Judgement Day for Team F-Troop’s Ron Radosh and David Horowitz
You can’t level a barrage of false claims and ad hominem attacks against an accomplished writer and author like Diana West and not expect to be brought to book. Full kudos go to the Breitbart team for agreeing to publish Diana’s rebuttals, apparently they are not influenced by threats of big money being pulled for hosting a reasoned debate.
NOTE: No doubt Ron Radosh is seething over Breitbart.com being unaffected by the same string pulling (threats) that got Nina Rosenwald to fire Clare Lopez from the Gatesone Institute. Interesting to note that Nina Rosenwald actually quoted the following by Clare Lopez on Twitter the day before she gave her the ax unannounced.
Calumnious charges against my new book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press), originated in a review that appeared at FrontPage Magazine on August 7, 2013. The 7,000-word review by Ronald Radosh was titled “McCarthy on Steroids” (FrontPage editor David Horowitz wrote the title). The Radosh review is referenced as source material for a series of attack-pieces that followed atFrontPage Magazine, Pajamas Media, The American Thinker, National Review, andelsewhere.
In one of three follow-up pieces Radosh published, he described the original review as a “take-down.” David Horowitz, in one of two pieces written about American Betrayal, wrote, “She should not have written this book.”
Who says that and why?
I have since come to understand the “take-down” of my book and the ad hominem attacks on my person in terms of a scorched earth policy to preserve and protect the conventional narrative as promulgated by mainstream academia.
“But FrontPage is a conservative site,” I can hear people say.
This stopped me, too, at first. Then I realized that the books Radosh cites in his “take-down”–not to debate my ideas, but to impugn them–are written by academics from Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. That’s liberal academia. Another source Radosh draws heavily from is a British historian and BBC documentary-maker whose works appear on PBS. More conventional (read: liberal) consensus.
My book threatens that consensus with arguments that are densely and meticulously documented. My sources are listed in 944 endnotes that draw from a bibliography that conventional historians consistently ignore. Specifically, I draw from the vast bibliography of Soviet espionage and infiltration that conventional historians ignore when writing World War II and even Cold War history. Indeed, the books Radosh cites omit or barely reference the same bibliography American Betrayal draws upon.
The Radosh review, then, is a defense of a conventional, tightly blinkered historiography – “the court histories that continue to obscure key facts about our backstage war with Moscow,” as M. Stanton Evans wrote in his endorsement of American Betrayal. But Radosh’s is in no way not a fair defense. It is not a fair debate. Instead, the Radosh review misrepresents my work by continually attacking my credibility.
