The Best Quotes From David Horowitz In 2003

Mar, 2012

— “For thirty years, beginning with the invention of a privacy right in the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, the Left has been waging a systematic assault on the constitutional foundation of the nation. One element of that assault is the transformation of the founding contract into a ‘living constitution’ that can be re-invented at will ‘ and without the Amendment process — to suit the Left’s latest, destructive, political ends.”

— ” ‘A university is not a political party,’ I said, ‘and an education is not an indoctrination.’ I pointed out that when we go to our doctor’s office we don’t expect to find political slogans on the office doors or partisan political cartoons on the waiting room walls. Yet that it is precisely what many students encounter when they go to their professors’ offices for counseling and guidance. ‘We can trust our doctors to be professional, to minister equally to their patients without regard to their political or religious beliefs. But we can no longer trust our professors to do the same.”

— “In the spring of 2001, I placed an ad in the student paper at Brown giving ‘Ten Reasons Why Reparations For Slavery Is A Bad Idea ‘ And Racist Too.’ I thought it was a bad idea because it was being proposed 137 years after the fact, and that it was racist because it made all non-black citizens responsible for slavery and promised restitution on the basis of skin color rather than any actual suffering of the individuals to whom restitution was to be made.”

— “The renewed sense of grievance ‘ which is what the claim for reparations will inevitably create ‘ is neither a constructive nor a helpful message for black leaders to be sending to their communities. Virtually every group that has sought refuge in America has grievances to remember. For millions of recent immigrants the suffering is only years behind them, and can be as serious as ethnic cleansing or genocide. How are these people going to receive the payment claims from African-Americans whose comparable suffering lies in the distant past? Won’t they see this demand as just another claim for special treatment, for a rather extravagant new handout that is only necessary because some blacks can’t seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others, many of whom are even less privileged than they are?”

— “A just-released study conducted by my Center for the Study of Popular Culture, and based on primary voter registration lists, shows that among 32 elite colleges and universities including the entire Ivy League, registered faculty Democrats outnumbered Republicans 10-1. At schools like Brown, Wellesley and Wesleyan the figure exceeded 25-1. A parallel study conducted by the Center showed that over a ten-year period, the commencement speakers at the same 32 schools were biased in favor of Democrats and liberals by a factor of 15-1. At twenty-two of those schools not a single Republican or conservative had been invited to speak at a commencement in 10 years.”

— “If Rodney King had obeyed the orders clearly given and had laid down in a ‘prone position’ on the night of his famous encounter with Los Angeles police, 58 people would be alive today, $16 billion would be circulating in the economy and four dedicated LAPD officers who were working to the book that night would not have been forced to endure two trials (the first had acquitted them) and had their careers destroyed to appease the liberal conscience. But liberals had to make their point. They had to roll out the racial melodrama, insisting that every time a black man is arrested ‘ even one fleeing and refusing to be cuffed — a hate crime is committed by the police themselves. Liberals had to wring millions of dollars out of Los Angeles taxpayers to pay reparations to a man whom everyone knew then and knows now is just a pathetic bum.”

— “Everybody knows — but no one wants to say — that the Democratic Party has become the party of special interest bigots and racial dividers. It runs the one-party state that controls public services in every major inner city, including the corrupt and failing school systems in which half the students — mainly African American and Hispanic — are denied a shot at the American dream. It is the party of race preferences which separate American citizens on the basis of skin color providing privileges to a handful of ethnic and racial groups in a nation of nearly a thousand. The Democratic Party has shown that it will go to the wall to preserve the racist laws which enforce these preferences, and to defend the racist school systems that destroy the lives of millions of children every year.”

— “It is important for conservatives to make distinctions between those on the Left who were (and are) traitors or self-conceived enemies of the United States, and those who were (and are) the fellow-travelers of enemies of the United States, and those who are neither traitors, nor enemies, nor friends and protectors of enemies, but are American patriots who disagree with conservatives over tactical and policy issues. It is important, first because it is just, but also because it is a condition of democracy. Citizens will disagree over many issues and matters. In order for the democratic process to survive, all parties must refrain from attempts to de-legitimize those who disagree with them, provided they have legitimate concerns and dissents.”

— “Here are three rules for identifying the America haters. They are ‘critics’ for whom,

1. America can do no right.
2. Even the rights America appears to do are wrong.
3. America’s wrongs are monstrous.”

— “The Palestine Authority cannot be changed or reformed from within. It is a corrupt terrorist police state. Any challenge to the terrorists who run it will be ruthlessly suppressed. Many Palestinians genuinely interested in peace have been assassinated over the years for that very reason.”

