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News18
21-06-2025
- Politics
- News18
What's Behind The Left-Islamist Contract?
The emergence of leftist ideology as a tool of political Islam is a phenomenon that has been widely observed around the world in recent years The shooting of two Israeli embassy employees in front of the Jewish Museum in Washington last month was an example of the threat Jews face around the world today. The attacker had shouted the slogan 'Free Gaza" as he opened fire, killing a young couple. Early this month, global media fondly reported how environmental activist Greta Thunberg sailed up on Israeli shores in a boat laden with just a truckload of aid supplies for the Gazans. But the ideological significance of these two events lies beyond the 'liberation" of Gaza. The Washington incident bore all the hallmarks of an Islamist terrorist attack. But the terrorist in this case was not an Islamist, but an activist from a far-left political party. Similarly, what lies beneath the delicate veneer of Greta Thunberg's activism is a stark portrait of the New Left politics. For the Left, all the problems in the world are caused by colonisation, imperialism, the Western capitalist system and, of course, the 'genocide" they accuse Israel of carrying out. The majority of those on board the 'Freedom Flotilla" boat with Greta Thunberg were either extreme leftists or those who openly support Hamas-Islamist terrorism. Prominent among them was Rima Hassan, a far-left French politician and member of the European Parliament, who praised the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, and shamelessly called it legitimate. The emergence of leftist ideology as a tool of political Islam is a phenomenon that has been widely observed around the world in recent years. French researcher Pierre-André Taguieff coined the term 'Islamo-leftism" in 2002 to describe this. He said that political Islam and the Left are joining hands for some chosen common goals, and that this is a threat to republican values, Western culture, and secular norms. On the surface, this cooperation may seem impractical. The leftists see religion as a bane, but ironically jump into bed with the political Islamists who plan to install theocratic governments. These two ideologies are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, going by their stated missions, but they cooperate to fulfil their ulterior motives. This paradox might look intractable, but recent developments show that both these groups have no qualms about engaging in this opportunism. There are certain ideas that act as the catalyst for this convergence. Some of them include the hatred for Jews, blind opposition to the United States, hostility to Western culture, and, in India, the demonisation of nationalist politics. In fact, these two groups are birds of the same feather in their stance on democracy as well. The constraints on building a society based on Marxist-Leninist thought are nationalism, market capitalism, and a social system driven by religion and morality. Political parties that stand for strong nationalism are the thorn in the side of the Left all over the world. Similarly, for the Islamists, nationalism is the first hurdle in their attempts to establish religious state enclaves wherever possible in the world. Only nationalist movements and governments can stop them from skillfully using their demographic advantage to create the ultimate theocratic empire. The primary foe of all nationalist political movements around the world is Islamism. The next is the Left. And these two are the closest allies in fighting nationalist movements in democratic countries. This can be seen in India, France, Britain, the United States and elsewhere. In return for helping their causes, political Islam gives unconditional support to the so-called anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial policies of the Left. Beyond that, Islamists also implicitly, and perhaps deceptively, support the neo-liberal ideologies espoused by the Left. The contradictions that emerge from this cooperation can be glaring. For example, ultra-left feminists join Islamists in their pro-Gaza marches, turning a blind eye to the fact that the Islamists are the ones who have scaled the pinnacle of misogyny. LGBT people are coming under rainbow flags to fight alongside Islamists, who sentence homosexuals to death in countries where they have established their preferred social order. Such conflicts are no longer news to us. In Kerala, some years ago, an Islamist extremist movement held marches against the central government's Citizenship Amendment Act. The protesters held banners with the slogan 'Save the Republic" in a vain attempt to give a self-righteous afterglow to their conceited agenda. What an irony! 