The Threat We Face
Posted By David Horowitz On October 10, 2013 @ 12:52 am In Daily
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Below
is a speech given by David Horowitz at the Kohler conference of the Bradley
Foundation. It has been revised and edited for publication as an article.
I was born at the beginning of the Second World War into a family
of high school teachers who were members of the Communist Party, and therefore
were actually part of a vast conspiracy dedicated to the destruction of this
country, although they would never have looked at it that way, and so-called
liberals would be the first to deny it.
In those days, the schools were old fashioned enough that my
parents did not use their classrooms to indoctrinate students as tens of
thousands of university professors and even more K-12 teachers regularly do
today. It is also an unhappy but hugely important fact that the conspiracy to
which my parents belonged has steadily migrated into the heart of the
Democratic Party until it now occupies the Oval Office in the person of our
president, Barack Obama, and his closest advisors.
The president, his chief operative Valerie Jarrett and his chief
political strategist David Axelrod all came out of the same Communist left and
the same radical new left as I did, and all have remained heart and soul a part
of it. As someone who turned his back on that destructive movement, I can say
with confidence that they have not. If a person belongs to an organization or
is the supporter of an idea that they come to see as destructive or evil, the
first thing they will want to do when they leave is to warn others against it,
to warn them of the dangers it represents. If a person does not do this – that
tells me that he or she hasn’t left the destructive movement or abandoned the
pernicious idea but has just put another face on them. Instead of calling
themselves communists or socialists they call themselves liberals and
progressives. This camouflage is very old. I never once heard my parents and
their party friends refer to themselves as Communists. They were progressives
– and registered Democrats.
This is why – to take one disturbing example, I know that Hillary
Clinton’s right hand, Huma Abedin, the former deputy secretary of state, and
chief foreign policy adviser on Muslim Affairs is a Muslim Brotherhood
operative. Huma Abedin’s late father was a Muslim Brotherhood leader, and her
mother and brother still are. For 12 years until the moment she was hired by
Hillary, Huma Abedin worked for Abdullah Omar Naseef, one of the top three
funders of Osama Bin Laden who is still wanted by our government for his role
in the 9/11 attacks.
Huma Abedin has never to my knowledge uttered a word of
disapproval about the Muslim Brotherhood’s desire to rid the world of
Christians and Jews or to bring all infidels under the heel of totalitarian
Islamic law. Her spiritual adviser Yusef al-Qaradawi is the spiritual leader of
the Brotherhood. Qaradawi has publicly said that the Holocaust of the Jews was
God’s punishment for their corruption, and that it would come again, and when
it did, “Allah willing it will be at the hands of the believers.” Huma Abedin
has not broken her relations with this evil man or dissociated herself from his
genocidal remarks. Nor has she opposed the policies enacted by Obama and
Hillary, which have supported the Muslim Brotherhood at home and in the Middle
East.
On the contrary. when the Obama administration supported the
Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt, Huma Abedin was our government’s key
adviser on Muslim affairs. She was at Hillary’s side when security was not
provided to our diplomatic complex in Benghazi and when al-Qaeda fanatics
murdered our Ambassador. The murder of Ambassador Stevens led to the most
shameful presidential act in our history when the President turned his back on
the cries for help of three American heroes who served him and who were in a
desperate fight for their lives. It is a time honored American code never to
abandon our warriors on the field of battle. But America’s commander-in-chief
turned his back on these brave fighting men and left them to die; and then lied
to the American people to cover up his crime.
Ever since Barack Obama was elected and began his radical course,
American conservatives have been in a state of shock, as though they couldn’t
quite believe what was happening. Until then there had been a general collusion
in the practiced deceptions of the left as commentators on all sides would
refer to unrepentant radicals, and dedicated socialists as “liberals,” and turn
half blind eyes to their anti-American agendas. What is “liberal” about the
mean-spirited intolerant people of the left, except their attitude to hard
drugs, sex, and criminal behavior? Oh yes, and spending other people’s money?
