Antiwar.com Blog

If “one the most hopeful signs we’ve gotten yet from Iraq” turns out to be a hoax, what does that say about the entire project?

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.

Stephen Schwartz sends a very telling assessment of “who’s taken seriously”:

BTW, when I knocked Hunter Thompson I got 65 nasty emails.

When I blasted Cat Stevens I got 50 nasty emails.

When I got into this ridiculous exchange with you goofs over links etc. I got seven nasty emails. I guess that is one illustration of who’s taken seriously.

Keep digging, Comrade.

With apologies to Slate, I now inaugurate Antiwar.com’s Stephen Schwartz Lawsuit Watch. As you probably already know, Schwartz threatened to sue us last week for hyperlinking to a photograph of him on The Atlantic Web site. After being laughed out of town for that by various commentators, including Instapundit, Schwartz now informs me, via e-mail, that

If you knew anything at all about anything you would know that legal actions don’t take place in a week. …

Legal action will have to do with libel, not links, and will be undertaken at the time and place of my choosing.

A time and place of his choosing, eh? Well, Schwartz first threatened to sue us (over a link to an article about him) in December 2002.

As for a suitable jurisdiction for his complaint, may I suggest Uzbekistan? I know it’s out of the way, but at least Schwartz has some credibility there.

In today’s centersmear at Frontpagemag, a Steven Plaut writes:

In a New York Times editorial, [Juan] Cole said that he saw the elections in Syria as a model for other Arab countries to follow: “The last thing the Arab people need is a red herring like ‘free and open elections’ to distract them from the international Zionist/Neo-Con conspiracy to take their oil.” Professor Cole then added that President Assad’s ability to gain such a high percentage of the vote “all the while maintaining an oligarchic cult of personality oppressive regime mired in nepotism and corruption” was “truly impressive” and a positive sign of “Arab solidarity.”

Wow. What a jerk that Cole is!

One slight problem: Cole never wrote, and the New York Times never published, any such thing. It’s a lame attempt at satire from an Iraqi blog. I didn’t bother reading any further. If David Horowitz can’t use some of his massive cash to hire a goddamn editor, then I assume he wants his writers to lie. Which they do, constantly.

UPDATE 10:30 a.m. CT: Steven Plaut sends the following e-mail:

Well, here then is a LEGIT citation from Abu Cole

Abu Cole’s ideas of democracy:

From http://www.juancole.com/ this week:
“Al-Qaeda has some political support in some regions of Saudi Arabia, and it should be remembered that Islamists did well in the recent municipal elections, so al-Qaeda there is sensitive to public opinion.”

Aside from the sheer pointlessness of this out-of-context quotation, am I to understand that a fake citation is nullified by a real one?

By the way, the fake citation is still up, and the charming little Plaut has put the same message on the Frontpage comments board under a pseudonym (Gallows).

UPDATE 3:30 p.m. CT: The passage in question has finally been removed. I saved the page this morning if anyone would like to see the original.