— “There can be no peace with someone who wants to kill you. The terrorist entities on the Palestinian side of the conflict want exactly that. The Road Map powers have put Israel in an impossible position. No government in the world can fail to respond when its civilians are murdered. Since the Palestinian Authority is completely unable (and probably unwilling) to keep its terrorist armies and allies in check, someone else has to do it.”

— “Politics is about winning. If you don’t win, you don’t get to put your principles into practice. Therefore, find a way to win, or sit the battle out.”

— “I have never equated dissent with treason nor given any indication I thought dissent as such was ‘evil.’ …Instead, I have asserted the right of critics to dissent from government policies both explicitly and by example…”

— “A key to the mentality of the left is that it judges itself by its best intentions, and judges its opponents — America chief among them — by their worst deeds. Or by the fantasies of what their worst deeds might be. By imagining a perfect world of social justice that leftists (unopposed) will surely create, even America’s most positive achievements can be made to look bad. If a world can be made in which everyone will be fed and have shelter and medical attention, then the fact that they don’t can attributed to America, because America is the guardian of the international ‘status quo.'”

— “What does it mean to oppose Saddam Hussein’s ‘execrable regime’ and at the same time oppose the effort to change it? Or to condemn the regime change after the fact when Iraqis are rejoicing in the streets? What are intentions worth when actions contradict them?”

— “In practice, socialism didn’t work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy. In the vast library of socialist theory (and in all of Marx’s compendious works), there is hardly a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth ‘ to what will cause human beings to work and to innovate, and to what will make their efforts efficient. Socialism is a plan of morally sanctioned theft. It is about dividing up what others have created. Consequently, socialist economies don’t work; they create poverty instead of wealth. This is unarguable historical fact now, but that has not prompted the left to have second thoughts.”

— “(E)ven in its innocent beginnings, the new left defined itself by negatives, as ‘anti-anti Communist.’ It was a ‘new’ left because it did not want to identify with communism. But it also did not want to oppose Communism either, because then it would have had to support America’s Cold War. ‘Anti-anti Communism’ was the code for its anti-Americanism. What the left wanted was to oppose America and its ‘sham democracy.’ ”

— “I said that the proper way look at America is not just that it shared in the crimes of all nations, but ‘ more importantly — that it became the pioneer of human equality and freedom for all nations; that as a result of America’s efforts to realize the ideals of equality and freedom, blacks in America are now the freest and richest black people anywhere on the face of the earth including all of the nations that are ruled by blacks.”

— “Now it is virtually impossible for a vocal conservative to be hired for a tenure-track position on a faculty anywhere, or to receive tenure if so hired. The conservative faculty members I encounter who have achieved this feat, invariably tell me that they were forced to keep their political orientation to themselves until they achieved tenure. Alternatively, they were hired and tenured twenty years ago before the left secured its grip on the hiring process.”

— “The 1998 missile strike on the Sudan was an unannounced, unprovoked attack that destroyed that Third World nation’s only medicine factory. Yet it provoked no opposition outcry on the left. The Clinton air strike violated every principle of the current liberal critique of Bush foreign policy. The target of the attack was an alleged chemical weapons factory (which the Administration subsequently was forced to concede contained no chemical weapons facility). Yet, there were no inspections, UN or otherwise, preceding the attack to determine whether the factory was actually producing chemical weapons, as the Clinton White House claimed. There was not even a presidential phone call to the head of a state with whom the United States had diplomatic relations to request such an inspection. The strike in the Sudan was ordered without a UN resolution, without a congressional authorization and without approval from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who actually opposed it). Yet no critic of the current Bush foreign policy on Iraq expressed concern over the aggression. This is in dramatic contrast to the present critique of a war policy that is based on 12 years of disregarded UN resolutions and thwarted UN inspections, and two congressional resolutions (under two Presidents) supporting a regime change by force.”

— “If terror is rewarded with American and British support for Israeli concessions, why should the Palestinians not resort to terror again at the first disappointment of their desires? This is how the “Oslo peace process” failed and it is how any peace process that is not prefaced with drastic reforms of the Palestinian Authority and recognition of Palestinian aggression will also fail.”

