I hope that this hasn't been posted previously. I couldn't find it in the past if it was. It is a great article and as always, David doesn't pull any punches.
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Racial Witch-Hunt
The Left is Guilty of Racial McCarthyism
By David Horowitz
Salon.com | January 22, 2001
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/dh/2001/dh01-22-01p.htm
ON DECEMBER 14TH, as the Holiday Season was getting into full swing, five young men and women, all professionals with bright careers ahead of them, were accosted at gunpoint in a townhouse belonging to one of them, sexually tortured and then shot in the head. The sadistic criminals who
perpetrated this atrocity were brothers. Only one young woman survived. In a poignant footnote to the tragedy, she had discovered, when one of the criminals stole a diamond ring from a drawer in the apartment where her companions were killed, that her now dead boyfriend intended to propose to her. Naked and bleeding from her head wound, the young woman staggered a mile through the snow to safety.
Despite the story’s horror, despite its drama, despite its “human interest” dimension, not a single national news outlet reported the case. The reason: the monsters who committed this horror were black, the victims white. The reason: The national media is infected with anti-white racism, and the infection is of epidemic proportions. The reason: The story did not fit the politically correct national melodrama of black victimhood, white oppression.
The same epidemic of politically correct, anti-white attitudes pervades local governments and law enforcement authorities. The official position over the killings in the editorial rooms of the Wichita Eagle and the local District Attorney’s office is that the December 14th hate crime was not a hate crime at all. Why? Because the victims were robbed and the motive therefore was not racial, but robbery.
Matthew Shepherd was robbed.
Neither the crime nor the silence surrounding it, are isolated incidents. Last February, 6-year-old Jake Robel was dragged five miles to his death in Missouri because a black car-jacker was deaf to a white child’s screams for help. The nation was not informed. Last April, eight-year-old Kevin Shifflett, had his throat slit by a racist in broad daylight in Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of the nation’s capital. No one reported Kevin’s assassination as a hate crime and
the crime itself was smothered in a politically correct news blackout. The reason? Kevin was white, his racist attacker black. These crimes of the last year remain invisible. But a two-year-old hate crime, familiar to every citizen through endless repetition in the news media, congressional keenings, and presidential pronouncements because it was committed against a black man, did become a central feature of the Democrats’ campaign against presidential candidate George Bush, whom they found guilty of association to the incident because it took place in Texas.
Why should these facts surprise anyone, when everyone knows that it is politically correct to hate white people in America? Hatred of whites is a well-developed intellectual doctrine at our nation’s most prestigious universities and law schools - whole faculties are devoted to it. Hatred of whites is widely taught in our nation’s schools, where they are portrayed as history’s racists and oppressors. It is inscribed in our nation’s laws, which provide racial
privileges and racial protections for those whose skin color is any shade but white. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party campaigns to ensure that hate crimes are identified in the public mind exclusively with straight white males. Its surrogate in this campaign is the nation’s leading so-called civil rights organization, the NAACP, which ran a multi-million dollar TV effort during the presidential race insinuating that George W. Bush hates black people and is in league with lynchers because he did not think extending a hate crimes law to include special protections for gays was a prudent idea. No Democrat has condemned this racial McCarthyism let alone the offensive outbursts of party extremists like Maxine Waters.
In a calculated cynicism, the Democratic Party has whipped up racial paranoia in the African-American community by lending credibility to the lunatic charge that there was systematic disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida by racists who remain invisible. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission has even staged a show trial to demonstrate the indemonstrable. Witness after witness appeared before the Commission to claim racial intimidation, and then was
forced to admit under questioning that they had actually been able to vote. Not a shred of evidence exists that there was a conspiracy to deprive African-Americans in Florida of the right to vote. Yet the NAACP has filed lawsuits making just that accusation. And millions of black people have been
persuaded by racial demagogues and their liberal abettors that such a conspiracy exists, that the election was “stolen” from them in order that Republicans could appoint racists to government.
The witch-hunting mentality that has seized the Democratic Party is on full display in a notorious Internet column written by Clinton strategist and Gore advisor Paul Begala during the Florida brawl:
Yes... tens of millions of good people in Middle America voted Republican. But if you look closely at that [electoral] map [showing counties that voted Republican in red] you see a more complex picture. You see the state where James Byrd was lynch-dragged behind a pickup truck until his body came apart - it’s red. You see the state where Matthew Shepard was crucified on a split-rail fence for the crime of being gay - it’s red. You see the state where right-wing extremists blew up a federal office building and murdered scores of federal employees - it’s red. The state where an army private who was thought to be gay was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, and the state where neo-Nazi skin-heads murdered two African Americans because of their skin color, and the state where Bob Jones University spews its anti-Catholic bigotry: they’re all red too.
