David Horowitz: How the Democratic Party Became the Party of Appeasement

... [H]ow [did] the Democratic Party [get] to the place where it is a party of appeasement in the approach to war and a saboteur of the war when it is underway. How did the Democratic Party get to the point where its leaders would break a fifty-year tradition of bi-partisanship in foreign policy, and over matters of war and peace? How did it come so powerfully under the influence of an historically anti-American left as to allow its presidential politics to be dominated by that left?

The short answer to these questions is that the leftward slide of the Democratic Party began with the McGovern campaign, when the anti-Vietnam left marched into its ranks and assumed positions of power in its congressional party. Obviously, the circumstances of the Iraq war and the movement to oppose it have a lot to do with the Howard Dean campaign, in particular, which was funded this left and driven by its passions, and whose success in the primaries turned John Kerry and John Edwards against the war. It also has a lot to do with the fateful decision of Jimmy Carter and Al Gore to make the war a partisan issue and break a half-century's tradition. But even before this moment it has to do with the McGovern campaign of 30 years ago, which was the original "anti-war" political campaign, demanding that America abandon its ally in Vietnam and leave the field of battle. Virtually all leaders of the anti-Iraq movement, including most of the leaders of the Democratic Party who supported that movement, were veterans of or affected by the anti-Vietnam campaign.

The left has never learned the lessons of Vietnam, a fact underscored by the way in which Howard Dean and Ted Kennedy and leaders of the movement against the war in Iraq invoked the history of Vietnam as though it showed that they were right and their opponents were wrong. As you probably know, I began my life on the political left and was one of the founders of the movement against the Vietnam War. My parents were, in fact, card-carrying Communists, and my first political march was against an even earlier war. I was nine years old in 1948 and marched down 7th Avenue with my parents and their political comrades in New York chanting, "One, two, three, four, we don't want another war." "We" called ourselves "progressives" and supported the Progressive Party candidacy of Henry Wallace, who had once been Franklin Roosevelt's Vice President but was now a captive of the Communist left. The war we marched against was Harry Truman's "Cold War" to prevent Joseph Stalin from conquering more of Europe than he had already acquired. The peace movement of that time wanted Stalin to "liberate" Eastern Europe, which he had in fact enslaved. This campaign was the seed of the anti-war movements of Vietnam and Iraq, and also of the political left's influence in the Democratic Party. George McGovern began his political career in the Progressive Party's 1948 campaign against the Cold War. The Democratic Party of Harry Truman was committed to the Cold War. But as far as the peace movements are concerned, not much has really changed in 50 years.

As a post-graduate student at Berkeley in the early Sixties, I was one of the organizers of the first demonstration against the Vietnam War. It was 1962 and I can tell you as someone who was there, everybody who organized that demonstration was a Marxist and a leftist who thought the Communists were liberating Vietnam the way Michael Moore thinks Zarqawi is liberating Iraq. By that time, I was a "new leftist," disillusioned with the Communism of my parents' generation, so I was aware that the North Vietnamese Communists were not Jeffersonian democrats as people like Jane Fonda and John Kerry seemed to think they were. I avoided the Winter Soldier Investigation into American "war crimes" that John Kerry and Jane Fonda were part of. Jane Fonda was an idiot (useful, to be sure) who had embraced the Communists and committed treason. Perhaps John Kerry didn't grasp that fact. He got himself in bed with people who had a hatred for the United States as intense as their current hatred of George Bush.

It is a curious hatred, suggesting that Democrats have collectively flipped their lids in their zeal to win this election. You may say many things about George Bush, but this is a decent, capable man. You may differ with George Bush, but he is not a "moron" or a bumbling incompetent. No one runs a successful national election campaign and a successful presidential administration without judgment that is fundamentally sound. This is a man you can disagree with, but you can't belittle or hate George Bush without those attitudes reflecting on yourself.

In 1973, President Nixon signed a truce in Vietnam and withdrew our soldiers. John Kerry and Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden conducted a campaign to persuade the Democrats in Congress to cut all aid to South Vietnam and Cambodia. When Nixon went down in Watergate, the Democrats cut the aid as their first legislative act. They did this in January 1975. In April, the Cambodian and South Vietnamese regimes fell. This is a particularly important fact to remember, because this is exactly what Terry McAuliffe has proposed for Iraq now - that we cut and run. In 1975 the Democrats cut military and economic aid to the two regimes we had been defending against the Communists. As a result, the Communists won. Within three years the Communist victors had slaughtered 2.5 million people. The blood of those people is on the heads of John Kerry and Ted Kennedy and Howard Dean and people like myself. The difference between the four of us is that I understand now what we did then, and they apparently don't. That is why I'm not going to vote for John Kerry in this election.

If we cut and run or are defeated in Iraq, there will be a bloodbath when we leave. The jihadists will slaughter our friends, our allies, and all of the Iraqis who are struggling for their freedom. But this bloodbath will also flow into the streets of New York and Washington and potentially every major American city. The jihadists have sworn to kill us all. People who think America is invulnerable, that America can just leave the field of this battle, do not begin to understand the world we are in.

The 9/11 attacks took $600 billion out of the American economy and bankrupted the airlines industry, which required a $15 billion bailout. The hotel industry has barely recovered. Suppose the terrorists had attacked again after 9/11. Suppose there had been terrorist attacks in the major shopping malls around Christmas season, as was threatened at the time. If they had carried out such attacks, the terrorists could have taken down the whole American economy and, with it, the world economy. Then you would have seen governments fall. Perhaps the government of Pakistan would have been one of them, a nuclear power with a huge radical Islamic presence. What is the Democratic Party leadership thinking when they conduct a scorched-earth war against a sitting President and jeopardize the security of 300 million Americans for political gain?