— “Between 1922 and 1948, the Arabs were given 90% of the Palestine Mandate — a territory in which no country existed and which had been promised by its British rulers to the Jews. The Jews were forbidden to live in the Arab portions of the mandate — a concession by the British to Arab racism. At the same time, because the Jews were a tolerant and democratic people, nearly a million Arabs were assimilated into the portion the Jews controlled where they were given more rights than Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East. The Arab response to this compromise was a seven-nation military assault on this new state, which was called “Israel,” and was a state largely composed of recent survivors of the worst genocide in human history. From the outset, then, the Middle East conflict was a war of xenophobic backwardness and ethnic barbarism waged against a persecuted people who intended no harm to their neighbors and sought only peace.”

— “The Palestinian terrorists have become the Black Panthers of the contemporary anti-war movement. The leftwing culture celebrates the suicide bombers of women and children as desperate victims of Jewish oppression. Attackers and destroyers of the Oslo peace process are proclaimed as heroes. Terrorists and totalitarian radicals are lionized as fighters for social justice. Israelis and Americans are condemned as Nazis.”

— “In 1962, as a Marxist radical, I myself had helped to organize the first protest against the war in Vietnam at the University of California, Berkeley. At the time, America had only 300 “advisers” in Vietnam, who were seeking to prevent the Communist gulag that was to come. John F. Kennedy was President and had been invited to speak on the campus. We picketed his appearance. Our slogan was, “Kennedy’s Three R’s: Radiation, Reaction and Repression.” We didn’t want peace in Vietnam. We wanted a revolution in America. But we were clever. Or rather, we got smarter. We realized we couldn’t attract large numbers of people by revealing our deranged fantasies about America (although that of course is not how we would have looked at them). We realized that we needed the support of a lot of Americans who would never agree with our real agendas if we were going to influence the course of the war. So we changed our slogan to “Bring the Troops Home.” That seemed to express care for Americans while accomplishing the same goal. If America brought her troops home in the middle of the war, the Communists would win. Which is exactly what happened.”

— “Unlike the anti-Vietnam efforts, the current (anti-war) movement is driven almost entirely by hate for American institutions policies and purposes (‘Washington Is The Axis of Evil,’ ‘America Is The Greatest Terrorist State,’ ‘No Blood For Oil’). It is not inspired by any hope ‘ however illusory ‘ in a utopian future in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Socialism has been dead as a serious goal for the most of the left for decades. In its core, the left has always been a nihilistic and reactionary revolt against the modern world (capitalism, individualism, liberty), which is why it can ally itself so easily now with Islamo-fascists.”

— “The anti-anti-Communists may have been good at stimulating critical discussion. A democracy can always benefit from dissenters because no faction has a monopoly on truth. But in practice the decent opponents of Cold War encouraged the Communists to hold onto their slave empire and resist the presures of the free world. In the end it was Ronald Reagan and the Cold Warriors he led who stymied the Communists’ ambitions, brought down the Soviet empire and liberated more than a billion people. In the scales of that historic struggle, when it came to mobilizing the military resources that backed the enemy down, the anti-anti-Communists ultimately put their weight on the other side of the scale.”

— “Israel is the canary in the mine. What happens to Israel will eventually happen to America itself.”

— “The so-called “peace movement” today is led by the same hate-America radicals who supported America’s totalitarian enemies during the Cold War. They marched in support of the Vietcong, the Sandinista Marxists and the Communist guerrillas in El Salvador. Before that they marched in behalf of Stalin and Mao. They still support Castro and the nuclear lunatic in North Korea, Kim Jong-Il. They are the friends in deed of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. What prompts American radicals to make common cause with such monsters? The answer is obvious: They share a common view of America as the “Great Satan.” They believe that it is America ‘ not tyrants like Saddam Hussein ‘ that inflicts misery and suffering on the world. The targets of the 9/11 terrorists were Wall Street and the Pentagon. These were the targets of American radicals long before.”

— “Diversity — as practiced in today’s colleges — is a form of racism, and in fact is the most thriving form of racism in America today.”

— “…(E)veryone knows that racism is not the problem when it comes to low admissions rates for blacks and other designated minority groups. The problem is poor test scores, the inability to compete equally when the rules are neutral and not rigged in their favor. The reasons for this incompetence are many — corrupt inner city K-12 schools run by liberals and Democrats, lack of stable two-parent homes, anti-intellectual cultural attitudes. But none them will be addressed as long as the Big Lie that white racists are holding minorities back persists.”

— “There was England. And then there was the United States. If the pacifist betrayers of the West had not been so powerful in the 1930s and Western governments had confronted Hitler early, 70 million lives would have been saved. Americans would do well to remember this now.”