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Posted by David Horowitz on May 28th, 2010 and filed under FrontPage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
David Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine,Ramparts. He is the author, with Peter Collier, of three best selling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987). Looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation (1989), a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s that has been compared to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and other classic works documenting a break from totalitarianism. Horowitz examined this subject more closely in Radical Son (1996), a memoir tracing his odyssey from “red-diaper baby” to conservative activist that George Gilder described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.”
[Editor’s note: This speech was delivered at the University of California, San Diego on May 10, 2010 and has been edited for publication.]
The last time I visited this campus was 40 years ago when I came to have lunch with Professor Herbert Marcuse, a malicious Marxist who made a reputation for himself and became a hero to the left by advancing the proposition that if you can claim to speak on behalf of the oppressed you have the right and the obligation to silence, and, if necessary, to obliterate people who disagree with you. This, of course, is the creed of every run-of-the-mill dictator on earth, and it is the creed of the progressive left today.
It is appropriate — and not coincidental of course — that I arrive here during “Israel Apartheid Week” or, as I prefer to call it, “Hitler Youth Week.” I use that reference because — as should be evident — what is going on here is part of a globally organized movement centered in the Arab Muslim Middle East to finish the job that Hitler started. Unlike the Nazis, who hid their “final solution” from ordinary Germans and the world at large, the Muslim radicals shout it from the rooftops, put it in their organizational charters and get applauded for doing so by millions of Muslims who want to see it happen. And the left does its job, as during the Cold War years, of conducting auxiliary campaigns to help the genocide along.
Along with Israel Apartheid Week, these leftists will commemorate what the genocide-minded call the “Nakba,” which is Arabic for “catastrophe” and is the name they have given to the creation of the only Jewish state in existence. The protests are genocidal intentions in themselves, seeking the obliteration of a people’s homeland; and they are supported by this university which prides itself on its diversity and respect for others – apparently excepting Jews. The “Israel Apartheid Wall,” which is the centerpiece of this genocidal week at UC San Diego, was created with $8,500 in student funds. Another $32,000 in student funds went to the sponsoring organization, the Muslim Students Association, for the hate speakers it brought in and other activities this spring. The hate week itself is supported by several university departments, including Ethnic Studies, Visual Arts and Literature, and by one of the colleges of the university, as it happens Thurgood Marshall College, named for a civil rights activist.
It is also fitting that one of the speakers should be Angela Davis, an academic icon and a lifelong Communist who devoted herself to furthering the agendas of the most oppressive, blood-soaked regime in recorded history; and received for her services a Lenin Prize from the East German police state, the most wretched and ruthless of all the Soviet satellite regimes; who bought an arsenal of weapons for a young Black Panther, who attempted to take a judge and his courtroom hostage, blew off the head of the judge and got himself killed in the process.
Today Angela Davis comes as the leader of a 20-year campaign to end what she calls the “Prison-Industrial Complex.” This is a racist campaign to free every incarcerated criminal in the United States who happens to be of a darker skin tone. Her movement is actually doubly racist. First, because it singles out black and Hispanic criminals for “liberation,” and second, because ninety-five percent of their crimes are committed against law-abiding black and Hispanic people. Angela Davis is a “University Professor,” which means that she makes a six-figure income, is provided with a personal staff and is honored in a way that only a select few of University of California faculty are. A revered figure among the academic left, she makes scores of appearances every academic year and receiving $10,000 honoraria an appearance to spread her hatred of white people, of Jews, and of America to college audiences. This evening we have been thrust into a very sad situation.
Ecclesiastes famously said, “There is nothing new under the sun,” and the older I get, the more impressed I am by this observation. My own parents were card-carrying members of the American Communist Party, which meant that they were pawns, witting and unwitting, of the Soviet empire. They called themselves progressives and believed they had joined a movement to bring social justice to all mankind. In 1956, the leader of world Communism gave a secret speech about the crimes that Stalin had committed in the name of social justice, which included the murders of millions of people, including millions of Communists. He gave the speech because the post-Stalin leaders of the Soviet Union were afraid a new Stalin would emerge and slaughter them too. Like today’s leftists, my parents hated the anti-Communists on the political right and called them liars when they confronted progressives with the crimes their hero had committed. The anti-Communists claimed that Stalin had killed 10 million people. In fact, when the truth was revealed, the figure was 40 million. That’s interesting in itself: The right understates the truth, and the left overstates the lies, in the name of social justice.