'Republic" is the cornerstone principle of democratic and secular statehood. Here, the very same forces that aspire to establish a religious state were using the perceived dangers to the republic as a campaign plank! What fate would befall the republic if these forces gained political power or if they achieved demographic superiority? You won't have to look far out into Afghanistan or Syria to know; just look at nearby Bangladesh. More shockingly, it was revealed later that the extremist Islamists who mobilised people under the slogan 'Save the Republic" had prepared a secret blueprint to abolish the Republic and establish a religious state in India within a few decades. Here, parallels can be drawn to how the Left treated Indian democracy soon after the country gained independence. The Marxists continued to harbour revolutionary ambitions, considered the Constitution and the democratic framework as a bourgeois system that needed to be overthrown, and believed limited participation in democracy would be an interim stage before class struggle was amplified to usher in revolution. Democracy is an interim arrangement for communists until they seize total power. For Islamists, democracy is merely a hiding place until complete religious rule is implemented. Both of these groups use the principles that are the cornerstones of democracy as needed and then abandon them by the wayside. The left-wing and progressive parties in Iran helped Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini establish a fundamentalist religious state. Islamists, who accepted the help of the Left as much as they could, persecuted leftists and expelled them from the country after the establishment of the religious state. In India, the Left and the progressives boosted Islamist radicalism by converging with their pseudo-fight for the republican fundamentals of the Constitution. The progressives were too dumb to realise that the CAA was the only remedy to protect the republican rights of the minorities who are persecuted by Islamist radicals in the neighbouring theocratic countries. Yet, they would shamelessly walk under a banner raised by the Islamists. History is witness to the fact that such contradictions have not caused any kind of psychological conflict for the leftists and Islamists. They are merely united in their struggle against nationalist politics. Some left-wing political organisations in Germany and France decided to cooperate with Hitler's Nazi party for certain specific political goals. Similarly, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem nursed a desire to exterminate the Jews of Israel in the early 1940s with Hitler's help. This cleric went to Germany and directly requested help from Hitler to annihilate the Jews. Germany has, thankfully, parted with its Nazi past, but the Islamist bigots have not. They still seek the annihilation of the Jews. And they have an able and trusted partner in the Left and the so-called progressives, who blindly demonise Israel. And, these two ideologies, which have not hesitated to cooperate with the most evil fascist forces in world history, now say that democratically elected nationalist governments are fascists! Because the concept of nationalism and the system of democracy are the ultimate obstacles to the goals that both these groups chase. Political Islam and the Left are strategically aligned to disparage, disrupt, and destroy the concept of nationalism. They help each other in this endeavour. Elijah Muhammad, who carved out Islam's identity in America as a religion for blacks and the oppressed, called white Americans 'blue-eyed devils". The Americans, who implemented the 'exploitative" system of market capitalism, are the same devils in the eyes of the Left. Elijah, who created the massive movement called the 'Nation of Islam" to promote his religion, had the stated goal of establishing a separate, ultra-religious Muslim state in the United States. Elijah's follower Louis Farrakhan described Hitler as a great leader. The accusation of racism or racial discrimination is a formula that can be used to oppose whites, Jews, and capitalists all at once. Elijah used the slogan of liberation from racial discrimination to foster the Islamist movement. This is the very foundation of the New Left, which argues that the Western world order and its cultural, economic, and political systems are based on racial and communal discrimination. Social justice is an aspirational goal, but for the far Left and the Islamists, it's only a false, delusional and deceptive vanguard that can be jettisoned at will at a later point. We saw this Left-Islamist collaboration later during the 'Black Lives Matter" movement. The leaders of this movement were those who described themselves as trained Marxists. This movement also used the same style and tactics as Islamist street revolutions seen in various countries in recent times. The BLM, which tried to overthrow the 'racist" American system, was appealing to the Islamists who were eager to destroy the 'Judeo-Christian" Western system. A handful of extreme left-wing members of the US Congress representing the Democratic Party were the most vocal supporters of this neo-Marxist anarchist movement. Not