reveals, even during the Bush years, conservatives were on the defense and leftists controlled the narrative as they attempted to destroy Bush and his chances for re-election in 2004. Their primary mode of attack was to undermine America’s efforts in Iraq almost from the start of the conflict, when just months earlier a majority of Senate Democrats and near half of House Democrats had supported the President. The Left then destroyed Bush’s second term with bogus charges of racist neglect in the handling of Hurricane Katrina. There was plenty of incompetence in the response to Katrina, but local and state officials — all Democrats, of course, and many of them African American — were the principal operators on the ground during the crisis.

The immediate abandonment of support for the Iraq war effort was a signal event in American history, sending a message that a large part of the Democratic Party was not remotely concerned about the morale of our men and women fighting overseas. The weak effort by some Democrats to hold onto an ounce of patriotic resolve — “end the war, support the troops” — was designed more for campaign speeches than any meaningful attempt to convey national unity for the effort underway by our armed forces. So too, the obsession with Abu Ghraib gave the lie to the Democrats’ “support our troops” message, as a broad brush was used to paint the incident as somehow what you would expect from our military on a routine basis.

Horowitz outlines this narrative, faulting the Bush administration for failing to fight harder to present its story of why we went into Iraq and the risks if we had done nothing. Regrettably, the Bush administration never had a chance to get a better defense of the Iraq war out to the media. Most in the media considered the Bush administration illegitimate due to its narrow victory in the 2000 presidential contest, a lie to be sure. Unfortunately, it is almost certainly true that the media today are far more in the bag for the left than ten or twenty years ago and work harder at pushing the left’s agenda. The soft liberalism of Walter Cronkite has been replaced by cable and national network anchors who routinely bury stories embarrassing to their side and focus on those that can do damage to the other side. During the current Presidential election cycle, we have seen the most prestigious media organs explain why it is necessary and appropriate for them to be biased this year. It is a special time, they argue, because Trump is, in their view, a unique threat to the Republic.

On the other hand, the media have been loath to consider the damage to the country caused by Barack Obama — the loss of respect abroad for America’s will to fight, the degradation of our military readiness, the fraying of ties with allies, and the near obsessive outreach to America’s enemies that led to agreements such as the nuclear deal with Iran, best described as an abject surrender of American interests that will lead to the funding of fanatical nuclear regime. About 85% of those supposedly sensible pro-Israel Democrats walked the plank behind their great leader on that deal, with no visible regrets to date. There was simply too much political risk to oppose the first black president of their party. The media were happy to parrot the administration’s talking points for the nuclear deal, something the manipulators crowed over at the White House.

At least in the propaganda use of Abu Ghraib, the Left was honest in revealing what it thinks about the military. As Horowitz outlines in article after article, the Left is fighting a war that most Americans do not see, disguising its intentions through its aggressive, unceasing promotion of “progressive” policies “to make America a better place.” This commitment to deception emerges, Horowitz reveals, from the allegiance to the ideology of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” a formative doctrine for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The progressive goal is to achieve a new society that has never been seen before in this country, though it has been promised and has catastrophically failed in many places around the globe. In America, the Left is not only unconcerned with selling their program to the public, but also, Horowitz argues, it is fearful of the result of voters knowing what it is pursuing. One prime example was the admission of MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber that health care law would never have made it through Congress if it had been presented honestly.

Every year, there is some report of the blissful ignorance of American history demonstrated by the supposedly best and brightest at elite American universities. Suffice it to say the collected writings of David Horowitz on the American Left, which constitute part of a solid foundation for understanding the last half century of American politics, are nowhere to be found on any college or high school reading list.

Horowitz’s latest book, The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama, is the seventh volume in his nine-volume collection, . This new volume provides a collection of his writings over the last quarter century, focusing primarily on the Left’s control in our government and culture. As Horowitz reveals, even during the Bush years, conservatives were on the defense and leftists controlled the narrative as they attempted to destroy Bush and his chances for re-election in 2004. Their primary mode of attack was to undermine America’s efforts in Iraq almost from the start of the conflict, when just months earlier a majority of Senate Democrats and near half of House Democrats had supported the President. The Left then destroyed Bush’s second term with bogus charges of racist neglect in the handling of Hurricane Katrina. There was plenty of incompetence in the response to Katrina, but local and state officials — all Democrats, of course, and many of them African American — were the principal operators on the ground during the crisis.