When the speech appeared on the front page of The New York Times, its impact was devastating to the progressive cause to which my parents had devoted themselves. Progressives were demoralized and unable to regroup. So their children — my generation — launched a new left. We fatuously believed that there could be a new left – one untainted by the crimes of the old and unlikely to repeat them despite the fact that our understanding of the world and our agenda for the future — social justice, meaning equality enforced by government — were fundamentally the same. The American founders understood and asserted that politically enforced equality would mean the end of liberty for all, a wisdom we ignored as the new left quickly revealed itself to be no different from the old, embracing Communists in Vietnam and Central America and eventually Islamic totalitarians in Gaza and the Middle East.
About the time I was having lunch with Herbert Marcuse, I was also raising a considerable sum of money for the Black Panther Party in order to buy a church in East Oakland to house a Panther school. I was then the editor of Ramparts, the largest magazine of the left, and had recruited our bookkeeper, Betty Van Patter, to maintain the school’s financial records because I foolishly believed our own propaganda that a “racist” federal government would shut down the school if the Panthers didn’t keep their books properly. In December 1974, Betty Van Patter disappeared, and by the time the police fished her body out of San Francisco Bay, I knew the Panthers had killed her, and I also knew that every progressive friend I had was a potential threat to me and my four children, because if I said what I thought, members of that community would denounce me as a CIA agent and a racist, and I couldn’t know what consequences might ensue.
So for me Israel Apartheid Week where secular progressives join hands with theocratic fascists and disregard the realities in front of their eyes is a case of déjà vu all over again. On this campus we are witnessing a “protest” in support of a movement worse than the Nazis, which unlike Hitler broadcasts from the rooftops its plan to obliterate the Jews, to obliterate Israel and to obliterate America. Have you noticed a single Muslim country distancing itself from this plan or denouncing Ahmadinejad and Hizbollah and Hamas for proclaiming this solution to the problem posed by infidel Jews and Americans? Even one Muslim state out of the 57 that exist? When people say Islam is a religion of peace, I’m sure that’s true for some individual Muslims, and have said so many times. But when you look at the organized Muslim community, the element that is willing to stand up for peace, that will defend the right of the Jewish state to exist, that is willing to pass a UN resolution condemning the genocidal terrorists of Hizbollah and Hamas is so inconsequential that it might as well not exist.
Now to the conflict in the Middle East which Israel Apartheid Week is supposed to illuminate. Since there are young people in this room I’m going to focus this lesson on a recent event — the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Gaza is a little strip of land bounded on one side by the Mediterranean and on the other by Israel. It is about six miles wide and 25 miles long. Across this stretch of land, Israel was attacked by Egyptian tanks in three aggressive wars supported by all the Arabs in the region – in 1948, 1967 and 1973. Since Gaza is a long corridor the support of its population for the anti-Israel aggressor gave Egyptian forces the opportunity to come within striking range of important Israeli cities. This is why in the aftermath of those aggressions Israel decided it was necessary for security reasons to station Israeli forces in Gaza.
Not only did Egypt invade Israel three times across the Gaza strip, but after the first invasion it annexed Gaza, and did so with no protest from Palestinians or the Arab world, which now pretend to be so concerned about Palestinian land and a Palestinian state. Following the 1948 war, when Gaza was under Egyptian control, the 25 mile strip of land became the base for the first terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. These were conducted by the Fedayeen who were created by Egypt’s dictator, Gamel Abdel Nasser, and were led by the head of his secret police.