uncharacteristically, they are also the ones who support fundamentalist Islamists in America and fan the flames of anti-Semitism. In Kerala, radical Islamist parties used sweet left-wing and progressive slogans to recruit non-Muslims who were at the bottom of the socio-economic system. The tactic was to use secular-social justice slogans in the interim to gain momentum for movements that were formed with the ultimate aim of building a religious state. In a bizarre paradox, the Left, which professes to eradicate religion, joins hands, as a temporary measure, with those who seek to build a religious state. The ultimate victims of this alliance are democracy, true secularism, individual freedom, and economic prosperity. Another stark irony of this Left-Islamist alliance is that those who seek to implement religious dictatorships also praise communist dictators. Osama bin Laden and the communist autocrat of Venezuela are equally heroes for them. In India, the Leftists and Islamists lead the campaign to oppose the ruling nationalist party on all fronts. In a recent controversy in Kerala, it was the Leftists who took the lead in mocking the concept of 'Mother India" on social media with astonishing aggression. That campaign started after the governor of Kerala garlanded the Bharat Mata portrait at a function at the Raj Bhavan, and one of Kerala's communist ministers boycotted the event over the niceties relating to the depiction of Mother India as a goddess. The concept and idea of Mother India is something that Islamist fundamentalists find hard to digest. The Left knows that by making fun of that concept and image, they would win the votes and hearts of the Islamists. Their grandstanding on secularism is a smokescreen; there is no idealism that they would not hesitate to surrender at the altar of Islamism for crass political goals. It is curious to note that the Left and Islamism began to fly the same flag at a time when democracy faced the greatest threat in history. The Communist International (Comintern) was formed in 1919 under the leadership of the Soviet Union to unite the world's communist forces and implement global revolution. At the 1920 Comintern conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, Vladimir Lenin described Islam as the religion of oppressed countries. He said the communists, who were inherently anti-religious, should give privileges and special consideration to Muslim religious sentiment. Going a step further, Comrade Grigory Zinoviev, a prominent Bolshevik and Lenin's confidant, called for a 'jihad" against the Western capitalist powers. That announcement was the first sign of the Left and Islamism joining hands in the name of anti-imperialist sentiment. This is the jihad that was carried out by a radical leftist activist in Washington last month. A man who once worked for a Marxist-Leninist movement, the Party of Socialism and Liberation, shot and killed two innocent people. He said he did it for the liberation of Gaza. How could someone who worked for a party that sought to overthrow the capitalist economic system and the Western system have the motivation to support Hamas and shoot innocent people dead? History offers more ample clues to solving this seemingly intractable question. In 1994, the leader of Britain's far-left Socialist Workers' Party wrote an article explaining the connection between the Left and Islamism. In this article, titled 'The Prophet and the Proletariat", he argued that Islamism can fill the void where the Left is powerless or absent. Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a radical leftist thinker from Latin America, became a terrorist in the 1970s and led the attacks on the French embassy in The Hague and the OPEC headquarters in Vienna. Born in Venezuela, he became a dyed-in-the-wool leftist after his education in Moscow. This staunch Marxist-Leninist later converted to Islam and praised Osama bin Laden as an 'immaculate martyr". Ramirez, who carried out hundreds of terrorist attacks around the world, said during his trial in France that no one else had killed more people than he for the liberation of Palestine. If his claim is taken literally, Hamas would be ashamed of the fact that it was a leftist 'fellow traveller" who killed more Jews than they did. Michel Foucault, a prominent figure in the 20th-century left-wing intellectual movement, was an ardent admirer of the Iranian religious revolution. Foucault, who visited Tehran twice in 1978, saw the revolution only from a Marxist perspective and said it was a revolt of the underclasses. When Iran, a secular country with civil liberties and women's freedom, was conquered by the Islamists, this leftist thinker gloated that 'politics was regaining spirituality". In Kerala, some mainstream television channels and newspapers described the 2021 takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban as a 'wonderful" moment. The Left offers unbroken ideological brotherhood to the Islamists who flaunt a merely pretentious and deceptive use