Today the Obama juggernaut is systematically bankrupting our country,
and undoing our constitutional arrangements. Its contempt for consultative and
representative government is relentlessly on display. This week Senate Majority
leader Harry Reid defended his refusal to negotiate with Republicans over
Obamacare and the debt in these words: “We are here to support the federal
government. That’s our job.” End quote. Forget about representing the people
whom our Founders made sovereign. Forget what America is about.
The fact that I had a radical past allowed me to see much of this
coming. But even I never thought we would be looking so soon at the prospect of
a one-party state. Those words may sound hyperbolic, but take a moment to think
about it. If you have transformed the taxing agency of the state into a
political weapon – and Obama has; if you are setting up a massive government
program to gather the financial and health information of every citizen, and
control their access to care; and if you have a spy agency that can read the
mail and listen to the communications of every individual in the country, you
don’t really need a secret police to destroy your political opponents. Once you
have silenced them, you can proceed with your plans to remake the world in your
image.
The good news is that the bad five years we have just been through
have aroused a sleeping giant among Americans who didn’t see it coming and
couldn’t imagine that it would. For the first time since the Cold War, people
with a public voice are calling socialists by their right name; conservatives
are finally organizing at the grassroots to defend their freedom; and at last
we have leaders who are willing to stand up to the thuggery of the left and who
have the spine not to back down.
As a sometime Jonah freed from the whale let me offer some
intelligence about the political forces arrayed against us. Do not make the
mistake of thinking that progressives and conservatives are people who merely
differ about practical agendas. There are four defining features of the left,
which distinguish it as a movement of individuals who approach politics quite
differently from pragmatically-minded conservatives.
The first of these features is their alienation from country: If
you ask progressives about their patriotic feeling, they will tell you that
they don’t think of themselves first as Americans but as “citizens of the
world.” That even has a Harvard imprimatur. They are, in fact, so
profoundly alienated from their country as to be in some sense foreigners to
it. They are hostile to its history and to its core values, which they see as
reflections of a society that has been guilty of racism and oppression on an
epic scale. And they are fundamentally opposed to its constitutional
arrangements which the framers specifically designed to thwart what they deemed
“wicked projects” to redistribute income and share individual wealth.
This is perhaps the hardest feature of their progressive
adversaries for conservatives to comprehend. It is difficult to imagine that
people as privileged by America’s generosity as Barack Obama and his entourage
of despoilers should be so alienated from their country as to feel themselves in
it but not of it. And there is no more shocking example of this than
Benghazi. No matter what your politics, or what solutions you propose to the
problems that confront this nation, ask yourself this: Could you have done what
Barack Obama did that night? Could you as commander-in-chief abandon three
Americans fighting for their lives under your command? These men had served
their country for more than a decade. For seven hours they cried out for help
from their government, but you refused to give it.
How, as a fellow American, could Obama have just left these men to
die? No one with an ounce of patriotic feeling could. But he did. Even Alexei
Kosygin, the Soviet premier of a Communist dictatorship, maintained contact
with his astronaut as he burned up in space. But not our president. When the
attack on our embassy in Benghazi began, he hung up the phone and went to bed,
and then on to a fundraiser with Beyonce and Jay-Z in Las Vegas in the morning.
This, with four Americans including our ambassador dead.
As a nation we are now confronted by mortal enemies in Iran and
Syria, in Hizbollah and Hamas – enemies who have openly declared that we are
the devil’s party and should be erased from the face of the earth. How could an
American president deliberately set out to appease such enemies? How in the
face of such threats could he reduce our country to an international laughing
stock, no longer respected by our friends, no longer feared by our foes? How
could he be so cavalier about having failed so miserably to have defended his
country’s security and uphold its honor? How could an American
commander-in-chief then put himself in a position to be snubbed by the Iranian
Hitlerites, which is what they are, and which is what Obama did? How could he
snub our Israeli allies and at the same time grovel before our Islamic enemies?
But he did. How could he create a vacuum in the Middle East allowing Russia to
become the new regional power? How could he make himself an ally of the Muslim
Brotherhood, which slaughters Christians, and promises the extermination of the
Jews and spawns terrorist armies like al-Qaeda and Hamas?
