Saturday, May 17, 2008
Horowitz takes aim at wrong targets, and misfires. Plus: the bizarre world of advertising; do doctors always know best?
Oct 4, 1999 | The myth weavers
BY DAVID HOROWITZ
(09/27/99)
Independent of his misreading of the history of the women's movement, the history of Guatemala and the Middle East, David Horowitz's continued harping on proven or unproven faults in the history of personalities on the left typically misses the point. Even if every allegation against these people is true (and this is far from certain, particularly in regard to Edward Said; see Hitchens in Salon and Said in the current New York Review of Books), it hardly has anything to do with the causes they have worked for so conscientiously and tirelessly. His ranting is calculated to deflect attention away from ideas and re-focus attention on overly concrete details.
-- Robert Lipton
Berkeley, Calif.
David Horowitz diluted an otherwise insightful critique of the mendacity of Edward Said. Said is not so much a leftist as he is an anti-Semite; his hatred of the Jews can be quickly ascertained from a reading of anything he writes, and Horowitz's criticisms would have been much more telling had he looked at Said's lies from that viewpoint. It puzzles me, also, that Said would be lumped in with the left wing when he shares the same hatred of Jews with Adolf Hitler and other notorious right-wing anti-Semites.
-- Tom Crawford
Atlanta
It would behoove David Horowitz to read Christopher Hitchens' acute evisceration of Justus Weiner's claims, published in the September 20 issue of the Nation. Edward Said emerges from this inquisitive, fact-laden column not only intact but fully vindicated, and Weiner is unmasked as the truth-be-damned ideologue that he is. By relying solely on Weiner's screeds for his "evidence," Horowitz implicates himself in this messy and libelous affair.
The richer irony is that, in the course of asking whether a "failure of their [liberal] ideology forced them to fictionalize," the question begging to be asked is whether it is a failure of conservative ideology that has forced Horowitz himself to resort to these juvenile ad hominem attacks.
-- Bruce Thompson
Santa Fe, N.M.
I appreciate David Horowitz's article about the lies that leftists like Menchu, Friedan and Said tell to promote themselves to the guilt-ridden and gullible left. I have read Justus Weiner's article exposing Edward Said's true background and found it to be an excellent and well documented piece of research. It seems completely true that Edward Said has lied about his life and has used his lies to further his own fame, wealth and political cause. I don't know what else can be done about these false icons but to expose them at every turn -- but at the very least, this must always be done.
-- Stuart Scheer
New York
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