of democratic, secularist, and civil rights slogans. The Left-progressive alliance doesn't even have any qualms about stitching up electoral partnerships with the extremists. As the Left supports the Islamist hardliners, a large number of people who sympathise with the broader leftist ideology fall into the trap and end up amplifying Islamism. This Left-progressive ecosystem lends pseudosecular-republican cover to the Islamists, and mainstreamises, legitimises, and intellectualises their bid for sabotage. top videos View all In Foucault's philosophy, the Western world lost its revolutionary verve after the French Revolution. Surprisingly, Foucault said he found the heights of revolutionary heroism and 'political spirituality" in the Islamist street revolution in Iran that created a religious state, replacing a secular one. In Indian college campuses, Foucault-esque 'political spirituality" finds its voice only when there is an Islamist cause to be upheld. Let's try to see why the Left's revolution is intertwined with the religious revolution of Islamism. We know what the cornerstones of Marxism-Leninism are: materialism, class struggle, struggle against the powers of capital and imperialism, revolution, and so on. But what happened to these ideologies? Did the Marxists create the beautiful communes they promised? The ideology that imposed bloodshed, poverty, and chaos in several countries for decades, and denied religious and personal freedom, later dumped the lofty goals and chased new ones. When the wheels of revolution stopped turning and those who were in the vanguard established dictatorships and farcically turned the followers into slaves, victims, and fools, fundamental leftist thought disappeared or became irrelevant. Today, the hard Left's main planks are anti-semitism packaged as anti-zionism, the theory of institutional racism, support for gender anarchy in the name of feminism and the like. The New Left throws into this heady cocktail their time-worn platitudes of colonialism, apartheid, imperialism, capitalism, climate activism, and, not to mention, genocide. The Left accuses Israel of all these, dramatically conjuring up the image of a perfect enemy in the Jewish state. The Islamists also do the same thing; in their blinkered view of Palestinian exceptionalism, all other problems in the Muslim world can be simply ignored and all venom directed against Israel. This mutually beneficial narrative is the glue that keeps the Left-Islamist contract in its place. The author is a senior journalist who has worked in India and abroad, and is currently a financial journalist in Europe. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views. tags : gaza Islam israel jew Left Location : New Delhi, India, India First Published: June 21, 2025, 23:02 IST News opinion Opinion | What's Behind The Left-Islamist Contract?
The Print
05-05-2025
- Politics
- The Print
Canada and Australia have decided to become citadels of wokeism
Canadians have always been comfortable with this ultra-left liberal position. Now, they have been able to comfortably combine it with a dash of hyper-nationalism, thanks to Trump's needling of their leaders and their policies. Geographically distant observers like this writer see nothing so frightening about Trump's amusing positions. In fact, they seem both logical and obvious. But then when hyper-patriotic and hyper-matriotic media anchors dominate, there is no space for down-to-earth logic or benign amusement. Net-net, the rightward shift of the US has been met with a reaffirmation of Canada's impractical, utopian Left ideology. Canadians affirmed that they are a left-of-centre people. Despite the disastrous and inequitable carbon tax, the emasculation of civil rights during Covid and a fanatical pursuit of climate hysteria in a resource-rich land, Canadians were willing to tolerate—and even welcome back—the Left, albeit under a new leader. Mark Carney is not from the traditional Left. He has probably never visited a factory or a farm, let alone worked in one. Elite boardrooms and transnational executive suites are his natural habitat. He represents the New Left with its neo-Malthusian weltanschauung . The most common words in election analysis are: trend, sweep, upset, and so on. Let us consider three elections in largely English-speaking countries: Canada, Australia, and Britain. The first two were parliamentary elections, while the third consisted of several local elections and an important by-election. The rightward shift in US politics is believed by most observers to have influenced all these elections. Australia's paradox Australia is quite similar. The Labor government has spent its years apologising for the racism—real, exaggerated, and sometimes imagined—of their country's founders. It has waffled on anti-Semitism in the streets of Sydney and while keeping it under the radar, its partiality for China cannot be missed. It has allowed and even encouraged universities and state-controlled media to become citadels of