David Horowitz

On Monday, People For the American Way delivered a petition with 178,000 signatures to House Speaker John Boehner calling for the removal of Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Bachmann, one of Congress’ leading purveyors of conspiracy theories, earned rebukes from Boehner and others last year when she accused several Muslim-American government employees, include top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, of being secret agents of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The petition, to put it mildly, hit a nerve among Bachmann’s allies in the anti-Muslim Right. FrontPageMag, an online outfit led by David Horowitz, has published a full three articles defending Bachmann and accusing PFAW of “smearing” the “vindicated” Bachmann by launching an “all-out war” on her.  In one article, Robert Spencer of JihadWatch argues, “If they really had any genuine concern for the American way, instead of calling for her removal from the Intelligence committee, the People for the American Way would be calling for Bachmann to be appointed to chair that committee.”

Yesterday, Horowitz launched his own petition, titled, ironically, “Stop the Witch Hunt Against Rep. Bachmann.”

Horowitz and Spencer aren’t the only ones coming to Bachmann’s defense. The Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney, who was the source of the bulk of Bachmann’s accusations against Abedin, and conservative columnist Diana West discussed the petition on Wednesday’s edition of Secure Freedom Radio. People For the American Way, Gaffney suggested, is part of the “Red-Green Axis” and should be called instead “People For the Islamist Way”:

Gaffney: I wanted to turn to a woman who has probably understood this jihadist enterprise, most especially the civilization jihadist element of it, that is to say the so-called non-violent -- actually pre-violent form -- that we’ve talked about in the book that you contributed marvelously to, Sharia: The Threat to America, namely Michele Bachmann. She has been savaged now for almost a year for having actually raised an alarm about some of this. What’s going on with her at the moment and what should our listeners be thinking about it and doing?

West: Well, you have People For the American Way, a leftist advocacy group, actually putting together a petition asking to have Speaker John Boehner to remove Michele Bachmann from the House Intelligence Committee. Now this actually all ties in to what we were talking about already because FOX has also savaged Michele Bachmann, specifically going back to last summer when she and a few of her colleagues were raising questions about Muslim Brotherhood penetration into the United States government. Specifically, one of the cause celebre was the perhaps penetration, her question of the secretary of state’s office with her top aide being Huma Abedin, who we’ve spoken about before. And this is one of these…

Gaffney: Closely tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

West: Correct.

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Gaffney: I think what we’re really getting at here is Michele Bachmann is being vilified for having exposed some of that influence operation, penetration problem and she should be, if anything, lauded for it, not taken to task by the Red-Green Axis, as they call it, doing business under the form of People For the Islamist Way.

David Horowitz talked to Frank Gaffney today on Secure Freedom Radio about what to expect in President Obama’s second term, where Horowitz warned that while the government through health care reform can “control your health, now they’re going to control your environment.” He said that the movement for environmental protection is America’s “biggest threat” because it is working with Obama to impose government “control over everybody’s life” under the excuse of preventing climate change, “the chimera of the left.” He even brought up the debunked claim that Obama will enforce a light switch tax.

The far-right author demanded that Republicans read his book Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion and learn that Obama is following the playbook of Saul Alinsky. Horowitz details how Saul Alinsky came up with the absolutely novel idea that politicians should make compromises, try to pass their policy agenda when they can and run negative advertisements against their opponents.

Horowitz also seems to be under the impression that Romney did not respond to any of the negative ads against him and did not go negative against Obama. “Character assassination is the middle name of every Democratic political operative,” Horowitz maintained, “What is wrong with Republicans that they don’t understand that this is a war? And the other side is playing for keeps.”

Horowitz: Alinsky advised, do what’s possible, not your ideal, make compromises, which Obama has done and he’s turned off some of the left because of it. SO he’s going to continue to fund the left with taxpayer money, that’s a given, that’s where the Stimulus money went, it went to the unions, he’s going to fund the unions. He’s going to pursue this other chimera of the left, the climate change, because it means control over energy policies. They actually want to control when you turn on your light switch, they want to tax you for the energy that you use. I have to tell you, this is the biggest threat, that environmental movement. That’s the powerful movement because it means control over everybody’s life. They won Obamacare and control your health, now they’re going to control your environment.

Gaffney: And energy. David, what would you recommend to the loyal opposition as to what it should be doing to contend with this radical and his agenda for the next four years?

Horowitz: Read my book. The big problem here is conservatives understand policy issues very well, they’re wonks like Paul Ryan. Romney by the way could have won this election if he had made Rubio his vice presidential candidate, as much as I admire Paul Ryan, it was Rubio we should’ve picked for the politics of it. But the main thing is you have to understand your enemy, it’s not good enough to do the policy, people never get to hear the policies. Romney never appeared to half the electorate, what appeared were all those negative campaign ads and that’s just what politics is about. You have got to understand how dedicated and vicious your opponents are. Stop calling them liberals and hopefully some people will read my book because my book is portraits of threes people so you understand who they are.

Gaffney: Right. One of the things that just jumps off of the pages is something that we saw play out, right out of Saul Alinsky’s playbook, I think it was “Rules for Radicals #11,” in which he said, select a target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it. If that wasn’t the script for taking down Mitt Romney I don’t know what was. Horowitz: Yes. Character assassination is the middle name of every Democratic political operative, and everybody who is a conservative knows it, we’ve all been victims of it. It’s not a secret, everybody said, everybody said, this will be the dirtiest campaign ever and Obama has nothing to run on, he has to demonize Romney. And when he did that, did the Romney campaign respond? No. What is wrong with Republicans that they don’t understand that this is a war?

