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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
You can't simply connect the dots from Ebert to, say, Marwan Barghouti, leader of the Palestinian faction Fatah, on Horowitz's site. His precariously programmed Java engine puts an interactive graphic on the screen that ostensibly links isolated conspiracies of the "political left," but a recent attempt to find the link between Ebert and terrorists came to an early dead end at the listing for the International Association of Democratic Lawyers in Brussels, Belgium. Then the program crashed.
Horowitz initially defended the organization of his database, saying that seemingly disparate people are all linked by anti-Americanism. "They [would] probably say that 9/11 or the [Iraq] beheadings were the wrong way to carry out a right cause," he says. "They come together when it comes to opposing America's wars, America" -- he laughs -- "and seeing America as the Great Satan." And he says "they," including Michael Moore, must be purged from the Democratic Party for the good of the country.
But later Horowitz announced some revisions to his site. Some of the members of the picture grid, he wrote on FrontPageMag.com, are "patriotic Americans." So are the editors of Salon, he added. "If you visit the individuals search page [of the site], you will see that we have separated the individuals into five columns, which we identify as 'totalitarian radicals,' 'anti-American radicals,' 'leftists,' 'moderate leftists' and 'affective leftists' ... We have arranged the grid this way, even though we think it feeds certain illusions, to accommodate those who expressed anguish over the grid in its original format."
He also fixed the description for No. 819, media critic Norman Solomon. He was listed not only as an "anti-American writer" but as a University of California at Berkeley professor, when he isn't, in fact, a professor of any kind. Recently checking his entry, Solomon said of Horowitz: "Imagine Joe McCarthy with a Web site, proudly stuck in a time warp ... Horowitz strains to throw as much mud as he can, evidently with the fervent belief that some of it is bound to harm his targets. Along the way, his material is riddled with demagogic smears, weird leaps of semi-logic and factual errors."
Days later, the clarifications and changes kept coming. "I've modified the descriptive text on the Individuals search page to make clearer that the [database] obviously includes moderates who don't think America is an imperialist power or the Great Satan," Horowitz wrote in an e-mail subsequent to our interview.
Still not off the hook, however, are his eternal enemies -- college professors -- whom he considers the most closely enmeshed with terror. As he explained it to Salon, Washington Democrats are products of the university "feeder system," an underworld where "40,000 professors have signed antiwar letters." And that's the impetus for his "Academic Bill of Rights" crusade in various state Senates, which among other things would outlaw "indoctrination" by liberal professors in classrooms. Defeated in Colorado last year, a similar law is resurfacing in the California Senate this month and is making some progress in the Florida Assembly.
But Horowitz's crusade is clearly driven by more than a push for diversity; he believes those he disagrees with not only are overrepresented in academia but represent threats to national security. For him, much anti-Bush rhetoric seems to be interchangeable with collaboration with the enemy. He likens Islamic fervor to "Western radicals' efforts to purify their tainted souls of 'racism, sexism and homophobia," saying that the two movements "reflect parallel inclinations ... Both are exacting in the justice they administer and the loyalty they demand."
Is Horowitz concerned that people might read his site the wrong way and believe that Mohammed Atta and a local college professor are literally co-workers? "I can't be accountable for people who misread what's here," he says. The professors he has criticized, he says, complain, "'I'm getting death threats or whatever.' I get death threats all the time. The level of our political rhetoric is horrible, and I don't think very much can be done about it." He adds: "I treat people the way they treat me."