The answer to all these questions is that Obama doesn’t identify
with our country. He sees himself as a “citizen of the world,” and a redresser
of grievances for the suffering he imagines America has inflicted on our
adversaries, including Hitlerite Iran.
The second feature of the progressive left that is key to understanding
it is its instinctive, practiced, and indispensable dishonesty. As I previously
noted, the Communists in the circles I frequented in my youth never identified
themselves as Communists but always as “progressives” and “Jeffersonian
democrats” (which is the last thing they were). When I was a young man and
Stalin was alive, the goal of the Communist Party U.S.A. was a “dictatorship of
the proletariat,” and a “Soviet America.” But under Stalin’s inspiration the
official slogan of the Communist Party was “Peace, Jobs, and Democracy.”
The lesson? People on the left may be delusional but they are not
stupid. They know what they can say and get away with, and what they can’t.
Barack Obama is a born and bred member of the left and not coincidentally is
the most brazen and compulsive liar ever to occupy the American White House.
What other politician could have successfully explained away the fact that two
of his closest political confidantes over a twenty-year period were an
anti-American racist, Jeremiah Wright and an anti-American terrorist William
Ayers?
There is a marked difference between the radicals of the Sixties
and the radical movement Obama is part of. In the Sixties, as radicals we said
what we thought and blurted out what we wanted. We wanted a revolution, and we
wanted it now. It was actually very decent of us to warn others as to
what we intended. But because we blurted out our goal, we didn’t get very far.
Americans were onto us. Those who remained on the left when the Sixties were
over, learned from their experience. They learned to lie. The strategy of the
lie is progressives’ new gospel. It is what the progressive bible — Saul
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals — is all about. Alinsky is the acknowledged
political mentor to Obama and Hillary, to the service and teacher unions, and
to the progressive rank and file. Alinsky understood the mistake Sixties’
radicals had made. His message to this generation is easily summed up: Don’t
telegraph your goals; infiltrate their institutions and subvert them; moral
principles are disposable fictions; the end justifies the means; and never
forget that your political goal is always power.
An SDS radical wrote in the Sixties: “The issue is never the
issue. The issue is always the revolution.” The Alinsky version is this: The
issue is never the issue; the issue is always power: How to wring power out of
the democratic process, how turn the process into an instrument of progressive
control. How to use it to fundamentally transform the United States of America
— which is exactly what Barack Obama warned he would do on the eve of his
election.
The chosen legislative instrument to begin this transformation was
Obamacare. It was presented as an act of charity, a plan to cover the
uninsured. That was the “issue” as they presented it. But the actual goal of
Obamacare’s socialist sponsors was a “single payer system” – government
healthcare — which would put the state in control of the lives of every
American, man, woman and child. That is the reason that none of the promises made
about Obamacare was true, beginning with his campaign lie that Obamacare
government health care was not a program he would support. Obamacare will not
cover 30 million uninsured Americans, as Obama and the Democrats said it would;
Obamacare will not lower costs, as they promised it would; Obamacare will
deprive many Americans of their doctors and healthcare plans, as they assured
everyone it would not; Obamacare is a new tax, as they swore it wouldn’t be.
All these promises Obama and the Democrats made were false because they were
only a camouflage for their real goal actual goal, which was universal control.
A third feature of progressives that defines their politics is
that they regard the past, which is real, with contempt, and are focused
exclusively on a future, which is imaginary.
To understand why this is important, think of progressives as a
species of religious fundamentalists planning a redemption. Like
fundamentalists they look at the world as fallen – a place corrupted by racism,
sexism and class division. But the truly religious understand that we are the
source of corruption and that redemption is only possible through the work of a
Divinity. In contrast, progressives see themselves as the redeemers,
which is why they are so dangerous. Because they regard those who oppose them
as the eternally damned. Progressives are on a mission to create the kingdom of
heaven on earth by redistributing income and using the state to enforce
politically correct attitudes and practices in everyone’s life. They want to
control what you do, and who you are, and even what you eat. For your own good,
of course.