The immediate abandonment of support for the Iraq war effort was a signal event in American history, sending a message that a large part of the Democratic Party was not remotely concerned about the morale of our men and women fighting overseas. The weak effort by some Democrats to hold onto an ounce of patriotic resolve — “end the war, support the troops” — was designed more for campaign speeches than any meaningful attempt to convey national unity for the effort underway by our armed forces. So too, the obsession with Abu Ghraib gave the lie to the Democrats’ “support our troops” message, as a broad brush was used to paint the incident as somehow what you would expect from our military on a routine basis.

Horowitz outlines this narrative, faulting the Bush administration for failing to fight harder to present its story of why we went into Iraq and the risks if we had done nothing. Regrettably, the Bush administration never had a chance to get a better defense of the Iraq war out to the media. Most in the media considered the Bush administration illegitimate due to its narrow victory in the 2000 presidential contest, a lie to be sure. Unfortunately, it is almost certainly true that the media today are far more in the bag for the left than ten or twenty years ago and work harder at pushing the left’s agenda. The soft liberalism of Walter Cronkite has been replaced by cable and national network anchors who routinely bury stories embarrassing to their side and focus on those that can do damage to the other side. During the current Presidential election cycle, we have seen the most prestigious media organs explain why it is necessary and appropriate for them to be biased this year. It is a special time, they argue, because Trump is, in their view, a unique threat to the Republic.

Please indulge me while I “toot” my horn. Over the years I have produced a dozen or so novels that touch on current events and even anticipate them. They are about Islam, cultural and political corruption, and frauds perpetrated on the citizens and the country by our self-appointed elite. Here are synopses of their plots. They are all available as printed books, on Kindle, and also as Audible versions.

I begin with the earliest series I had finished, self-published on Amazon, because no mainstream publisher would touch it. It stars Merritt Fury, an American entrepreneur and maverick capitalist who invariably runs afoul of the political and financial establishments in America and abroad. The first title, Whisper the Guns, is set in Hong Kong. But the most relevantly violent one is the second title, We Three Kings, in which Fury is targeted for death by a Saudi sheik with the approving nod of our State Department. Sound familiar? The sheik gets his comeuppance by story’s end, with Fury holding the sheik’s feet and other body parts to the fire. I boldly adopted the Saudi royal emblem for the cover. No outrage from the Riyadh medievalists yet.

Another series, published by Perfect Crime Books in Baltimore, Maryland features a detective hero, Chess Hanrahan, who specializes in solving moral paradoxes. In Presence of Mind Hanrahan encounters and engages in a contest of wits with two denizens of the State Department, who subscribe to the policy of “cognitive dissonance,” in order to put across a disastrous “peace” treaty with the Soviet Union. Wishing hard enough for a preferred result will make it so. Hanrahan jolts the celebrated denizens back to reality in the worst possible ways. In With Distinction, he investigates a murder in the philosophy department of a Midwest university (based on Michigan State University), and uncovers a snake pit of plots to grant illiteracy and ignorance the highest academic honors, and to rid the department of a reason-oriented philosophy professor. Sound familiar?

The Hanrahan and Fury novels were composed and finished in the mid-1980s. Their plots were extrapolations of the political and cultural conditions of the time. I had no sense then that things would grow much worse. Political correctness in speech and written forms was not yet a ubiquitous term of derogation of enforced conformity – although Marxists and feminists were hard at work to impose PC, often successfully – while such concepts as “safe places,” “white privilege,” and “trigger warnings” would have caused even the leftist professors in academia to guffaw in laughter.