These and later terrorist attacks by the PLO and Hamas strengthened Israel’s resolve to take the step that any country would take to protect its citizens by stationing its own military in the Gaza strip until such a time as the Arab states and the Palestinians were ready to accept Israel’s existence and live in peace. It has been more than sixty years since the creation of Israel and the Arabs have never been willing to accept Israel’s existence and consequently there is no peace. No Palestinian entity recognizes the state of Israel. None. Israel has been continuously under attack by Arab regimes and Arab terrorists since its creation. The Islamic Republic of Iran, armed with Chinese rockets and soon to possess nuclear weapons has declared its intention to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. The Palestinian Authority, Hizbollah, and Hamas have made the identical intention clear so that no one can mistake it. These calls for genocide have not been repudiated by a single Muslim state, and no Muslim state has offered Israel’s threatened Jews their support.
Nonetheless, in 2005, Israel, in the interests of peace, unilaterally withdrew its military forces from Gaza, taking a risk unprecedented in the annals of nations. The events that followed the Israeli withdrawal tell you everything you need to know about the Palestinians and their cause, and about the nature of the conflict in the Middle East.
Prior to Israel’s withdrawal, there were 9,000 Jews living in Gaza along the Mediterranean coast. Nine thousand Jews out of a population of 1.2 million Arabs; nine thousand law-abiding Jews. These 9,000 law-abiding Jews created a horticulture industry, which employed 12,000 Palestinians and whose product accounted for 10% of the entire gross national product of Gaza. Consider that 9,000 Jews are only .02% of the Gaza population. Two hundredths of 1%. As it happens the entire state of Israel also exists on only .02% of the entire Arab land mass. But that is too much for the Arabs. And nine thousand Jews out of a population of 1.2 million Arabs was too much for them as well.
Think about it. If the Muslims of Gaza – or if the leaders they have elected — were rational, decent, normal human beings their reaction to the law-abiding Jews living among them could have been: Let’s import more Jews! Let’s encourage more Jews to live here. Let’s make Jews welcome in our country; they are creating so much wealth for our citizens.
But that did not happen. Instead the Israeli government out of concern for the safety of the 9,000 productive, law-abiding Jews who lived there, evacuated them from Gaza. Some of these Jews were so attached to their homes in Gaza that they had to be removed at gun point. Why did the Israeli government do that? Because if they left them behind they would have been slaughtered. Everybody, including those individuals in this audience who disagree with everything else I say, should understand that. Palestinians elect regimes – both the PLO and Hamas – which organize terrorist attacks against men, women and children; which target men, women and children. No civilized people in the world does that. Everybody understands that if the Palestinians were disarmed today, there would be peace in the Middle East. Everybody understands that if the Jews in Israel disarm, they will be massacred. These are simple facts that every rational person can see provided their vision isn’t impaired by religious hatred.
It was even worse than these bare facts would suggest. A philanthropic Jew in America, Mortimer Zuckerman, the publisher of U.S. News and World Report, fully aware that the Jews of Gaza were going to be removed forcibly to save their lives because the Palestinians are so bloodthirsty and genocidal that Israel couldn’t guarantee their safety, collected $14 million from American Jews to buy the 3,000 greenhouses and all the plumbing that went into this horticulture industry. They then gave it to the Palestinians as a gesture of peace. And on the day that Hamas took control of Gaza, the Palestinians destroyed all the greenhouses, all the plumbing, and started firing thousands of rockets into unarmed towns and schoolyards in Israel.
Every Palestinian rocket is an anti-civilian rocket because they are rockets that can’t be aimed. The Palestinians fire their rockets at random in the hopes that they will kill Jews. Israel’s rockets, by contrast, are precision weapons that are aimed solely at military targets in an effort save civilian lives.
The lesson of the Gaza Strip is that the Palestinian jihadists are so full of hate that they are willing to destroy 10% of their own gross national product because it was created and donated by Jews. Israel, the on the other hand, was forced to evacuate the people who created this wealth to save them from being massacred because they were Jews. That tells you everything you need to know about the conflict in the Middle East.
Here’s another instructive fact about Gaza. After the 1948 war, the entire Gaza Strip was annexed by Egypt. It disappeared from the maps. The same thing happened to the West Bank, which was annexed by Jordan. Yet there was no protest from the Arabs or the “Palestinians.” So much for the desire for Palestinian self-determination.