wokeism. Australia, too, is on a neo-Malthusian crusade engineered by the Holy Climate Inquisition. Yet, the otherwise sensible, cricket-loving Australians have chosen to reaffirm their faith in the Left. In Australia, there was some hope that the rightward shift in US politics would bring about positive change. Unfortunately, the Left has succeeded in promoting itself as anti-Trump—or at least as the side not pro-Trump—and this seems to have gone down well with voters. One can only pity today's voters and their children as their once prosperous and free country continues down a path toward genteel poverty and cancel-culture totalitarianism. One hates to see these developments in purely imperialist or racial terms. But sometimes one must abandon political correctness. In a few years, Australia might become the first white Anglo-Saxon country to willingly serve as a subservient outpost of the Han empire. Britain bucks the trend British elections, on the other hand, have been markedly positive. This writer had given up on Britain when the colourless, odourless, tasteless Keir Starmer came to power. It got worse when it became clear that Starmer was a closet, or perhaps even open, Islamist, as he resisted calls for a proper inquiry into the grooming-raping scandal across large parts of Britain. Starmer is also wrecking what remains of Britain's industrial competitiveness by listening to his in-house climate ayatollahs. And then came Nigel Farage and the Reform Party. One could write a new Ode to the West Wind, as Reform has echoed the right sentiments from across the Atlantic. Reform has highlighted the destructive potential of uncontrolled immigration and the systematic discrimination by police, prosecutors, and courts (all gone woke with a vengeance) targeting native white Britons. Clearly, Reform has benefited from being pro-Trump. That is the demonstrable difference between the voters of Canada and Australia and those in Britain's middle and working classes. The British need to be congratulated. Unfortunately and unhappily for them, they must spend a few more years sipping from the poisoned chalice of Starmerian Labour. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. The upward trajectory of Reform may yet lead them out of woke and neo-Malthusian traps. I am not sure Farage will read this column. Perhaps some UK-based readers of ThePrint can forward this article to his office and ask that the paragraph below be shared with him. Dear Mr Farage: in De Quincey's essay on Taking the News of Victory on a Stagecoach, he portrays a period when Britain and its Iberian allies were fighting Napoleonic France. Even small British successes were celebrated as big victories. Coachmen driving through Britain would shout 'Salamanca Forever; Badajoz Forever'. Today, Mr Farage, you are entitled to shout, 'Runcorn Forever; Helsby Forever; Lincolnshire Forever'. This writer and many others in lands distant from yours wish you all the best in your fight to stay the right course (right in more ways than one) and preserve your nation's identity and heritage. Those of us engaged in the struggle to preserve our authentic identities are with you. To end: Elections forever! By-elections forever! Jaithirth 'Jerry' Rao is a retired entrepreneur who lives in Lonavala. He has published three books: 'Notes from an Indian Conservative', 'The Indian Conservative', and 'Economist Gandhi'. Views are personal. (Edited by Prashant)
Boston Globe
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
David Horowitz, combative right-wing activist and author, dies at 86
A Queens-bred son of communist teachers, Mr. Horowitz grew from a red diaper baby into a committed Marxist, attending his first march at age 9 and becoming a top editor at Ramparts magazine, a voice of the 1960s and '70s New Left. Advertisement He gradually became disillusioned by the movement and, in a break from politics, partnered with his friend Peter Collier to write books about powerful American families, including well-received portraits of the Kennedys, the Roosevelts, and the Ford auto-making family. Their first collaboration, 'The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty' (1976), was a finalist for the National Book Awards. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Beginning in 1985, when the duo co-wrote a Washington Post Magazine article titled 'Lefties for Reagan,' they also drew attention for their turn toward conservatism. The Los Angeles Times likened them to 'lumberjacks on a two-man saw, enthusiastically cutting through a forest of former beliefs.' Mr. Horowitz and Collier explained they had decided to vote for President Ronald Reagan out of frustration with the left's 'anti-Americanism' and 'casual indulgence of Soviet totalitarianism,' among other issues. Advertisement 'Looking back on the left's revolutionary enthusiasms of the last 25 years, we have painfully learned what should have been obvious all along: that we live in an imperfect world that is bettered only with great difficulty and easily made worse - much worse,' they wrote. 