David Horowitz Debates the Ground Zero Mosque
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/08/30/david-horowitz-debates-the-ground-zero-mosque/
The following is a debate between David Horowitz and Daniel Luban reprinted from Tabletmag.com.
When Daniel Luban published an essay in Tablet Magazine last week finding resonances between what he called Islamophobic opposition to the Park51 Islamic center and past anti-Semitism, one comment on the piece jumped out at us. “This article is in serious denial,” began a brief, angry response from David Horowitz, the conservative intellectual and activist and the author, most recently, of A Cracking of the Heart, a book about his daughter. We invited Horowitz and Luban to extend their debate about Luban’s theory. Here is their exchange.
MARC TRACY, Tablet Magazine: David, in your comment on Dan’s piece, you said that “Jew hatred is part of the gospel of Islam and the practice of all Muslim states in the world today.” By contrast, a premise of Dan’s article is that there are in the world a relatively small group of Islamists—fundamentalists who subscribe to a violent, anti-Semitic, mutant strain of Islam—and, for the most part, ordinary Muslims who do no such thing, and that, contrary to the arguments of writers like Andrew McCarthy, most American Muslims are not Islamists. How do you respond to that? Is the problem with Islam or with Islamists? And if it’s with Islamists, how influential are Islamists in America? Are the people behind the Islamic center Islamists?
DAVID HOROWITZ: Like many Jews who are in denial about the existential threat to Israel and to Jews generally from the Islamic world, Daniel Luban thinks that the radical, Jew-hating element in Islam is relatively small, and consequently the threat is a pathology, which people like him call “Islamophobia.” Among such deniers there is a notable absence of attention to what the Islamic world actually does and says in relation to Jews or how seriously Muslims take the word of their God, who refers to Jews as “apes and pigs” and calls for their extermination (as per this infamous and well-known saying of the prophet: “The day of Judgment will come when Muslims fight the Jews and kill them”). Here are some corrective observations:
After the Sept. 11 attacks there were several public opinion surveys conducted in the Muslim world about Muslim views of Osama Bin Laden and his terror war against “crusaders and Jews.” The number of Muslims who supported Osama and the attacks ranged from a low 10 percent, or 150 million Muslims, to 50 percent, or 750 million (the latter figure coming from a poll conducted by Al Jazeera). These cannot be dismissed as insignificant minorities, even if reduced by a factor of 10.
The Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—head of a nation of 70 million and a man who claims to speak in the name of Islam—has called for wiping Israel from the face of the earth, a comment seconded by a former prime minister of Malaysia. Leaders of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank are openly opposed to the existence of the Jewish state, officially celebrate mass murderers of Jewish civilians as “martyrs” and “saints,” and run a school system that teaches kindergarteners to hate Jews and aspire to kill them. The charter of the Islamist terror organization Hamas calls for Israel’s extinction in the name of Allah, while the head of Hezbollah, the largest terrorist army in the world, armed with 30,000-plus rockets courtesy of Syria and Iran, has called for the liquidation of Israel and the extermination of the Jews.
That’s the open and frank admission side of the ledger, the millions of Muslims with genocidal designs on the Jews. Copping to genocide by the way is something that Hitler never dared to do. He thought it prudent to keep the Final Solution hidden until it was a fait accompli, lest he incite civilized opposition to his plan. In contrast, the demand for a second Holocaust has been trumpeted from the Islamic rooftops, and there has been no official opposition from the Islamic world. This is a reasonable indication that these open calls are the tip of a very ugly iceberg of Jew hatred that runs the length and breadth of Muslim ummah. There are some 57 Islamic nations in the world, and not one of them has condemned these genocidal proclamations. Au contraire. They have added their own condemnations of Israeli crimes in hundreds of U.N. resolutions they sponsored. But there is not a single U.N. resolution condemning 60 years of terrorist acts by Palestinians and Arabs, beginning with the creation of the Fedayeen in 1949. Not a single one.
The same silence over genocidal intentions blankets virtually all the mosques in America, at least 80 percent of which are funded by the rulers of Saudi Arabia, the most bigoted promoter of jihadism and its Jew-hating ideology in the world today. The same can be said of the principal Muslim organizations in the United States, the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
All of these organizations are elements of the Muslim Brotherhood network, which spawned al-Qaida and Hamas. (CAIR is a direct spinoff of Hamas.) None of them have condemned Hezbollah and Hamas or their patrons in Teheran. The same is true of the Muslim Students Association, representing most Muslim students in American universities, which is also a part of the Muslim Brotherhood network. The Muslim Students Association is currently conducting a nationwide campaign to support the Islamic crusade to eliminate the Jewish state, which it refers to as “occupied Palestine.” When I confronted a former officer of the Muslim Student Association on the University of California, San Diego, campus and asked her if she were for or against a genocide of the Jews she said, “For it.” Refusal to condemn Hezbollah and Hamas, which in my experience is universal among Muslim Students Associations, is tantamount to such an endorsement. (You can see our exchange here.) The same Judeophobic campaign is now a principal focus of the secular left, although these secularists don’t seem to fully grasp the implications of their support. All these elements are also supporting the Ground Zero mosque whose leader also finds Islamic terrorism “too complex” to condemn.
These are troubling indicators of evil afoot. Dismissing them as figments of a conspiratorial paranoia is a sign of intellectual bankruptcy and a form of psychological denial. It is not an argument that anyone, let alone a Jew, should take seriously.
