David Horowitz
![David Horowitz](/assets/img/authors/david-horowitz.jpg)
David Horowitz
David Joel Horowitzis an American conservative writer based in Southern California. He is a founder and current president of the think tank the David Horowitz Freedom Center; editor of the Center's publication, FrontPage Magazine; and director of Discover the Networks, a website that tracks individuals and groups on the political left. Horowitz founded the organization Students for Academic Freedom to oppose political correctness and leftist orientation in academia...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth10 January 1939
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
You could mention my name in any hallway in any academic institution and you would have people foaming at the mouth.
For many Washington liberals, terrorism was not the instrument of political fanatics and evil men, but was the product of social conditions - poverty, racism and oppression - for which the Western democracies, including Israel were always ultimately to blame.
I have also been attacked by my opponents as someone seeking to purge university faculties of leftist professors. This is false. The first provision of the Academic Bill of Rights is that no professor should be hired or fired because of his or her political views. I have never myself called for the firing of any professor for his or her political views, nor would I.
We can trust our doctors to be professional, to minister equally to their patients without regard to their political or religious beliefs. But we can no longer trust our professors to do the same.
Never before in the history of the modern research university have entire departments and fields been devoted to purely ideological pursuits.
If you have to invoke a distant past to justify a present grievance, the case for the grievance is already undermined.
If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years, which rejected it.
Politics is about winning. If you don?t win, you don?t get to put your principles into practice. Therefore, find a way to win, or sit the battle out.
In Washington, of course, evading responsibility is an art form, so it is not always easy to tell who's responsible for which mess.
Not even Sen. [Joseph] McCarthy was able to repress ideas he opposed as effectively as Harvard's hiring committees have suppressed the conservative viewpoints they despise and fear.
Israel is the canary in the mine. What happens to Israel will eventually happen to America itself.
My parents, who were Communists, always pretended to be American patriots. You can always convince yourself you are: 'I love America, I just want it to be perfect, which it will be when it becomes a Soviet Communist state'. When the left called for 'liberation' what it really wanted was to erase the human slate and begin again. Like everybody else, I see things that need to be improved. I just am mindful of the fact that they can be made a lot worse.
The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago?
It is the human wish to be told lies that keep us as primitive morally and socially as we are. I am persuaded that a lie grounded in human desire is too powerful for mere reason to kill.