The fact that they see themselves as saving the world – or “saving
the planet” as they would prefer — results in a fourth key characteristic of
their politics, which is that they regard politics as a religious war. This
explains why they are so rude and nasty when you disagree with them or resist
their panaceas (and of course if they had the power, the punishments would be
more severe); that is why the politics of personal destruction is their
favorite variety, why they are verbal assassins and go directly for the
jugular, and why they think nothing of destroying the reputations of their
opponents and burying them permanently. And that is why they can perform their
character assassinations without regrets – or did I miss Obama’s apology
to Romney for accusing him of killing a woman with cancer during the campaign?
Why apologize when you did it for the good of a world transforming cause?
To sum this up: Progressives see themselves as an army of the
saints, and their opponents as the party of Satan; and that will justify almost
anything you can get away with.
An appalling episode of their Machiavellian politics has shaped
the international conflict in which we find ourselves currently impotent in the
Middle East. The root of that impotence lies in the way Democrats turned the
issue of the Iraq war against the Republican president George Bush. The
Democrats’ case against Bush was that he acted unilaterally, deceptively and in
haste.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The policy to remove
Iraq’s government by force was put in place by a Democratic president, Bill
Clinton, when he signed the Iraqi Liberation Act and fired 450 cruise missiles
into that sovereign country. He did it, by the way, not only unilaterally but
without consulting anyone.
That was in 1998, which is five years before Bush sent American
troops into Iraq. Ten months before Bush did that he warned Iraq’s dictator,
Saddam Hussein, to obey the Gulf War truce he had signed in 1991 and then
repeatedly violated over the next ten years. Seven months before sending our
troops into Iraq Bush went personally to the UN and got a unanimous Security
Council ultimatum to Saddam. UN Resolution 1447 said: Obey the terms of the
Gulf War truce by December 7, 2002 – or else.
Two months before that deadline Bush went to Congress and
requested an authorization to use force in the event that Saddam did not
voluntarily observe the terms of the UN Resolution, and the Gulf War truce he
had signed and then violated. Both houses of Congress including a
majority of the Democrats in the Senate voted to authorize Bush to use force in
Iraq. He also got an authorization from NATO and he also formed a coalition of
40 nations, including America’s oldest allies, the Brits, to enforce the UN
Security Council ultimatum.
Not only was the decision not made in haste, and not made without
consultation, as the Democrats claimed. The truth was just the opposite. The
process of making the decision to go to war took 10 months and every
significant authority was consulted. But once U.S. troops entered Iraq on March
19, 2003, it took only three months for the Democrats to betray them and their
president, to turn their backs on the war they had authorized and supported,
and claim it was – to use the words of former Vice President Al Gore,
“unnecessary, immoral and illegal.” Or in the words of Democratic presidential
candidate John Kerry, “the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”
Why did the Democrats betray the war they had supported? It was
not because of any fact on the ground in Iraq, or any principles Bush had
allegedly violated. They betrayed our troops and turned on their
commander-in-chief for one reason and one reason alone: to gain political power
at home.
At the very moment of their treachery a Democratic primary was in
progress. An anti-war Democrat – a Sixties leftist named Howard Dean — was on
the verge of winning their presidential nomination, burying other candidates like
John Kerry and John Edwards in the polls. Until then, Kerry and Edwards were
full-throated supporters of the war. Kerry made a speech on the floor of the
Senate in support of the bill authorizing the use of force. He explained why
the forcible removal of Saddam was necessary to defend the country and secure
the peace.
But that was before the anti-war candidate Howard Dean had surged
ahead in the polls. When that happened, and Kerry saw that he was going to lose
the party nomination, he decided to switch sides. He turned his back on
everything he had said in defense of the war, and the necessity of using force,
and he turned his back on our troops in the field, and attacked their
commander-in-chief. He did it for one reason, and one reason only. He did it
because he saw it as the only way to win the Democratic nomination and have a
chance of winning the presidency in 2004.
