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Monday, Oct 13, 2008
David Horowitz has a new project calculated to give the left apoplexy: A Web site that proclaims insidious links between latte liberals and murderous Islamists.
Apr 12, 2005 | David Horowitz has lived a rich, and contradictory, life. He once contributed to seminal leftist magazine Ramparts and hired for the Black Panthers, but then bitterly split with his leftist friends and reinvented himself as a conservative who may be the leading scourge of left-leaning professors nationwide. His crusade to make liberal "indoctrination" a statutory offense has seized the backing of Republican lawmakers and the imaginations of campus followers. Recently, Horowitz launched a new Web site, DiscoverTheNetwork.org, to catalog and expose his enemies on the left.
When I called to interview him for Salon, listed on his site as an "apparatchik far-left" publication practically in league with Islamists, the former Salon columnist was strangely eager to appease me. Famous for breathing fire in public before admiring college Republicans, he scampered when I confronted him about his site's claims, even promising to rewrite some of them.
Purportedly a serious counterbalance to liberal sites that track conservatives, Horowitz's online "Guide to the Political Left" lays out what he considers the extensive connections between liberals and terrorists. Its controversial picture gallery of "leftists" runs the gamut from movie critic Roger Ebert and Omar Abdel Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, to crushed Holy Land protester Rachel Corrie and even Sen. John Kerry.
You just can't separate Ebert from a terrorist like the blind sheik Rahman, Horowitz told me. Chalk it up to the limits of presenting information on a two-dimensional computer screen. "It's a limitation of -- what? Of language? The human mind?" mused Horowitz. "The two-dimensional, three-dimensional, four-dimensional universe?"
The human minds with limitations, of course, belong to his critics. But Horowitz's latest venture has his critics asking if the right-wing provocateur has finally flipped in his long-running battle with the left.
Columbia journalism professor and longtime liberal activist Todd Gitlin calls the site the "venomous" product of Horowitz's 1950s childhood as the son of Stalinists, and of his lasting guilt over the killing of a friend by his former allies, the Black Panthers. "The psychodynamics here are not pretty" says Gitlin, whose squashed face appears on the site. As No. 376 on the list, he's accused of "harboring the belief that his country is ultimately unworthy of his respect and even allegiance." The Web site, Gitlin says, reflects "a demonology that's about as unsubtle as the one [Horowitz] pursued when he was a Marxist in the '60s, except the terms are inverted."
The Horowitz files at Discover the Network, at last count, span 948 people and 552 organizations, from America Coming Together to the Pearl Jam fan club to the
"It may seem extreme to some people to have John Kerry in the same database as [Sept. 11 hijacker] Mohammed Atta," he told me, yet he was at a loss for a way to separate them on his site. It was "an infinite regress," he said: Toss out Stanley Cohen, lawyer for Hamas, and he'd have to remove the allegedly similarly minded ACLU. Take out the ACLU, and the next thing you know you have to delete Democrats from the "network."
The searchable site, with a staff of two, opened to the public in February after about two years in development, at a cost of about $500,000 by Horowitz's estimate. It has met with scattered applause from the right as an educational tool. Conservative blogger "Jeff Blogworthy" declared that the "leftist attack strategy" has been laid bare by Horowitz's site. "Few people understand the Left like David," he wrote.
Horowitz offers his A-to-Z master list of leftists as a gift of wisdom through experience -- i.e., his transformation from a radical to a repentant, hard-line anti-Communist. But is he the right man to build a cool-headed research database that uses accuracy as a weapon?
Horowitz hopes to outdo progressive watchdog sites like the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which tracks white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and Horowitz himself (whom it labels a bearer of "radical ideas"); Media Matters for America, a site run by Republican turned liberal David Brock (whom Horowitz calls a "snake and liar and a backstabber"); and Media Transparency, a handy database that links Horowitz's college groups to hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from the conservative coffers of Richard Mellon Scaife and the Bradley Foundation.
Media Transparency's Rob Levine calls Horowitz's site a "comic cartoon imitation" of the Minnesota-based liberal site, which Horowitz acknowledged was an inspiration for Discover the Network. "One reason," Levine says, "is that there just isn't the same kind of progressive infrastructure and coordination on the left as there is on the right, so in some sense he's swatting at a chimera."
The mission statement of Horowitz's site is to "identify the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it." For instance, Discover the Network identifies the Ford Foundation as a supporter of "communist front groups" and the Tides Foundation as the "nerve center of the left," asserting that Teresa Heinz Kerry has funneled $8 million through the foundation "to further her radical environmentalist agenda" (a claim that's debunked at Snopes.com).
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