NOVANEWS
The following is Part II of a four-part investigation that was originally published onAlterNet. (Read Part I here.)
When David Horowitz appeared in Rancho Palos Verdes, California for his lavish annual West Coast Retreat on March 6, the launch of the shadowy Canary Mission website was just weeks away. Speaking before hundreds of ultra-conservatives, Horowitz set the tone for the weeks to come: “It’s kind of obvious [that] the Jews are the canaries in the mine,” Horowitz proclaimed. “The canaries were taken by miners, as you know, into the mines, and when the canary died you knew there was gas in the mine and you’d better get out. So the Jews are there to identify the threat.”
Horowitz described for the assembled activists what he saw as the greatest threats to Jews. The danger, he said, started with the Muslim Students Association (MSA), a campus group he described as “a recruitment organization for the Muslim Brotherhood” with secret ties to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign through her aide, Huma Abedin, whom he called “a Muslim Brotherhood operative.” According to Horowitz, the MSA and another student group composed largely of Arab and Muslim-Americans, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), were behind a supposed epidemic of anti-Semitism that had put Jewish college students at risk across America.
Funded to the tune of $10 million by right-wing foundations, the David Horowitz Freedom Center is a key financial conduit to extreme anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic organizations. Among those who have received funding through the Horowitz Freedom Center is Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative. Geller, an aggressively self-promoting Islamophobic Zionist who was named in a recent FBI report as an ideological catalyst of far-right extremism, has spent much of this year waging court battles to allow her to purchase advertisements on public buses and subways that read, “Islamic Jew Hatred: It’s in the Quran.” (In order to keep Geller’s “Draw Muhammad” ad campaign out of the city, Washington DC’s Transit Authority banned all political advertising).
More than perhaps any other conservative activist, Horowitz has revived the tactics most familiar to the late Senator Joseph McCarthy in order to undermine progressive political movements. “McCarthy was right about the presence of Communists posing as liberals…virtually all of McCarthy’s victims were Communists (and lied about being Communists),” Horowitz wrote in “Left Illusions,” a book-length defense of McCarthyism. His error-laden book, “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,” amounts to a blacklist of left-wing and liberal professors who supposedly “say they want to kill white people,” “support Osama bin Laden,” “advocate killing ordinary Americans,” and “defend pedophilia,” according to Horowitz. Horowitz’s website, Discover The Networks, published dossiers of progressive public figures and linked them to “Jihad” and the Muslim Brotherhood. His lurid allegations of a dark alliance between American progressives and radical Islamists have formed the basis for the tactics he is now using to demonize the Palestine solidarity movement. And his extreme “Jew Hatred on Campus” initiative has received promotion from Canary Mission.
Horowitz is a former radical leftist who emerged as a leading conservative organizer during the Reagan era. A former Stalinist raised without any connection to Jewish religion by Communist academics blacklisted by McCarthy, Horowitz became an ardent promoter of the North Korean Communist regime before turning hard right. His dogmatism was unaffected by his conversion. His transformation, meanwhile, has been wildly profitable, earning him millions of dollars from conservative donors including the Koch brothers. He showed little interest in the Middle East or Israel before the terrorist attacks of September 11. Afterward, in an autobiographical reflection on his own sense of mortality, Horowitz likened his deceased father to Mohammed Atta, one of the suicidal hijackers. In the post-9/11 era, Horowitz has focused his energy on whipping up the conservative movement with Islamophobia through campus-based initiatives like “Islamofascism Awareness Week,” where he attempted to explain how “the Left is in league with Islamofascists.” His Islamophobia campaigns have gained him and his groups millions more dollars from right-wing funders, some of which he funneled to the Dutch neo-fascist politician Geert Wilders. Despite his self-proclaimed fervent devotion to Israel, Horowitz has never bothered to visit the country.
Early this year, Horowitz introduced an initiative that would join the smear tactics that had earned him so much notoriety—and money—with the campaign to crush BDS, or the international grassroots campaign to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel until it abides by international law. Calling it “Jew Hatred on Campus,” Horowitz introduced a project that aimed to blacklist colleges with “the worst anti-Semitic activity” while painting Students for Justice in Palestine as a hate group. At the same time, Horowitz’s organization plastered campuses with posters depicting a public execution by Hamas of prisoners accused of spying for Israel’s security services. The posters read: “Students For Justice in Palestine #JewHaters.” (Horowitz only took credit for the campaign after the posters ignited a furor).
One of Horowitz’s chief funders, the Boston-based tech baron Robert Shillman, also helps bankroll Pamela Geller’s Islamophobic poster campaign and her deliberately provocative road show. A trustee at his alma mater of Northeastern University, Shillman has attempted to leverage his multi-million dollar donations to pressure the school into banning its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. Through his Shillman Fellowship, he has sponsored the careers of many of the zealots nurtured in Horowitz’s hothouse.
One of the most prolific Shillman-backed writers is Ben Shapiro, a would-be pundit and founder of the far-right online outlet called Truth Revolt, which is operated and funded through the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The website’s stated aim is to “unmask leftists in the media for who they are, destroy their credibility with the American public, and devastate their funding bases.” It has become a center for attacks on student BDS activists and liberal pro-Israel students, publishing material by right-wing students being groomed by the Israel lobby for advocacy careers.
Back in 2003, when he was still a student at UCLA, Shapiro called for the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. “If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper,” Shapiro wrote. More recently, Shapiro dedicated a column to a theme he would return to repeatedly in his tirades against the Black Lives Matter movement: “The racism of the black community.”
While other conservative organizers have attempted to recruit minorities into the ranks of the Republican Party, Horowitz has instead provided a sympathetic forum at his FrontPageMag for Jared Taylor, a leading white nationalist who argues that blacks and Latinos are genetically inferior to whites. Horowitz has editorialized that African-Americans owe white America a debt of gratitude for ending slavery and granting them “the most thoroughly protected rights anywhere.” This year, as protests against police brutality erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, Horowitz declared that “there’s no community in America that’s more racist than the black community.”
At his West Coast Retreat last March, Horowitz announced his “guerrilla campaign” against Palestine solidarity activism on campus. Complaining that conservatives too often shy from “very dirty warfare,” he declared that “negative advertising works. By focusing the conversation on their negatives, it takes attention away from ours.”
