I guess it’s noteworthy when George Soros singles you out for attack. On the other hand, when you have been targeted by as many leftists as I have, one more billionaire doesn’t make much difference. These assaults have been inspired by my efforts to organize an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” whose goal was to identify America’s enemies as more than just “terrorists,” and specifically to link them to a radical movement within Islam, which has declared war on the West. One salutary aspect of the Week is to have exposed the breadth of the coalition that now functions as a frontier guard for our enemies. Members of this coalition are apparently determined to run interference for America’s enemies, because, in their view, a greater danger to America is posed by conservatives such as myself and George Bush.

According to Soros, Bush has made up the war on terror, and thereby created the terrorist threat. In a notable article titled “A Self-Defeating War,” Soros wrote: “A misleading figure of speech applied literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts -- Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia -- a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world…. We can escape it only if we Americans repudiate the war on terror as a false metaphor.” As a principal funder of the Democratic Party, Soros is probably the inspiration for Nancy Pelosi’s claim that the terrorists are only in Iraq because we are there and will leave when we do, and is certainly behind John Edwards’ suggestion that the war on terror is a “political bumper sticker” and the way to fight the terrorists is to treat them as individual criminals rather than members of a fanatical religious movement with tens of millions of adherents.

Even as leftists project onto America responsibility for the war against us, so they seek to blame conservatives for the scorched earth politics they have adopted at home. Thus Soros describes me as a political manipulator who is unwilling to argue issues with my opponents, and instead focuses on destroying them: “Another technique [of conservatives] is transference: accusing opponents of having motives or using methods that characterize the accuser himself. For example, David Horowitz, who accuses me of being ‘the Lenin of the anti-American conspiracy,’ is a former Trotskyite for whom opponents are never adversaries to be debated, but rather enemies to be crushed.”

For the record, I was never a Trotskyite, nor have I ever accused Soros of being the Lenin of a “conspiracy.” More to the point, Soros’ claim that I never debate my adversaries on the issues is refuted by my writings and actions in the twenty-five years I have been a conservative. Few public figures have answered the arguments of their critics more copiously than I have. I have written hundreds of thousands of words of specific argument, which can be found in my articles archives titled “Replies to (Leftwing) Critics” and “Debates With (and About) the Left,” at Frontpagemag.com, and in published works such as Radical Son, The Politics of Bad Faith, Left Illusions, Hating Whitey, Uncivil Wars, Indoctrination U, and Unholy Alliance. Contrary to Soros, my entire intellectual work can be seen as an extended argument with the left, not an attempt to dismiss it with labels.

The basis for Soros’ claim is a passage in my work, which has been frequently mis-quoted by leftists, and which is actually a description of how the left itself deals with political opponents. A recent reference to this passage by one of my critics, Michael Berube, illustrates the point. “Here’s Horowitz in his 2000 book The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits: “you cannot cripple an opponent by outwitting him in a political debate. You can only do so by following Lenin’s injunction: ‘In political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent’s argument, but to wipe him from the face of the earth.’”

People who have actually read The Art of Political War, which was written as advice to Republicans, will recognize that that this is a description of how I believe Democrats (and leftists like Berube) fight their political wars. It was not my recommendation of how conservatives and Republicans should fight them. Moreover, I said so, in so many words, and in the very next sentence, which Berube deliberately omitted: “Well, we needn’t go as far as Lenin. After all, we’re not Bolsheviks. But destroying an opponent’s effectiveness is a fairly common Democratic practice. Personal smears accomplish this. And Democrats are very good at it.”

My thirty-year effort to engage an argument with the left has not been reciprocated. Except on occasions when I have invited leftists into the pages of Frontpage or onto my public platforms for the specific purpose of debate, few on the left have considered it necessary to engage my work except to ridicule and slander me, as a way of warning others not to take the issues I raise seriously – in short, to “crush” me (as Soros puts it), and eliminate me from the discussion. In a typical encounter, during a debate at Reed University, the Dean of the Faculty opened his remarks by describing me thus: “So, I hypothesize, engaging in political warfare, doing and saying whatever it takes to win, this is what Mr. Horowitz does for a living. It’s his job, it’s his way of life. And, of course, if this is true, then clearly what it means is that it’s simply impossible to take anything he says or does seriously, including anything he says today.” The Dean was hypothesizing from the same mis-represented Lenin quote used by Soros and Berube.

In discussing my book The Professors on the blog Crooked Timbers, Berube recommended the crush-them-and-dismiss-them strategy to other leftists. “My job is to contest [Horowitz’s] legitimacy,” he wrote. To implement such a strategy, progressives should resort to “mockery and dismissal.” Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, was more direct. In a review that appeared in Academe he advised: “Please ignore this book. Don’t buy it. Don’t read it. Try not to mention it in idle conversation.” I am not the only conservative to be treated this way in “liberal” venues.

In academic circles, Berube’s strategy of mockery and dismissal might be an effective tool for crushing an opponent, but in the political arena rougher methods are the order of the day. These will also be familiar to most conservatives, but here is a sample of some recent attacks directed at me, which are taken from the Google index: “Fat-assed,” “faux-intellectual,” “a quintessential slobbering lackey,” “neo-con,” “insane,” “Trotskyist turned neo-con scumbag,” “Stalinist,” “Maoist,” “former communist,” “brimming with self-hate,” “hyperventilating about commies,” “traitor,”“anti-education fanatic,” “witch-hunter,” “far-right fanatic,” “far-right wacko,” “Ahmadinejad’s double,” “little Fuehrer,” “right-wing nut,” “Grand Wizard,” “anti-Muslim,” “religious bigot,” “arch- racist,” “Zionist neo-conservative,” “racist Zionist Jew,” “extremist racist Zionist Jew,” “a Nazi mind with a Zionist face,” “a notorious icon of Zionist Islamophobia,” “a blatant Judeo-fascist crusader of Zionism and social regressivism,” “Zionist poof.”

Some of these sobriquets have appeared on widely trafficked “liberal” sites such as HuffingtonPost. Others can be found on Islamist websites and venues of the radical left. Here is how I am described in a broadside by the Revolutionary Communist Party, which appeared on Indymedia.org: “[Horowitz] is a vitriolic defender of everything from the extermination of the Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people, to the savage and criminal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and the torture of those whom this regime deems to be terrorists. He has set up a website that clamors for the arrest and imprisonment of revolutionaries, radicals, dissenters and liberals and reports every slander, rumor, lie and innuendo that comes his way….In short, Horowitz defends every crime that this system has ever committed and is now preparing to justify even more, and to intimidate and silence any who would question or resist this.” In my speech at Columbia University, during Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, I observed that malicious lies like this were a form of hate speech -- the equivalent of nooses, or targets painted on one’s back.

In fact, such attacks are entirely representative of the wall of hate that greeted students on a hundred campuses who invited speakers to address the issue of Islamo-Fascism in the last week of October. Yet, when I described this as a hate campaign, Time magazine blogger Andrew Sullivan was inspired to add another epithet to my list, as he accused me of “turning [the event] into polarizing McCarthyism.” Continued...