Gaffney: They have to read your book, that’s for sure.

Horowitz: And the other side is playing for keeps.

David Horowitz has been promoting his new book Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion on conservative talk radio by attacking Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin as a Muslim Brotherhood agent and arguing that President Obama was only elected because he is black because “part of the racism of our society is [that] if you’re black you can get away with murder.” Horowitz’s interview with Janet Mefferd was no different, as he charged that Abedin “is a Muslim Brotherhood operative and she has been all her life” and that she has been pushing foreign policy favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood. Horowitz even said that Abedin “is worse than Alger Hiss,” the accused Soviet spy.

But it is not just the Obama administration which has been penetrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, as Horowitz warned that “the Republican Party has also been infiltrated” thanks to conservative luminary Grover Norquist, whom he said is a “practicing Muslim.” Norquist is a reviled figure among anti-Muslim activists like Horowitz, who in 2011 lashed out at Norquist from the podium at CPAC, mainly due to the fact his wife is a Muslim-American and he works with Muslim Republicans like Suhail Kahn.

Horowitz: We have a medieval enemy with twenty-first century technology aimed at us, they’ve infiltrated our government. If you wondered how it’s possible that Obama and Hillary would not know or would pretend what was happening wasn’t happening in the Middle East or how they could turnover Egypt as they have to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the fountainhead of Al Qaeda and all of these terrible Islamic Nazi organizations, the answer is not really hard to find: the chief adviser to the American government on Muslim affairs, Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, is a Muslim Brotherhood operative and she has been all her life, and her whole family is. This is worse than Alger Hiss, for those in your audience who are old enough to remember, Alger Hiss is a Soviet agent who was right next to Roosevelt at Yalta.

Mefferd: It’s very true and yet you had these five congressmen, Michele Bachmann and the others, who tried to say the inspectors-general need to look into this, and even Republicans stood up on the floor and said no!

Horowitz: You had Boehner and McCain, and McCain is just bonkers. But the Republican Party has also been infiltrated. Grover Norquist is a Muslim, he is a practicing Muslim.

Later, Horowitz explained that liberals and radical Islamists are working out of their shared “hatred for America” and promoted the ridiculous and debunked conspiracy that Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s book Dreams from My Father.

Mefferd: Why is it that you see so many who are radicals and progressives supporting radical Islam?

Horowitz: Because they share a common enemy: the great Satan, which is us, and the little Satan, which is Israel. It’s very simple, the left for many, many years now, maybe half a century, has had no practical program, they have no idea what they were going to do with the world when they get the power. So what organizes them is their hatred for America. Why would you want to bankrupt America? Why would you want to take its military down? Why would you apologize to our enemies, as our President has done, unless you were a radical and you believe that we’re the great oppressor nation. I know he talks out of two sides of his mouth, he actually makes Bill Clinton look like a Boy Scout in the realm of rectitude in what he’s saying, this guy lies so easily. Of course because he’s black he gets a pass on everything. We have reached a very low point in our national evolution. I’m hoping that this book, you know it’s not going to change the world, but those people who are buying and reading “Radicals” will at least understand the mentality behind these people and how influential they are. Bill Ayers is an America-hating terrorist and was Barack Obama’s closest political ally for twenty years and wrote his autobiography.

Commenting on the right-wing smear campaign targeting Huma Abedin, Adam Serwer noted that the people suggesting Abedin is a secret agent for the Muslim Brotherhood would “have to ignore her marriage to the ardently pro-Israel disgraced New York Congressman Anthony Weiner. (Of course: it's the perfect cover.)” But some anti-Muslim activists are actually using the “perfect cover” line to bolster their own arguments: David Horowitz told American Family Association president Tim Wildmon yesterday that Weiner has either “secretly converted to Islam or Huma Abedin has been given a special dispensation to marry a Jew so she can infiltrate our government.” He lamented Republican criticism of attacks on Abedin at a time when Democrats have already been “thoroughly infiltrated and defending the jihadists”:

Horowitz: The inquiry; the fact that Michele Bachmann has been attacked as she has by Republicans, and the two key ones are McCain and John Boehner, is terrible. It’s bad enough that the Democratic Party is thoroughly infiltrated and defending the jihadists, the Islamists. But that the Republican Party should be doing this as well, it’s disastrous.

…

Wildmon: Michele Bachmann, the congresswoman from Minnesota is being demonized in the national media and what is happened here is that—and I’ve read about this a year ago or so—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her right hand person, who is married to disgraced Anthony Weiner—

Horowitz: Anthony Weiner is a Jew. So according to Muslim law, either Anthony Weiner has secretly converted to Islam or Huma Abedin has been given a special dispensation to marry a Jew so she can infiltrate our government.

Horowitz also claimed that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is to blame for the rise of the “dangerous” left because it makes people want to seek change in the world they live in:

Horowitz: George Soros, who is an evil man, who has evil designs on this country, once said, he said he aspired to be the conscience of mankind. He knows that he’s a corrupt businessman who has caused a lot of pain and so he redeems himself by being the champion of the progressive future. That’s what it does for them. If you look at history you will see that all these ‘isms’—communism, socialism, Nazism—they all emerge after Darwin, that is after the decline of organized religion. They replace the religious vision of a redemption in the next life with a communist vision with a redemption in this life, and that is why they are so bloody dangerous.