DANIEL LUBAN: David Horowitz’s response to my article is primarily devoted to reciting a familiar litany of examples of anti-Semitism in Muslim-majority countries. Many of his arguments in this regard are cherry-picked or otherwise misleading, but I won’t spend time answering them, for they are irrelevant to the point of my piece. My argument was not about attitudes toward Jews in Syria or Saudi Arabia, but about attitudes toward Muslims in America.
For Horowitz’s defense of the “anti-jihadis” to hold water, he needs to show not merely that many Muslims in other countries hold objectionable views, but that Muslim-Americans are actually engaged in the kind of conspiracy against the United States that people like Andrew McCarthy and Pamela Geller posit. On this count, his arguments are remarkably thin. The primary piece of evidence he offers to show that most Muslim-Americans are genocidal anti-Semites is that not enough of them for his liking are willing to publicly denounce Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups.
One does not need to be fond of either group to notice how shaky the logic is here. Peter King, the hawkish New York congressman who has been a leader of the anti-mosque campaign, is a longtime apologist for the IRA, and I similarly imagine that it would be nearly impossible to get New York Jewish politicians like Sen. Chuck Schumer or Rep. Anthony Weiner to publicly label as “terrorists” Zionist militant groups like the Irgun or the Stern Gang. What follows from this? That King, Schumer, and Weiner are terrorist conspirators against the United States? I suspect the reason that even many Muslim-Americans who privately abhor Hamas and Hezbollah’s attacks on civilians are reluctant to “denounce” them to David Horowitz is that they realize, correctly, that he will simply pocket these denunciations and use them in the service of a broader Likudnik agenda that they find abhorrent.
The YouTube video that Horowitz posts is unintentionally revealing in this regard. A UCSD student confronts Horowitz over his allegation that her campus Muslim Students Association has financial ties to terrorist groups and presses him to provide some evidence for this claim. Rather than doing so, Horowitz—who is nothing if not a savvy showman—quickly changes the subject to the student’s own personal attitudes toward Hamas. Of course, whether an individual college student is willing to publicly denounce Hamas has nothing whatsoever to do with the factual question of whether the UCSD student association has financial links to terrorist groups, which Horowitz is content to insinuate without providing any evidence.
To determine whether people like McCarthy and Geller represent a measured response to a real threat or a hysterical response to a conspiracy of their own imagining, it might be helpful to examine the central claims that they make. Let’s leave aside the most obviously insane bits (Bill Ayers is the real author of Obama’s memoir; Malcolm X is Obama’s real father) and focus on their views about the Muslim threat to the United States. Does Horowitz really believe that the goal of the large majority of Muslim-Americans is “to supplant American constitutional democracy with sharia law”? Does he really believe that Muslims who privately live according to religious values within their own communities are doing so purely instrumentally, as a way to take over the country and impose these values on everyone else? Does he really believe that the president is a “neocommunist” who is secretly working in cahoots with these Islamists to implement a shared totalitarian vision in the United States?
If he genuinely does believe these things, I admit that there simply isn’t much more that I can say to him. But if he doesn’t—as I suspect he doesn’t—then I have to wonder how he feels about the fact that these views and those similar to them are rapidly becoming ubiquitous on the American right. Many hawks seem to feel that the Pamela Gellers of the world may be nutty and misguided, but that they make useful shock troops for fighting these political battles, so it’s best simply to hold one’s nose and make good use of them. It seems to me that there is something very dangerous in this logic, and that the anti-jihadis—egged on by conservative elites like Newt Gingrich, Bill Kristol, and Horowitz himself—are leading the country into a very ugly place.
MARC TRACY: David, I think Daniel is conceding—or if not conceding, at least saying that for the sake of argument he would concede—your point about Muslim anti-Semitism in other parts of the world, but he is challenging you on the question of Muslim anti-Semitism in the United States specifically. Can it happen here and does it happen here? Is the mosque a manifestation of it, or a potential manifestation?
DAVID HOROWITZ: Daniel Luban has failed to understand my comments and therefore dodged the issue between us. A sign held up at the counter-demonstration by supporters of the Ground Zero mosque summarizes the real nub of our contention: “Groundless Fear Is the Real Enemy.” Is it?
The point of my response was not that there is “anti-Semitism” and not just “in Muslim countries” but that there is a global Muslim movement for a genocide of the Jews, beginning with the destruction of the Jewish state; and that this movement was spawned by the Muslim Brotherhood and is supported by the major Muslim organizations in the United States including the main supporters of the Ground Zero mosque, and wittingly or unwittingly, enabled by their allies on the political left.
Luban does not challenge a single fact I presented, which shows how deaf, dumb, and blind critics of the “anti-jihadis,” as Luban calls us, can be. Luban studiously ignores the elaborate documentation of the political beliefs and aims of the Muslim Brotherhood network and of Islam itself, which we have presented and instead attempts to draw ludicrous parallels designed to show a moral equivalence between Jewish and Muslim terrorists and their apologists. The difference is obvious to all but the politically obtuse. When some Jews commit acts that are heinous, Jews condemn them, they don’t build $100-million monuments on or near the site where the crimes were committed. Only Islam would build a mosque—the Dome of the Rock—right on top of the holiest place of another religion and then name a terrorist army (the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade) after it. The silence of the central organizations of the Muslim world both here and abroad in the face of atrocities committed in the name of their God and their refusal to condemn by name those who commit them is both deafening and telling; and the failure of Daniel Luban and the left generally to appreciate this is ominous for Americans and Jews.
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