The really terrible step in this political process, as I have already mentioned, was taken by Jimmy Carter and Al Gore who made the war a partisan issue right after President Bush went to the UN in September 2002. Carter and Gore poisoned the politics of the debate over America's war policy and sowed bitterness into the nation's soul. As a result, we now confront the terrorists and the world with nation divided over the issue of the war. As it happens, the only America that can lose a war is one that is divided.

The War At Home

The root cause of the division in this war, as in the war in Vietnam, is a left that is alienated from our national purpose. It is a left that in the Cold War gave moral and political support to our Communist enemies and in this war has entered an unholy alliance with radical Islam. This left is not just at war with our efforts in Iraq; it is also at war against our homeland security defenses. It may surprise you to know that there are already more than 350 American cities which, under instigation of the political left, have signed pledges to refuse to cooperate with Homeland Security, particularly in regard to the protection of our national borders. Georgetown University, where I am speaking tonight, is a leading player in this seditious effort. David Cole is a Professor of Law at this university and an intellectual leader of both the movement against our borders and against the Patriot Act, our first line of defense. Not coincidentally, he is also a lawyer for indicted terrorists.

The inspirer of the anti-Patriot Act movement, which conducts its activities in the name of civil liberties, is Sami Al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida. In 1996, Al-Arian founded an organization called the National Coalition for Political Freedom to oppose the anti-terrorism act. This act was passed at the behest of the Clinton Administration in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. Al-Arian opposed the act because it allowed the use of secret evidence in terrorist cases. It was hardly constitutional issues that motivated Al-Arian, now a leading figure in the civil liberties left. Al-Arian's real motivation for opposing the act was that his brother-in-law had been arrested under its provisions. Both Al-Arian and his brother-in-law were leaders of Palestine Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization responsible for the suicide bombing deaths of more than 100 people in the Middle East.

Sami Al-Arian is a colleague of David Cole, the ACLU, and the National Lawyers Guild, leaders of the movement against the Patriot Act. They still defend al-Arian even though he is now a federal prisoner under a 120-page indictment. Although he was exposed by journalists in the early 90's, the government could not arrest him because of legal obstacles that blocked their investigations, obstacles that were only removed by the Patriot Act. For nearly a decade, al-Arian was protected by the president of the University of South Florida, Betty Coster, who is currently the Democratic Party's candidate for the U.S. Senate in Florida.

Sami Al-Arian is hardly alone. Lynne Stewart, a National Lawyers Guild attorney, has also been indicted by John Ashcroft. Like Al-Arian, Stewart is defended by the ACLU and the American Association of University Professors. The Middle Eastern Studies Department at this university, headed by John Esposito, has spent years throwing a smoke screen over terrorist groups, defending terrorist leaders like Sam al-Arian, pretending that they are no threat to the United States and claiming, along with Salon.com and The Nation magazine, that the head of Palestine Islamic Jihad is being persecuted by Ashcroft simply because he's a Muslim and a Palestinian.

Lynne Stewart is now under indictment by Ashcroft for helping her client, the blind sheik Abdel Rahman, who masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing, to conduct his terrorist activities in Egypt. Lynne Stewart is on record saying she believes the terrorists are liberationists and freedom fighters. For Stewart, Abu Musab, al-Zarqawi and the Abdel Rahman are freedom fighters. And she collaborated with the blind sheik in conducting his terror. Stewart is a hero of the legal left, and she tours law schools like Stanford and perhaps Georgetown as a guest of their faculties. It would be a cold day in hell before Georgetown's Law School would honor John Ashcroft as a guest.

How is it possible that people who think of themselves as advocates of social justice can lend aid and comfort to Islamic radicals who behead people and blow women's heads off with AK-47s when they are suspected of having sexual relations outside of marriage? How can self-styled progressives embrace these people? They embrace them under the logic that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and their enemy is the United States. They do it under the delusion that is common to all radicals. It's the radical analog to the 72 virgins that await jihadists in heaven. Think of how sick our enemy is. The Muslim martyrs in Palestine kill their own children by strapping bombs to them, to 14-year-olds, and telling them if they blow up Jewish 14-year-olds -- and if they are lucky enough to bemale -- they will go straight to heaven and get 72 virgins. They're committing mass murder to get into paradise. That is exactly what the left does. Why does the left want to destroy America? To get into paradise. Call it socialism, call it Communism, call it social justice. It's a dream of paradise that is so enticing it will justify any crime necessary to achieve it.

The radical left does not understand that the root cause of social problems is humanity. There will never be a socially just world because the world is always going to be run by human beings, and human beings are in their nature corrupt, selfish and fallible. If you don't understand that, you are simply delusional, in denial. Thus radicals have the same goal as jihadists, which is paradise. And the same enemy, which is the Great Satan, i.e., us. You cannot read a page of Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn or Michael Moore and not understand that America is the great Satan, the root of the world's evil, worthy of destruction. It is this faith that forges the unholy alliance.

To confront our enemy we must reverse the perception. The mantra of the left is the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Out of simple consideration of self-defense, we must adopt the view that the friend of my enemy is my enemy.