This is a collection of Ed Cline’s recent columns on Rule of Reason and edwardcline.blogspot.com., chiefly on the subject of Islam’s incursions on the West and especially in the United States. The incursions are made possible mainly at the invitation of corrupt, cravenly cowardly, and reality-denying dhimmis in Europe and in America. Other guilty parties have as their conscious goal the subjugation and destruction of the West. Not all of the essays discuss or are even remotely related to Islam. I have included a handful of pieces on political correctness and the decrepit state of our culture. There really isn’t that much anymore that can be regarded as “good news” or encouraging.Stay tuned for the print edition coming soon….rsk

From the moment he took office in 2009, President Barack Obama tried to repair America’s standing in the Middle East by demonstrating his sincere concern for the grievances and aspirations of Arab peoples. He gave interviews to Arab news outlets. He issued New Year’s greetings to the people of Iran. He delivered a speech in Cairo in which he acknowledged America’s past wrongs, and he called on Israel to accept the legitimacy of Palestinian demands for a state. Mr. Obama did almost everything liberal critics of the policies of George W. Bush wished him to do. And he failed. Or rather, he found that the Arab world was afflicted with pathologies that placed it beyond the reach of his words and deeds.

Had Mr. Obama had the chance to read “Ike’s Gamble,” Michael Doran’s account of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s statecraft before, during and after the Suez Crisis of 1956, he might have saved his breath. Mr. Doran, a scholar and former State and Defense Department official in the George W. Bush administration, describes a seasoned, wily and prudent president who aligned the United States with what he understood to be the legitimate hopes of Arab peoples, even at the cost of damaging relations with America’s closest allies—and made a hash of things.
Ike’s Gamble

By Michael Doran

Free Press, 292 pages, $28

Mr. Doran illuminates a narrative with which very few non-specialists will be familiar. His tale begins at the moment in the early 1950s when America was reaching its zenith. The United Kingdom was reluctantly acknowledging the end of empire, and the United States was filling the vacuum in the Middle East. Neither Eisenhower nor his fervently anti-communist secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, understood this transition in strictly geopolitical terms; both believed that the liberating American faith in national self-determination and consent of the governed would supplant Britain’s self-aggrandizing colonialism. Both morality and national interest dictated such a course. As Dulles said in a prime-time televised address in 1953: “We cannot afford to be distrusted by millions who could be sturdy friends of freedom.”

The familiar story—and it is all too true—is that Cold War competition led the United States to side with friendly but despised dictators in the region like Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi. Yet at the same moment that the U.S. was plotting to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected leader in favor of the shah, leading policy makers were infatuated with Egypt’s immensely popular revolutionary leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Eisenhower and Dulles saw in Nasser the kind of nationalist leader whom America needed to recruit to its side in order to demonstrate that postcolonial nations were better off in the democratic than in the communist camp.

The problem was that in order to do so, they had to sell out their closest ally. To British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Britain’s 80,000-man garrison in Suez was irrefutable proof that his nation remained an imperial force. But Eisenhower and Dulles took Nasser’s side in 1953-4 as he whittled away at British influence and demanded that Britain withdraw its forces. Unintimidated by his former wartime ally, Eisenhower brusquely advised Churchill to defer to “the very strong nationalist sentiments of the Egyptian Government and people” by agreeing to hand over control of the base. Churchill had loudly declared that he had not been elected prime minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire; having no choice, he now agreed to do just that.

Britain was one impediment to America’s grand bargain with Nasser; Israel was the other. Eisenhower, Dulles and State Department officials feared that the United States would never win Arab hearts and minds if it was seen as the ally of a nation that almost all Arabs reviled. The problem has hardly gone away over the past six decades. But while the American response today is to gently prod Israel to rein in the growth of illegal settlements, the answer in 1955 was to push Israel to make unilateral territorial concessions—and, remarkably, to present the plan to Nasser for his approval before disclosing it to the Israelis. Mr. Doran makes it clear that the anti-Semitism of the Washington elite converged with what seemed at the time to be perfectly sound strategic calculations.

