David Horowitz

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Image:Horowitz.gif David Horowitz is an American conservative writer and social activist. A prominent member of the New Left in the 1960s, Horowitz later rejected Leftism and now identifies politically with conservatism.

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 website FrontPageMag.com. He is affiliated with Students for Academic Freedom and Campus Watch. He frequently appears on the FOX News network as one of their analysts.

Contents

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Life and career

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David Horowitz 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 close friend Betty Van Patter. Horowitz blames the Panthers for her death (although no one was charged and the case remains unsolved) and points to this as having shaken his faith in Leftist ideology.

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 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." Part of the motivation for Discover the Networks is Horowitz's view that Leftist individuals and groups are lending support (whether consciously or not) to Islamic terrorism, and thus require ongoing scrutiny. This theme is explored in Horowitz's 2004 book Unholy Alliance.

The issue of ideological bias in academia, particularly in Leftist forms, is currently Horowitz's main focus. He is promoting the adoption of the Academic Bill of Rights, billed as a means of reducing ideological bias in academia, by universities in the United States. His most recent book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Regnery Publishing, 2006), names 101 professors at universities in the United States. These professors are, he says, representative of the left-wing professors in academia whose intent is not to educate their students, but to indoctrinate them. 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."

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Affirmative action

Horowitz generally opposes affirmative action programs, and particularly opposes proposals for reparations to African American descendants of slaves owned by white U.S. citizens. To promote this view, in 2001 he distributed an essay stating that reparations for slavery are a "bad idea, and racist too"[2] to more than 50 college and university student newspapers. The essay discusses the following 10 claims:

  • No single group is clearly responsible for slavery
  • No single group benefited exclusively from its fruits
  • Only a minority of white Americans owned slaves
  • Most of today's Americans have no connection (direct or indirect) to slavery
  • Reparations to other ethnic groups were justified by direct, not historical, injury
  • Not all African-American descendants of slaves suffer from the economic consequences of slavery
  • The reparations claim promotes a victim mentality in the African-American community
  • African Americans have already received substantial economic aid
  • African Americans also owe social debts to America
  • The reparations claim threatens to increase divisions between the African-American community and the rest of America

Several newspapers rejected the essay (offered as an advertisement), and demonstrations against college newspapers that did carry it included destruction and burning of newstand copies by campus groups. Image:David Horowitz.jpg

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Academic Bill of Rights

Horowitz and other conservatives promote his Academic Bill of Rights, an eight-point manifesto that seeks to eliminate what they see 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, as evidenced in part by the party registrations of faculty members[3]. 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. [4] Others say Horowitz advocates an affirmative action program for conservatives, but he denies this.Template:Fact

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Gay Rights Perspective

Despite arguably being a hardline social conservative, Horowitz has rejected the tendency of social 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. While he disagrees with the gay marriage movement, he believes homosexuals have a fundamental right to privacy in their own homes and that the term "homosexual agenda", common among right-wing pundits, is an "intolerant" one.[5]

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Controversy and criticism

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 wrote an open letter to Morris Dees, president of the SPLC, which 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 bilingual 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.
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Books

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

Article

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

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External links

sv:David Horowitz

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