One could respond to Begala in Begala fashion: “The state where left-wing extremist, Muslim terrorists blew up the World Trade Center - that’s blue. The county where a race riot following a jury verdict destroyed 2,000 Korean businesses and caused the deaths of 58 people - that’s blue. The states where Colin Ferguson and Ronald Taylor killed 8 whites and Asians because leftwing race baiters convinced them they were victims of a racial conspiracy - are blue. The counties, nationwide, where the vast majority of murderers, rapists and child molesters live and operate - those are blue, too.”
But far more important is how Begala’s outburst reveals the casual way in which a mainstream political strategist on the left can smear an entire political party - routinely identified by his political comrades as a “white party” - as a den of racial killers.
Not since the heyday of Senator Joe McCarthy has there been a demonization of whole categories of Americans or a national witch-hunt on a scale like this.
And this witch-hunt is now the focus of the nomination process for the new president’s cabinet. Nor do Democrats betray any embarrassment at the fact that leading their attack from the left is a Senator who killed a woman while driving under the influence, left the scene of the accident, and avoided a manslaughter charge only by massing all his legendary family’s political muscle to fix the judicial process in a backwater county of his own state. Democrats had previously politicized and debased the process by which Supreme Court nominees are vetted. Now they are turning what used to be a pro forma confirmation ritual of a new Administration into an orgy of character assassination.
Consider the spectacle. George Bush has nominated the most diverse cabinet in American history. He has appointed African-Americans to the highest positions on record. He has appointed a Chinese-American and an Arab-American to cabinet positions for the first time. He has appointed Hispanic
Americans and African Americans and a Japenese American, and of course women. Yet his nominations are the targets of a Democrat campaign to portray his nominees as racists, homophobes and even, in one frenzied historical leap - Torquemadas.
All this has had a predictable effect on a reliably uninformed public. Does a national icon of the popular culture, Ricky Martin, have the temerity to accept an invitation to sing at the new President’s Inauguration? In normal times, this would routinely be seen as a high honor - in this case an honor to the entire Puerto Rican community to have one of its sons assume such a nationally visible role. But in the atmosphere the left has poisoned, Ricky Martin must be prepared to have his life and career torn apart. On hearing of his decision, Martin’s childhood friend and professional partner, the man who produces and writes his songs, told the nation’s press that the singing gig was “a betrayal of everything that every Puerto Rican should stand for.” “This is a president,” according to Robi Rosa, “who would have people in his Cabinet who would obstruct the exercise of civil rights, human rights, consumer rights, the right to choose, the right to be free of gun violence and the right to a clean environment.”
This pathetic extremist screed - far from being unexpected -- sounds very much like the tune the whole Democratic choir is singing. Mario Cuomo may have sung it first at the 1996 Democrat Convention: “Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, the Republicans are the real threat. They are the real threat to our women. They are the real threat to our children. They are the real threat to clean water, clean air and the rich landscape of America.” Give me a break.
What are the actual charges the Democrats have brought against Bush’s nominee for Attorney General? John Ashcroft is accused of the crime of opposing racial preferences (along with 70% of all Americans). According to the witch-hunters, this makes him a closet racist. He is accused of opposing a failed program -- forced busing as a means of integration -- which has been rejected even in liberal Democrat cities like Los Angeles and Boston, and even among blacks. For this he is accused of “racism.” He is accused of sympathies for the Confederacy because he didn’t condemn the Confederate flag and thought the Confederate cause may have embraced other issues besides slavery (normally the left argues it was about anything but slavery) - yet it was
Democrat Senator Fritz Hollings who raised the Confederate flag over South Carolina’s capitol and Bill Clinton who signed official proclamations commemorating the Confederacy while governor of Arkansas -- with no such backlash effects. Ashcroft is accused of opposing one black judicial nomination out of a total 26 such nominations because Ronnie White, the black judge in question, overturned the death penalty of a cold-blooded killer who had murdered the wife of a sheriff in front of her children at a Christmas Party, arousing the passionate interest of Missouri sheriffs. For this - for all this - a man with two decades of unimpeachable public service, a supporter of integration, a proponent of Martin Luther King’s vision -- is pilloried as a “racist.”
In the atmosphere of hysteria whipped up by left-wing McCarthyites, one news channel even billed a program on the nominee for Attorney General this way: “Bush calls him a man of integrity; critics call him frightening.” Begalism uber alles.
The time has come to pose to Democrats and the left the same question the hero of America’s most famous witch-hunt finally put to the Senator himself: Have you no decency, sir (and madam)? Have you no shame?