There can’t be too many books like this one. The Impact of Islam, by Emmet Scott, is one of many books that deflate the whole history, provenance, and character of Islam. At first glance, as an atheist, I thought that reviewing a book written by a Christian with an obvious Christian bias against Islam would be difficult, mainly in segregating the bias from the truth-telling and facts. But Scott’s book, while it has a demonstrable bias in favor of Christianity, doesn’t lay it on too thickly. Scott’s arguments are very well structured and made, and he doesn’t beat one over the head. There is history and information in it that I have not encountered elsewhere, not even in Robert Spencer’s masterful and comprehensive Did Muhammad Exist? An Enquiry into Islam’s Origins, in which little or no Christian bias is evident.

For starters, Scott visits the rather shocking argument that the Islamic Koran was probably an early Jewish-Christian (or Ebionite) devotional manual (Scott labels Ebionitism as a “proto-Islamic creed”) because so much in it was cadged or plagiarized by Islamic “scholars” over the centuries (Having had a nose or sixth sense for fakery, I’ve always contended that both the Koran and the Hadith were works in progress with numerous editors and compilers over the centuries adding to them or redacting portions from them to make the works consistent and complementary and too “holy” for later scholars and believers to correct or question.) There are just too many similarities in the texts, argues Scott, and the Jewish-Christian work, if Islamic history is to be accorded any credibility, predated the birth of Mohammad by centuries. Christians of various sects existed long before Islam. When Christianity first appeared, it would be nearly half a millennium before the Islam we’re familiar with allegedly made its destructive appearance.

The Koran itself, writes Scott, is an incomprehensible mess. Written and read in its “original” Arabic, and translated into modern non-Arabic languages, it often makes no sense, not even to Islamic scholars charged with the task of interpretation. There seems to be more rhyme and reason in a chimpanzee’s random hunt-and-peck on a typewriter keyboard . In his compelling Appendix, he notes:

Among the numerous titles which have appeared recently we may cite in particular The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran, by Christoph Luxenberg (2007)and The Hidden Origins of Islam: New Research into its Early History, a series of essays edited by Karl-Heinz Ohlig and Gerd-R Puin (2009). Upon the publication of Luxenberg’s book, the popular media…focused on his claim that the 72 virgins promised to Islamic martyrs was a mistranslation, and that what was actually an offer of 72 raisins, or grapes. Yet this was the very least of what Luxenberg was saying, , the full import of which was ignored in the newspapers. In fact, he was claiming that the original language of the Qur’an was not Arabic (where the questionable word is read as “virgins”) but Syriac or Aramaic, where the same word would translate as “grapes.” He was furthermore claiming, sensationally enough, that the Qur’an was originally a Syriac Christian devotional text and had nothing to do with Muhammad or Islam. (p. 174)

I opened “Islam Upside-Down and Inside-Out” with “There can’t be too many books like this one. The Impact of Islam, by Emmet Scott, is one of many books that deflate the whole history, provenance, and character of Islam. At first glance, as an atheist, I thought that reviewing a book written by a Christian with an obvious Christian bias against Islam would be difficult, mainly in segregating the bias from the truth-telling and facts.”

But I left out some of the goriest parts of Scott’s opus, parts which explain in some respect the title of his book, parts which indict Islam as a psychopathic movement, an “illness” which spread to the rest of Europe.

Islam, for example, invented the “Inquisition,” not the Catholic Church, which adopted the institution as a way of identifying and persecuting heretics. Islam’s original purpose, however, was to test the sincerity of the conversion of Jews and Christians to Islam. Untold numbers of Jews and Christians were made an offer they could not refuse: convert or pay the exorbitant jizya or die. Jizya was a poll tax, or a head tax, on anyone not a “true” Muslim. Theoretically, the tax offered the infidel, or the dhimmi ,“protection” from theft, persecution, or death by Muslims and others, much as racketeers centuries later would extort “protection money” from individuals and businesses; the extortion was simply the criminals refraining from murder or dynamiting one’s business.

As Scott and others have described the workings of jizya, this did not, as a rule, work out as expected, resulting in massacres of Jews and Christians, or their deportation from Spain across the Mediterranean to Morocco. Which leads us back to the Inquisition.