http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/09/the-totalitarian-impulse/
I know and respect Nina Rosenwald who has been my dear and loyal friend for decades. I also know many members of the board of the Gatestone Institute which publishes excellent columns daily. Among the excellent columns was the one by Clare Lopez which was taken down and now Clare Lopez has been unceremoniously fired. I have to ask myself- which members of the board actually read Diana West’s book enough to demand the firing of Clare Lopez for praising it? There has to have been enormous pressure and possibly threats to Gatestone either from a benefactor or someone on the board who was lobbied or convinced by the smears and invectives perpetrated by David Horowitz, Ron Radosh, Conrad Black, and two “reviewers” on American Thinker who actually confessed that they were “reviewing” a book they had not read. I hope that Gatestone, which effusively praised Clare Lopez prior to this incident will offer her some form of reconciliation, so the incident can be put to bed. For the record Diana West’s rebuttal is ready and Iwill post it all….rsk
As mentioned here Tuesday night, an article by Clare Lopez was published earlier that day at the Gatestone Institute’s website and then immediately removed. Since Ms. Lopez had referred favorably in her article to Diana West’s book American Betrayal, and since Ms. West recently had anathema pronounced against her for that same book, it seemed that there might be a connection between the two events.
And indeed there was. Our suspicions were correct.
I just received this information from a source close to Clare Lopez:
In late August 2013, Clare Lopez, then a Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, submitted an article for publication at the Gatestone Institute’s website. It was entitled “Recognizing the Wrong People”, and drew on the U.S. government’s 1933 formal diplomatic recognition of the USSR as described in Diana West’s book American Betrayal to form an analogy with the U.S.’s present day recognition and/or support of other fundamentally-anti-American entities, such as the AQ/MB-dominated rebel and opposition forces in places like Egypt, Libya, and Syria.
As with all of Ms. Lopez’ previous articles, this one was well-received by Gatestone’s editor, Nina Rosenwald, who praised it as “so far-sighted.” The article was duly published the morning of Tuesday 3 September 2013 at Gatestone and was sent out to an email list of subscribers. Sometime shortly after that, however, it was pulled from the website, with no notice or explanation.
Word spread quickly as regular Gatestone readers realized something odd had happened.
The real shock came the following morning, though, on September 4, when Ms. Lopez received an email from Nina Rosenwald notifying her that her relationship with the Gatestone Institute had been terminated at the request of the Gatestone Board of Directors. On September 5, Ms. Rosenwald confirmed in an email sent to Ms. Lopez and others what some had already suspected, that her firing was due to her “choice of books to promote…,” a clear reference to Ms. Lopez’ citation of historical events from Ms. West’s book. Although Ms. Lopez also had cited about the same 1933 events to a second book, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, by Robert Conquest, for some reason, that reference did not seem to pose any issues for the Board. Only Ms. West’s book about the very same events seemed to irritate the Board, whose recently-appointed Chairman is former UN Ambassador John Bolton.