David Horowitz is editor-in-chief of FrontPageMagazine.com and president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
© Copyright 2001 Salon.com
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Racial Witch-Hunt
The Left is Guilty of Racial McCarthyism
By David Horowitz
Salon.com | January 22, 2001
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/dh/2001/dh01-22-01p.htm
ON DECEMBER 14TH, as the Holiday Season was getting into full swing, five young men and women, all professionals with bright careers ahead of them, were accosted at gunpoint in a townhouse belonging to one of them, sexually tortured and then shot in the head. The sadistic criminals who
perpetrated this atrocity were brothers. Only one young woman survived. In a poignant footnote to the tragedy, she had discovered, when one of the criminals stole a diamond ring from a drawer in the apartment where her companions were killed, that her now dead boyfriend intended to propose to her. Naked and bleeding from her head wound, the young woman staggered a mile through the snow to safety.
Despite the story’s horror, despite its drama, despite its “human interest” dimension, not a single national news outlet reported the case. The reason: the monsters who committed this horror were black, the victims white. The reason: The national media is infected with anti-white racism, and the infection is of epidemic proportions. The reason: The story did not fit the politically correct national melodrama of black victimhood, white oppression.
The same epidemic of politically correct, anti-white attitudes pervades local governments and law enforcement authorities. The official position over the killings in the editorial rooms of the Wichita Eagle and the local District Attorney’s office is that the December 14th hate crime was not a hate crime at all. Why? Because the victims were robbed and the motive therefore was not racial, but robbery.
Matthew Shepherd was robbed.
Neither the crime nor the silence surrounding it, are isolated incidents. Last February, 6-year-old Jake Robel was dragged five miles to his death in Missouri because a black car-jacker was deaf to a white child’s screams for help. The nation was not informed. Last April, eight-year-old Kevin Shifflett, had his throat slit by a racist in broad daylight in Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of the nation’s capital. No one reported Kevin’s assassination as a hate crime and
the crime itself was smothered in a politically correct news blackout. The reason? Kevin was white, his racist attacker black. These crimes of the last year remain invisible. But a two-year-old hate crime, familiar to every citizen through endless repetition in the news media, congressional keenings, and presidential pronouncements because it was committed against a black man, did become a central feature of the Democrats’ campaign against presidential candidate George Bush, whom they found guilty of association to the incident because it took place in Texas.
Why should these facts surprise anyone, when everyone knows that it is politically correct to hate white people in America? Hatred of whites is a well-developed intellectual doctrine at our nation’s most prestigious universities and law schools - whole faculties are devoted to it. Hatred of whites is widely taught in our nation’s schools, where they are portrayed as history’s racists and oppressors. It is inscribed in our nation’s laws, which provide racial
privileges and racial protections for those whose skin color is any shade but white. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party campaigns to ensure that hate crimes are identified in the public mind exclusively with straight white males. Its surrogate in this campaign is the nation’s leading so-called civil rights organization, the NAACP, which ran a multi-million dollar TV effort during the presidential race insinuating that George W. Bush hates black people and is in league with lynchers because he did not think extending a hate crimes law to include special protections for gays was a prudent idea. No Democrat has condemned this racial McCarthyism let alone the offensive outbursts of party extremists like Maxine Waters.
In a calculated cynicism, the Democratic Party has whipped up racial paranoia in the African-American community by lending credibility to the lunatic charge that there was systematic disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida by racists who remain invisible. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission has even staged a show trial to demonstrate the indemonstrable. Witness after witness appeared before the Commission to claim racial intimidation, and then was
forced to admit under questioning that they had actually been able to vote. Not a shred of evidence exists that there was a conspiracy to deprive African-Americans in Florida of the right to vote. Yet the NAACP has filed lawsuits making just that accusation. And millions of black people have been
persuaded by racial demagogues and their liberal abettors that such a conspiracy exists, that the election was “stolen” from them in order that Republicans could appoint racists to government.
The witch-hunting mentality that has seized the Democratic Party is on full display in a notorious Internet column written by Clinton strategist and Gore advisor Paul Begala during the Florida brawl:
Yes... tens of millions of good people in Middle America voted Republican. But if you look closely at that [electoral] map [showing counties that voted Republican in red] you see a more complex picture. You see the state where James Byrd was lynch-dragged behind a pickup truck until his body came apart - it’s red. You see the state where Matthew Shepard was crucified on a split-rail fence for the crime of being gay - it’s red. You see the state where right-wing extremists blew up a federal office building and murdered scores of federal employees - it’s red. The state where an army private who was thought to be gay was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, and the state where neo-Nazi skin-heads murdered two African Americans because of their skin color, and the state where Bob Jones University spews its anti-Catholic bigotry: they’re all red too.