The so-called Palestine Liberation Organization was created in 1964, fifteen years after the creation of Israel. This was the first time since the Arabs invaded the region in the 7th Century that there was any hint there was a people who identified themselves as “Palestinians” and desired a Palestinian state.
The charter of the newly created PLO which proclaimed the goals of the “liberation” movement failed to mention either the annexation of the West Bank or the Gaza strip. There was not a word in it about the liberation of Gaza from Egypt. There was not a word about the liberation of the West Bank from Jordan. Instead the PLO charter called for the elimination of the “Zionist entity.” From its beginning the Palestinian liberation movement has been a movement driven by Jew hatred. It is not designed to liberate the Palestinians by winning them a state; it is designed to “liberate” Israel and the Arab Middle East from the Jews, to expunge an infidel presence from the Muslim umma. Hamas and Hizbollah and the PLO do not want a Palestinian state. They want an Islamic empire, an infidel-free zone stretching “from the Jordan to the sea.”
Now allow me to deal with some of the lies perpetrated by the Muslim Students Association and their “Israel Apartheid Week” on this campus. On the “apartheid” wall of hate funded by this university there is a map that pictures Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. It is labeled “occupied Palestine.” It is a lie.
There is no occupation of a country called “Palestine.” There were no Palestinian lands originally to be stolen. Israel was created in the same way that Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq were created – out of the ruins of the Turkish Empire. The Turks are not Arabs. They had ruled the entire region for 400 years since the 16th Century, until they joined the powers that were defeated in World War I.
At the end of the war, the victors – Britain and France — divided up the spoils, in this case the defeated Turkish empire. The “Palestine Mandate,” which was part of these Turkish spoils did not refer to a people but to a geographical region. The people in the region for the previous thousand years called themselves “Arabs” not “Palestinians.” The word “Palestine” is not even an Arab word. It is Roman in origin. When the Romans drove the Jews out of their homeland, Judea, in the first century CE, they renamed it after the Jews’ enemies, the Philistines, who were Europeans, not Arabs. Hence the name “Palestine.”
The claim that Israel is “occupied Palestine” is a lie of Hitlerian proportions and has the same genocidal intention. And it is funded by the University of California on this campus.
A second version of this lie is focused on Jewish settlements in the West Bank, as though these are an extension of the so-called “occupation.” The hate week displays put up by the Muslim Students Association, show the West Bank dotted with the settlements of Jewish interlopers. Let me put to you this question: If you are not a xenophobe or a racist what is wrong with Jewish settlements – with Jews settling on the West Bank or in Gaza? Why is a Jewish settlement a problem? There are more than a million Arab Muslims settled permanently in Israel as Israeli citizens. They have more rights than the Muslims of Gaza, more rights than the Muslims in the West Bank, more rights than the Muslims in Iran, more rights than the Muslims in any Muslim country. Jews welcome Muslims as settlers in their country. But Arab Muslims do not welcome Jews. They are xenophobes and Judeo-phobes, and that is the only reason why Jewish settlements are a problem for them.
Consider that the Jews of Israel have been attacked in a single generation in three aggressive wars designed to push them into the sea. By every precept of international law they had – and have — the right to annex those territories from which they were attacked and expel the entire population which joined the aggressions.
That’s exactly what happened to the Germans after World War II. East Prussia was the industrial heartland of Germany. Ethnic Germans had inhabited it for 1,000 years. But when Germany invaded Poland twice in a generation, the allied powers said, enough. As part of the peace that followed the war, they expelled 12 million Germans from East Prussia and gave the land they had inhabited to Poland. There was no international outcry over that.
The Israelis had every right to take the same measures to secure peace in the Middle East in 1948 and 1967. In 1948 they could have expelled all the Arabs who had not left Israel, the way the Arabs expelled the Jews living in their countries in the Middle East. In 1967 they could have expelled all the Arabs living in Gaza and all the Arabs on the West Bank. But they didn’t. They preferred to live in peace with their Arab neighbors. The Israelis extended their hands to them and even when their peace offers were rejected built universities on the West Bank and made it a booming economy – an economy the PLO has since destroyed. And now the Israelis are being threatened with extinction by these same people as a reward for their generosity.