Kerry and the Democrats betrayed the war they had authorized; they
betrayed the young Americans they sent into harms way; they betrayed the
country they had sworn to serve. They did it to win the political power they
were going to use to change the world. No conservative in his right mind would
behave like this. No conservative would regard a political administration in
Washington as a stepping stone on the way to a brave new world, and therefore
something to justify opposing a war they had authorized and supported.
What were the issues the Democrats used to make their case
against the president and the war in Iraq? It didn’t really matter, because the
issues were never the issue. The Democrats opposed Bush and the war because
both stood in the way of their quest for power.
The Democrats attacked Bush for acting in haste and acting
unilaterally. Both charges were false. Worse, the Democrats claimed that the
war was about weapons of mass destruction, ignoring the fact that Saddam had
violated the Gulf War truce and had failed to comply with sixteen Security
Council resolutions attempting to bring him into line, including the ultimatum
of December 7. To make their case they claimed that Bush falsified the
intelligence reports about weapons of mass destruction and lied in order to
fool them into supporting the war. This was the biggest lie of the entire war.
CIA chief George Tenet was a Clinton appointee. John Kerry sat on the
intelligence committees with other Democrats like Feinstein and Rockefeller.
The Democrats had access to all the intelligence information that Bush
did. Bush could not have persuaded them to support the war by lying about the
data, even if he had wanted to.
Why did they accuse him of lying? Because they could not admit the
actual reason they had betrayed the war and the young men and women they sent
to battle. They did it for partisan political gain. Unfortunately neither the
White House nor any Republican had the political courage to hold them to
account, and we are all paying the price for that.
For five years the Democrats conducted a scorched earth campaign
against their country and its commander in the midst of a war. The harm they
did is irreparable. Their sabotage of the war crippled our efforts to prosecute
it – for example to follow Saddam’s weapons and generals into Syria, where they
had fled; to take the war to Iran which supplied the IEDs which killed most of
our troops; to close the border with Syria across which jihadists
entered Iraq to fight our troops. The Democrats’ sabotage of the war created
the power vacuum in the Middle East, which the terrorists and the Russians have
now filled. And it most certainly inflicted casualties on our troops, though no
one has had the political courage to say so.
The Democrats sabotaged the war in Iraq for the worst of reasons.
They claimed it was for principle, but it was really – and only — to save their
political skins.
Once the Democrats recaptured the presidency, it took no time at
all for events to expose this destructive farce. Unlike the majority of his
Democratic colleagues, Senator Barack Obama had always opposed the war in Iraq.
He was against American interventions in sovereign countries, and he was
against presidents who acted unilaterally, and in haste. Or so he said.
But when Obama became president and had the power to do so, he
invaded Libya: unilaterally, and without authorization, and with no national
security interest at stake. And he lied about the cause. There was no prospect
of massacres as he claimed, and it was not a human rights intervention. If it
were, Libya would not now be in chaos with al-Qaeda resurgent, and in a worse
state than before.
Obama’s invasion of Libya was not merely unilateral. It was
egomaniacal. Obama consulted no one outside his White House inner circle, not
his own party, not the Congress, not the United Nations. Unlike Bush, he acted
without constitutional authority and he acted alone. Yet there was not one
Democratic leader who stood up for the principles they had all invoked to
cripple America’s war against the jihadists in Iraq. Not one Democratic
leader opposed the Democratic president, or criticized his aggression. They
abandoned the principles of multilaterialism, consultation with Congress, and
support from the U.N. because it would have been bad for their leader if they
didn’t; it would have jeopardized their power.
The political consequences of the differences between conservatives
and progressives is not only not small, it affects the way both sides conduct
their political battles. Progressives focus on an impossible future, a utopia
of promises, and this justifies for them their unscrupulous means. Issues for
them are merely instruments for accumulating political power.
