I love reading David Horowitz’s Frontpage website, I have to confess, in part because it confirms my very low opinion of the War Party: I mean, where else could someone be so utterly clueless as to name his own blog “Moonbat Central”? Does Horowitz really mean to characterize himself and his cohorts as “moonbats”? Poor David: still incoherent after all these years. But his moonbattish tendencies seem to be growing: he recently hooked up with one Steven Plaut, a professor of business at Haifa University who left America for Israel in 1981, and the extremist rhetoric has really gone around the bend. In a very poorly-written piece attacking Middle East scholar Juan Cole, Plaut writes:
“Here is the Cole take on bin Laden and 9-11, taken from the pro-al-Qaeda ‘antiwar.com’ web site …”
Oh yes, that’s us all right: “pro-Al Qaeda” through-and-through! That’s why Michael Scheuer, lately of the CIA’s special unit charged with going after bin Laden, writes for us. That’s why we’ve advocated killing bin Laden and wiping out his organization. It’s all an elaborate ruse, you see: because anybody who disagrees with David Horowitz, and Steven Plaut, has got to be pro-Al Qaeda. It’s as simple as that!
Who is this Steven Plaut? He is, among other things, a defender of racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Israeli extremist, one of whose crazed followers assassinated Yitchak Rabin (see here and here). Kahanist groups are characterized as terrorists by the U.S. State Department — but that doesn’t seem to bother Plaut. He also condemns the newly-elected Palestinian leader as a “Holocaust-denier” — although what this makes President Bush, who welcomed his election and invited him to the White House, is anybody’s guess.
Desperate for attention — and, increasingly, for more funds from his right-wing backers — Horowitz has been getting increasingly crazed lately, working himself and his dwindling band of supporters into a frothy-mouthed lather in a effort to convince himself that anything he says really matters.
What’s interesting to note is that the Horowitzian technique hasn’t really changed since his heyday as a New Leftist. Back then, his enemies were “capitalist running dogs” and agents of “the ruling class.” Today, as then, there can be no honest disagreements with Horowitz: his enemies are all “terrorists” and agents of “Al Qaeda.”
Horowitz, Plaut, and their fellow nutjobs are the real anti-Americans: fanatics who want to see their alleged enemies silenced, shut down, and jailed. That of course is the real intent of someone who labels their political opponents “pro-Al Qaeda.”
No conservative, no matter what their view of the Iraq war, should countenance this kind of intellectual dishonesty — and outright hooliganism. That’s why we’re urging all conservatives and libertarians of good will to boycott Horowitz, and all his works. People that irresponsible need to be marginalized.