A third lie featured in the Muslim-sponsored hate fest this week is that there are five million Palestinian refugees who should be returned to their homes in Israel. The Arab records show quite clearly that when the Arab armies invaded Israel, the Arab governments called on those Arabs living in the area to flee and promised them they would be returned to their homes by the victorious Arab armies. In war, people sometimes flee because they are scared; some were undoubtedly driven out. Eventually there were an estimated five or six hundred thousand Arabs who fled. But there were also six hundred thousand Jews who were driven out of Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia and other Arab lands where they had lived for centuries. The largest ethnic community in Baghdad until the 30’s, when Iraq joined the Nazis, was the Jews.
The Arab propagandists and their University of California supporters now claim that there are more than five million Palestinian refugees, even though there were only a tenth that many originally and most of them have died. But why are there any Palestinian refugees? It is sixty years later. There are no longer any Jewish refugees, because they were all re-settled by Israel. The Palestinian refugees were not re-settled by the Arabs, not even in Jordan whose territory consists of 80% of the original Palestine Mandate and whose population is 70% made up of Palestinian Arabs. Jordan by the way is ruled by a Hashemite minority, yet there are no calls for the self-determination of Palestinians in Jordan. Palestinian Arabs are not allowed to settle in other Arab states. They are barred from entering.
In other words, the reason there are Palestinian refugees is because the PLO, Hamas and the Arab states want them to be refugees — want them to be confined to miserable camps, where they can use them for propaganda and as cannon fodder for the war to cleanse the Jews from the Muslim Middle East. Indeed the refugee camps are bases for the terrorist armies of the Islamic jihad. The United States and Israel, along with other countries, have poured billions of dollars into the refugee cause and it ended up in the Swiss bank accounts of the real oppressors of Palestinians – the leaders of the PLO and Hamas. Yasir Arafat died with a Swiss bank account worth $35 billion. That was money donated by Jews and Americans and taken out of the pockets of Palestinians.
The centerpiece of the Muslim sponsored hate week on this campus is the so-called Apartheid Wall which is itself two lies. The wall being protested – the “wall” in Israel — is not a wall but a security fence, and it is not an “apartheid” fence because it is not designed to enforce a separation of races or ethnicities. There are, as noted, a million Arabs living in Israel with more rights than the Arabs of any Arab country.
The fence was not erected to keep Arabs out. It was erected to keep terrorists out. The West Bank and Gaza are terrorist camps whose governments honor, support, and orchestrate a terrorist war against the ordinary citizens of Israel. What if the Jews took down the wall? We know from the past exactly what would happen. Israel’s security fence did not appear out of the blue. The wall was a desperate last measure the Israelis devised after years of watching their children slaughtered by Palestinians in discos and at Sbarro pizza parlors who were then honored as heroes and martyrs in the wake of their crimes. The fence has stopped virtually all of these attacks. So what the hate week on this campus is really calling for when it calls for the removal of the fence is a renewal of terrorist attacks against the children of Israel.
There are whole departments of this university that are sponsoring this hate week and thus the war against the Jews it encourages, including the Visual Arts Department, the Literature Department and the Ethnic Studies Department. The Thurgood Marshall College is another official entity sponsoring these incitements and lies. If you look at the codes this university claims to live by, you will see that chief among them is respect for diversity – for the ethnicities of students who attend this school. There is no respect for Jewish students at this campus when a week of hate like this is thrust in their faces courtesy of university faculties and administrators.
There are thirty campuses across the nation hosting Israel Apartheid Weeks this spring, including the University of California — Irvine, UC Berkeley, Boston University, Brandeis. Brown, University of Wisconsin, University of Houston, Brooklyn College, University of Chicago, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, DePaul, Columbia, University of Illinois, University of Minnesota, University of Washington and others.