Conservatives look to the past as a guide to what is possible and humanly
practical, and what is not. Issues for them are problems that need to be fixed,
and they take seriously the policies they devise to address them. This puts
conservatives at a huge political disadvantage. It causes them to argue policy
as though they were debating a party with whom they shared goals and only
differed on the means to get there. But that is far from the case.
Take the present debate about a government shutdown. A statement
from Boehner’s office explains, “The entire government is shut down right now
because Washington Democrats refuse to even talk about fairness for all
Americans under ObamaCare.” This is a proposal for compromise and is designed
to portray Republicans as reasonable. We’re all part of the same social
contract, and we need to give on both sides to resolve the impasse. We’re all
interested in fairness, when all is said and done. If individuals were to be
given a year’s extension under Obamacare, as corporations already have been,
that would be fair. But since when is Obamacare about fairness? That’s a
Democratic façade and talking point, courtesy of the Republican Speaker. By way
of contrast, this is how the Democrats make their argument: “Republicans are
trying to shut down the government so they can prevent us from providing all
Americans with affordable healthcare.” In other words, Democrats are standing
up for fairness and ordinary Americans, against the selfish Republicans who
want deny them affordable care and shut down their government. This is three
lies in one sentence. But who do you think wins that vote?
If you want to fight the left you have to fight fire with fire.
That means first and foremost you have to hold them to account for hurting the
people they are pretending to help. Whose opportunities are going to be wrecked
by Obamacare? Health care taxes will go up for those who pay taxes – the middle
class — while their incomes will go down. Already Obamacare is cutting the
workweek to 30 hours. Whose pocket books do you think that is hitting?
They claim conservatives are conducting a war against minorities;
we need to throw the truth back in their faces. We need to tell the people that
progressives are the principal oppressors and exploiters of minorities and the
poor in this country. Progressives control the inner cities, which are teeming
with the nation’s minorities and poor; and they run the broken public school
systems that have become dumping grounds for those who cannot afford a private
education.
The city of Milwaukee has been run by liberals and progressives
without interruption for more than 100 years. What is the consequence of this
progressive rule? Milwaukee’s median household income is forty percent below
the rest of the country. The black unemployment rate is 27%, three times the
national average for everyone. Milwaukee’s population is majority black and
Hispanic, and 30% of it lives below the poverty line. A third of Milwaukee’s
public school children drop out before they graduate; those who do are barely
literate. That’s what progressive policies achieve. Don’t let them
forget it.
Conservatives need to put the human disasters of progressive
policies in front of people every chance they get. We need to confront
progressives with the misery they have created in America’s bankrupt cities,
Detroit and Chicago, Philadelphia and Cincinnati, St. Louis, and the nation’s
capital, and every city they have controlled for 25, 50 and 100 years, without
interruption.
Conservatives need to talk less to the voters’ heads and more to
their hearts. Government debt is not just an accountant’s nightmare. Debt is a
form of economic slavery. If you add up all the taxes Americans pay — federal,
state, local, income, sales — Americans already work half the year for
government rather than for themselves. Like Obamacare and the political use of
the I.R.S., debt is a threat to individual freedom.
Freedom is what our cause is about not just fiscal responsibility. Fiscal
responsibility has no emotional appeal except to people who already understand
what it means. Fiscal responsibility is a means to an end. The end is freedom,
and that is what inspires commitment and sacrifice and the passion necessary to
win. Because it speaks to the heart.
Conservatives need to speak up as champions of the little guys,
the underdogs, whose lives are being steadily constricted – made less free — by
the ongoing destruction of a system that once afforded more opportunity for
more people than any other in the history of the world. Conservatives need to
speak up for the young whose future horizons are being rapidly diminished as
the trillion dollar Obama deficits pile higher and higher. Conservatives need
to speak for all Americans whose security under Obama has been degraded to the
most dangerous levels since the end of the Cold War.
This is the threat we face, and the sooner we grapple with it the
greater our chances to survive it. The most important battle in the world today
is not being waged in the Middle East but here at home in the United States. If
we lose this battle, everything is lost. But if we will take the measure of the
enemies of freedom and prepare ourselves to fight them, we have a better than
even chance to win.
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