One could respond to Begala in Begala fashion: “The state where left-wing extremist, Muslim terrorists blew up the World Trade Center - that’s blue. The county where a race riot following a jury verdict destroyed 2,000 Korean businesses and caused the deaths of 58 people - that’s blue. The states where Colin Ferguson and Ronald Taylor killed 8 whites and Asians because leftwing race baiters convinced them they were victims of a racial conspiracy - are blue. The counties, nationwide, where the vast majority of murderers, rapists and child molesters live and operate - those are blue, too.”
But far more important is how Begala’s outburst reveals the casual way in which a mainstream political strategist on the left can smear an entire political party - routinely identified by his political comrades as a “white party” - as a den of racial killers.
Not since the heyday of Senator Joe McCarthy has there been a demonization of whole categories of Americans or a national witch-hunt on a scale like this.
And this witch-hunt is now the focus of the nomination process for the new president’s cabinet. Nor do Democrats betray any embarrassment at the fact that leading their attack from the left is a Senator who killed a woman while driving under the influence, left the scene of the accident, and avoided a manslaughter charge only by massing all his legendary family’s political muscle to fix the judicial process in a backwater county of his own state. Democrats had previously politicized and debased the process by which Supreme Court nominees are vetted. Now they are turning what used to be a pro forma confirmation ritual of a new Administration into an orgy of character assassination.
Consider the spectacle. George Bush has nominated the most diverse cabinet in American history. He has appointed African-Americans to the highest positions on record. He has appointed a Chinese-American and an Arab-American to cabinet positions for the first time. He has appointed Hispanic
Americans and African Americans and a Japenese American, and of course women. Yet his nominations are the targets of a Democrat campaign to portray his nominees as racists, homophobes and even, in one frenzied historical leap - Torquemadas.
All this has had a predictable effect on a reliably uninformed public. Does a national icon of the popular culture, Ricky Martin, have the temerity to accept an invitation to sing at the new President’s Inauguration? In normal times, this would routinely be seen as a high honor - in this case an honor to the entire Puerto Rican community to have one of its sons assume such a nationally visible role. But in the atmosphere the left has poisoned, Ricky Martin must be prepared to have his life and career torn apart. On hearing of his decision, Martin’s childhood friend and professional partner, the man who produces and writes his songs, told the nation’s press that the singing gig was “a betrayal of everything that every Puerto Rican should stand for.” “This is a president,” according to Robi Rosa, “who would have people in his Cabinet who would obstruct the exercise of civil rights, human rights, consumer rights, the right to choose, the right to be free of gun violence and the right to a clean environment.”
This pathetic extremist screed - far from being unexpected -- sounds very much like the tune the whole Democratic choir is singing. Mario Cuomo may have sung it first at the 1996 Democrat Convention: “Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, the Republicans are the real threat. They are the real threat to our women. They are the real threat to our children. They are the real threat to clean water, clean air and the rich landscape of America.” Give me a break.
What are the actual charges the Democrats have brought against Bush’s nominee for Attorney General? John Ashcroft is accused of the crime of opposing racial preferences (along with 70% of all Americans). According to the witch-hunters, this makes him a closet racist. He is accused of opposing a failed program -- forced busing as a means of integration -- which has been rejected even in liberal Democrat cities like Los Angeles and Boston, and even among blacks. For this he is accused of “racism.” He is accused of sympathies for the Confederacy because he didn’t condemn the Confederate flag and thought the Confederate cause may have embraced other issues besides slavery (normally the left argues it was about anything but slavery) - yet it was
Democrat Senator Fritz Hollings who raised the Confederate flag over South Carolina’s capitol and Bill Clinton who signed official proclamations commemorating the Confederacy while governor of Arkansas -- with no such backlash effects. Ashcroft is accused of opposing one black judicial nomination out of a total 26 such nominations because Ronnie White, the black judge in question, overturned the death penalty of a cold-blooded killer who had murdered the wife of a sheriff in front of her children at a Christmas Party, arousing the passionate interest of Missouri sheriffs. For this - for all this - a man with two decades of unimpeachable public service, a supporter of integration, a proponent of Martin Luther King’s vision -- is pilloried as a “racist.”
In the atmosphere of hysteria whipped up by left-wing McCarthyites, one news channel even billed a program on the nominee for Attorney General this way: “Bush calls him a man of integrity; critics call him frightening.” Begalism uber alles.
The time has come to pose to Democrats and the left the same question the hero of America’s most famous witch-hunt finally put to the Senator himself: Have you no decency, sir (and madam)? Have you no shame?
David Horowitz is editor-in-chief of FrontPageMagazine.com and president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
© Copyright 2001 Salon.com
He and Peter Collier wrote a book together titled something like, "'60s: the Destructive Generation.". A must read.