Behind each and every one of these hate weeks against the Jews is the Muslim Students Association. Many people on this and other campuses mistake the Muslim Students Association for a cultural organization that represents all Muslims. It is no such thing. The Muslim Students Association is a sister organization of the terrorist organization Hamas, and like Hamas, is part of the Muslim Brotherhood network.
Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and the architect of terrorist jihad was an admirer of Adolf Hitler, whose organization translated Mein Kampf into Arabic. The father of Palestinian nationalism, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was one of Al-Banna’s heroes and is revered to this day by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas as the father of Palestinian nationalism. Haj Amin al-Husseini was a Nazi. In the twenties and the thirties he preached the extermination of the Jews and inspired two celebrated massacres of Jewish settlers. During the Second World War he went to Berlin to work with Hitler to recruit Arabs to Nazism . He devised his own plan to create an Auschwitz in the Middle East and was thwarted in setting up his death camps only because Rommel was defeated at El-Alamein. After the war, he and al-Banna led the Arab crusade against the creation of the Jewish state.
Why is the Muslim Students Association that violates the diversity principles and ethical codes of every one of these universities allowed to sponsor hate weeks against Israel and the Jews on these campuses? Where is the outrage over the lies the Muslim Students Association spreads along with its incitements against the Jewish state? Shame on the University of California for its role in this event. Shame on Thurgood Marshall College and the faculties that sponsored it. And shame on the Muslim students who use the shield of their religion to advance the Islamic war against the Jews.
A Question from the Audience:
[Note: I am including this one question from a UC San Diego student named Jumanah Imad Albahri, a former officer of the Muslim Students Association. Albahri came wearing a red Muslim head covering and a Kaffiya, the scarf Arafat used as a symbol of the terrorist war against Israel. A video of this exchange is available here]
Jumanah Imad Albahri: Good evening. I just wanted to say thank you for coming to campus tonight and presenting your point of view. It’s always valuable to have two sets of views going on at the same time. Very useful. My name is Jumanah Imad Albahri and I am a student here at UCSD. I was reading your literature. I found that much more interesting than the talk. And I found some interesting things about the MSA, which is an organization that is very active on campus and it is hosting our annual “Hitler Youth Week.” You should come out to those events. If you could clarify the connection between the MSA and Jihad terrorist networks, because last I checked, we had to do our own fundraising and we never get help from anyone. So if you could clarify the connection between UCSD’s MSA, or if you don’t have such information, if you could connect other MSAs on UC, because the connection wasn’t too clear in the pamphlet.
David Horowitz: Will you condemn Hamas here and now?
Jumanah Imad Albahri: I’m sorry, what?
Horowitz: Will you condemn Hamas?
Albahri: Would I condemn Hamas?
Horowitz: As a terrorist – genocidal — organization?
Albahri: Are you asking me to put myself on a cross?
Horowitz: So you won’t. I actually have had this experience many times. You didn’t read the pamphlet (The Muslim Student Association and the Jihad Network), because the pamphlet gives chapter and verse on the connection. The main connection is that the MSA is part of the Muslim Brotherhood network as revealed in the documents produced by the FBI in the Holy Land Foundation trial.
Albahri: I don’t think you understood what I meant by that. I meant, if I say something, I’m sure that I will be arrested for reasons of Homeland Security. So if you could please just answer my question.
Horowitz: If you condemn Hamas, Homeland Security will arrest you?
Albahri: If I support Hamas — because your question forces me to condemn Hamas — if I support Hamas, I look really bad.
Horowitz: Well, if you don’t condemn Hamas, obviously you support it. Case closed. I had this same experience at UC Santa Barbara where there were 50 members of the Muslim Students Association sitting right in the rows there. And throughout my hour talk, I kept asking them, will you condemn Hezbollah and Hamas. And none of them would. And then, when the question period came, the President of the Muslim Students Association was the first person to ask questions. And I said, before you start, will you condemn Hezbollah? And he said, well, that question is too complicated for a yes/no answer. So I said, okay, I’ll put it to you this way. 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?
Albahri: For it.
Horowitz: Thank you. Thank you for coming and showing everybody what’s really going on here.