'This is a conservative assessment, but on the basis of half a lifetime's experience, it seems about right.' Although he continued to write biographies with Collier, Mr. Horowitz shifted his focus back to politics, reinventing himself as a conservative commentator and provocateur. He spoke at college campuses, wrote dozens of books (including the 2017 bestseller 'Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America') and appeared frequently on television, particularly on Fox News, where he denounced President Obama as 'an evil man' who was 'destroying our borders.' Long before the Trump administration began seeking more federal control of universities, he helped lay the groundwork for the White House's efforts, arguing in books such as 'Indoctrination U' (2007) that America's universities had become incubators for left-wing politics and had abandoned the principle of academic freedom. Mr. Horowitz influenced conservative activists and political advisers such as Charlie Kirk, who called him 'a titan in the battle of ideas and a warrior for Western civilization,' and Stephen Miller, the Trump White House deputy chief of staff for policy, who credited him with inspiring 'generations of bold conservative leaders.' Miller first sought out Mr. Horowitz for advice as a teenager in Santa Monica, while trying to persuade high school administrators to direct daily recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. Mr. Horowitz later helped him get a job in the office of Senator Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican who served as attorney general during Donald Trump's first term. Advertisement Outside of right-wing circles, Mr. Horowitz was harshly criticized, including for describing Black Lives Matter as 'a violent racist organization' and equating Palestinians to 'Nazis.' The Southern Poverty Law Center called him 'a driving force of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black movements,' citing his direction of the Freedom Center, which began in 1988 as the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. The center has denounced climate science, illegal immigration, and the spread of Islam, organizing a 2007 event called 'Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week' that was billed as a campaign to call out 'the oppression of women in Islam.' Its gatherings drew future Trump officials and advisers including Sessions and Stephen K. Bannon. Discussing the group in a 2017 interview with the Post, Mr. Horowitz cast the center as a key defender of 'traditional American values' and as a counterweight to rival groups spending money on behalf of the left. 'People would refer to my Freedom Center as a 'think tank,'' he wrote in a 2017 article for Breitbart News, 'and I would correct them, 'No, it's a battle tank,' because that is what I felt was missing most in the conservative cause - troops ready and willing to fight fire with fire.' One of two children, David Joel Horowitz was born in Queens on Jan. 10, 1939. He studied English at Columbia University, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1959, and married Elissa Krauthammer that same year. Mr. Horowitz earned a master's degree in English from the University of California Berkeley in 1961, and the next year he published his first book, 'Student,' a report on the political activism taking place on campus. Advertisement His political advocacy took him to London, where he worked for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and befriended the Polish Marxist writer Isaac Deutscher, whose biography he published in 1971, a few years after returning to Berkeley and joining the staff of Ramparts. 'The system cannot be revitalized; it must be overthrown,' the magazine declared in a 1970 editorial. 'As humanely as possible, but by any means necessary.' (Mr. Horowitz later told The New York Times that he was the one who pushed for the 'humanely' part.) At Ramparts, Mr. Horowitz worked closely with Collier, a fellow editor who had also been a graduate student at Berkeley. He also got to know Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party, which was heavily featured in the publication. Mr. Horowitz helped the Panthers raise money to finance a school for poor children in Oakland. Mr. Horowitz (right) of Ramparts magazine answered questions at a news conference in Berkeley, Calif., in 1972. He appeared along with editor Peter Collier (third from right) and Perry Fellwock (second from right) of San Diego. Fellwock, an antiwar activist, was credited by the magazine as the source for an article on National Security Agency intelligence-gathering. Sal Veder/Associated Press But he grew disillusioned with the organization, and with left-wing politics more broadly, after the death of his friend Betty Van Patter, a white woman whom he had introduced to the Panthers. While working for the group as a bookkeeper, she disappeared in late 1974. Weeks later, her body was found in San Francisco Bay, badly beaten. Although no one was charged with her killing, Mr. Horowitz was convinced the Panthers were responsible. 'Everything I had believed in and worked for, every effort to ally myself with what was virtuous and right, had ultimately led to my involvement with the Panthers, and the invitation to Betty to take the job that killed her,' he wrote in a 1997 memoir, 'Radical Son.' Advertisement By his own acknowledgment, her death sent him into a tailspin. He bought a Datsun sports car; was nearly killed when it was struck by a train, according to The New York Times; and divorced his wife after nearly two decades of marriage. Writing, especially in partnership with Collier, seemed to bring stability. Together they produced books including 'The Kennedys: An American Drama' (1984), a four-generation history that charted the rise of patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and the successes and disappointments of his descendants. 'Collier and Horowitz have blended historical research and journalism brilliantly,' Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward wrote in a review. 'The information they have gathered will always be an important part of the record, although their particular vision of the Kennedys as doomed family will likely die with other Kennedy myths. They see the Kennedy history as a story of alliances and dreams - in their view, the wrong alliances and the wrong dreams. Where the individual family members succeeded, the authors see money, manipulation and insincerity. Where the family failed, Collier and Horowitz see payment for the successes.' Mr. Horowitz's marriages to Sam Moorman and Shay Marlowe ended in divorce. In 1998, he married April Mullvain. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Horowitz had a stepson, John, and four children from his first marriage: Jonathan Daniel, Ben, Anne and Sarah Horowitz, who was born with Turner syndrome, a chromosomal condition, and died in 2008 at the age of 44. He wrote about her legacy in a 2009 book, 'A Cracking of the Heart.' Describing his political views, Mr. Horowitz said he was more moderate than his critics made him out to be, writing in a 2002 essay for Salon that he was 'a defender of gays and 'alternative lifestyles,' a moderate on abortion, and a civil rights activist.' Advertisement But he was unabashed about his combative style and, to the dismay of some conservatives, his defense of Trump, whom he falsely claimed had won the 2020 election. 'If you're nuanced and you speak in what I would call an intellectual manner, you get eaten alive,' Mr. Horowitz told the Times in 2017. 'It's a great handicap to be talking like accountants while the opposition are making moral indictments.'
New York Times
01-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The Christian Right Is Dead. The Religious Right Killed It.
There have been two competing narratives about the rise of the Christian right in the United States. The first story is the one we conservative evangelicals told ourselves: Religious conservatism arose as a force in the United States in response to the hedonism of the sexual revolution, the cultural intolerance of the New Left and the threat of the Soviet Union, an explicitly atheistic, Marxist empire. According to this narrative, the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 was the seminal domestic event that inspired Christian conservatism. It represented a deadly corruption of our Constitution in service of a culture of sexual convenience in which human life was subordinate to sexual pleasure. The response of the Christian right was both political and personal. That approach could be boiled down to a single sentence: Elect people of good personal character who will defend human life and religious liberty. The movement placed a heavy emphasis on constitutional fidelity, seeing the Constitution as a bulwark against authoritarian overreach. And during Bill Clinton's presidency it staked out the clearest possible ground on personal character. As the Southern Baptist Convention declared at its annual meeting in 1998, 'We urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New Statesman
30-04-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Harvard, elite privilege and the weaponisation of anti-Semitism
Photo by Shelly Rivoli/Alamy Live News A society in a dreamlike state of slow dissolution, as America is now, is inevitably going to pass through a series of inversions and perversions of its old status quo, on the way to a new one. Yesterday's foe, Russia, is now our government's friend. The concept of the 'deep state' has gone from a chimera of the New Left to a pretext employed by the new 'populist' right. Americans who wanted to know the truth of where things stood in the trade war between the US and China had to turn, not to their government, but to China, which exposed Donald Trump's assertions that the two sides were engaged in productive negotiations at a high level as a lie. Never mind that Trump's phoney claims caused the stock market to soar and made a bundle for his rich pals. And then there is the stand-off between Harvard and the Trump administration. Under the guise of combating what it claims is unchecked anti-Semitism at the fabled university, the administration has frozen more than $2.2bn in federal grants and contracts to Harvard. The funds stay locked up unless Harvard submits to audits of its faculty for plagiarism and oversight of its hiring practices, among other ultimatums similarly unrelated to anti-Semitism. Trump is threatening to revoke the university's hallowed tax-exempt status as well. In response, and unlike Columbia, which folded before the administration's demands, Harvard's president, Alan Garber, sent a letter to the White House refusing to acquiesce. Now Harvard is suing the Trump administration. Trump has put similar pressure on a number of universities. But Harvard being Harvard, its confrontation with Trump is getting nearly all the attention. Harvard being Harvard, that is the rub. Few are not horrified by Trump's assault. 'First they fascinate the fools, then they muzzle the intelligent,' was how Bertrand Russell described fascism's tactics; in his attempt to bring Harvard to heel, the president is pursuing both ends. If Trump succeeds in his war on the universities, the country will be several steps closer to a soft autocracy. At the same time, even those appalled by the American right vs Harvard may well have a small voice deep inside them whispering to the former: 'Go lunatics!' Conservative elites are making war on liberal elites from the outside. But Harvard, on account of its legacy admissions, thraldom to power, wealth and celebrity, and a thick impasto of social codes and connections, has long frustrated true meritocracy from the inside. Harvard remains a glittering sanctuary of intellectual pursuits and achievements. But the criteria for belonging to it and similar schools are, largely, subtly calculated and constructed along social lines. The Jewish novelist Saul Bellow used an anti-Semitic, anti-Harvard slur in the 1950s to refer in private to a prominent Jewish literary scholar who had been hired by Harvard when Jews were barely allowed into the place. What the young Bellow meant by his infra dig tribal jab was that humbly born, socially raw outsiders like him and his peers could, maybe, one day find themselves in those institutions, but never of them. That turned out to be wrong with regards to Jewish intellectuals, who have found a haven at places like Harvard – and especially at Columbia. But Harvard has always embodied a state-of-the-art conformity. While Ralph Ellison, the black author of America's greatest novel, Invisible Man, taught briefly at Harvard, his vulnerable, open-hearted hero would not have made it through its gates. Rooting for Harvard against Trump is like rooting for Goliath against Godzilla. It feels as superfluous as it does right. Trump will find it easier to keep rounding up foreign students on American streets than tangling with the world's richest and most elite-accommodating university. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe In another Wonderland turn, rational, well-intentioned people, including many Jews, now find themselves railing against the Trump administration's efforts to fight campus anti-Semitism. Partly this is because American universities in general, and elite schools in particular, have long been home to large, thriving Jewish communities. Partly it is because the instances of campus anti-Semitism, though despicable, were some campuses' crisis, not a national one, despite Benjamin Netanyahu's irresponsible lies at the time that 'anti-Semitic mobs' had taken over US universities. And it is partly because, enraged by even the long-overdue premises of Black Lives Matter, the right has cynically contrived its very own mirror-response: White, Jewish Lives Matter. The dazing result is to put Jews, yet again, in a perilous historical situation. Nazis blamed Jews for civilisational decline. The American right is using the mirage of a general hostility to Jews to justify an attack on American civilisation. Jews are now a pretext on the way to being a scapegoat. Steve Witkoff, Stephen Miller, the bouncy Howard Lutnick, the Kushners – the seeming Jewish presence accompanying Trump's war on America is plain for all anti-Semites to see and conspire about. Meanwhile the Jews who were destroyed in Europe as a pretext for tyranny are now being used by an American would-be tyrant as the pretext for enabling another destruction. It is absurd to state that anti-Semitic incidents in America are on the rise because of a few pro-Palestinian campus protests. They are on the rise because Trump's fraudulent campaign against anti-Semitism is suppressing opposition to Netanyahu's shocking erasure of Gaza. In dreamlike, upside-down, inside-out America, Jews are terrifyingly at the centre of an accelerating historical nightmare. [See also: One hundred days of autocracy] Related
