The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners (19 page)

As
with all of Ms. Lopez’ previous articles, this one was well-received by
Gatestone’s editor, Nina Rosenwald, who praised it as “so far-sighted.” The
article was duly published the morning of Tuesday 3 September 2013 at Gatestone
and was sent out to an email list of subscribers. Sometime shortly after that,
however, it was pulled from the website, with no notice or explanation.

Word
spread quickly as regular Gatestone readers realized something odd had
happened.

The
real shock came the following morning, though, on September 4, when Ms. Lopez
received an email from Nina Rosenwald notifying her that her relationship with
the Gatestone Institute had been terminated at the request of the Gatestone
Board of Directors. On September 5, Ms. Rosenwald confirmed in an email sent to
Ms. Lopez and others what some had already suspected, that her firing was due
to her “choice of books to promote…,” a clear reference to Ms. Lopez’ citation
of historical events from Ms. West’s book. Although Ms. Lopez also had cited
about the same 1933 events to a second book, The Great Terror: A Reassessment,
by Robert Conquest, for some reason, that reference did not seem to pose any
issues for the Board. Only Ms. West’s book about the very same events seemed to
irritate the Board, whose recently-appointed Chairman is former UN Ambassador
John Bolton.

It
would seem that the legacy of Stalin lives on. The anti-anti-communist movement
is alive and well in 21st century America, and so are the vicious public smear
tactics of personal vilification to which Diana West has been subjected.

For
shame, for shame.

Clare
Lopez has not yet been entirely airbrushed out of existence at the Gatestone
Institute. Her
author
archive
is still available at the website, and below [is a text
version of her bio] in case it disappears down the same memory hole as did her
article (or Mark Tapson’s favorable review of American Betrayal at FPM, for
that matter).

Clare M. Lopez

Distinguished Senior Fellow, Gatestone
Institute

Clare M. Lopez is
a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on national defense,
Islam, Iran, and counterterrorism issues. Currently a senior fellow at the
Gatestone Institute, the Center for Security Policy and the Clarion Fund and
vice president of the Intelligence Summit, she formerly was a career operations
officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, a professor at the Centre for
Counterintelligence and Security Studies, Executive Director of the Iran Policy
Committee from 2005-2006, and has served as a consultant, intelligence analyst,
and researcher for a variety of defense firms. She was named a Lincoln Fellow
at the Claremont Institute in 2011.

Already an
advisor to EMP Act America, in February 2012 Ms. Lopez was named a member of
the Congressional Task Force on National and Homeland Security, which focuses
on the Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) threat to the nation. She is deputy
director of the U.S. Counterterrorism Advisory Team for the Military Department
of the South Carolina National Guard and serves as a member of the Boards of
Advisors/Directors for the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi
Arabia, the Clarion Fund, the Institute of World Affairs, the Intelligence
Analysis and Research program at her undergraduate alma mater, Notre Dame
College of Ohio, and United West. She has been a Visiting Researcher and guest
lecturer on counterterrorism, national defense, and international relations at
Georgetown University. Ms. Lopez is a regular contributor to print and
broadcast media on subjects related to Iran and the Middle East and the
co-author of two published books on Iran. She is the author of an acclaimed
paper for the Center,
The
Rise of the Iran Lobby
and co-author/editor of the Center’s Team
B II study, “Shariah: The Threat to America”.

Ms. Lopez
received a B.A. in Communications and French from Notre Dame College of Ohio
and an M.A. in International Relations from the Maxwell School of Syracuse
University. She completed Marine Corps Officer Candidate School (OCS) in
Quantico, Virginia before declining a commission, in favor of joining the CIA.

So
these are the credentials of the woman who was fired for writing favorably
about a book that someone else disapproves of. A scholar of her quality and
expertise had to be suppressed, not just by having her article pulled, but by
losing her status as a senior fellow.

Well…

Gatestone
is a private foundation. It is fully within its rights to exercise editorial
discretion and terminate any of its fellows as it sees fit. Front Page Magazine
may also claim the same prerogatives vis-à-vis its own articles.

Still,
one cannot help but observe the sheer juvenility of such behavior. These people
are intelligent, well-educated adults — what prompts their descent into
junior-high style bullying? Not just incompetence, but maliciousness. What’s
going on here?

The
impulse to suppress what someone else has to say, using any and all tactics
available, is a totalitarian one.

The
ferocious personal attacks on Diana West emerged from numerous quarters at more
or less the same time, which suggested a concerted effort to apply Saul
Alinsky’s Rule #12 — referred to in another context as “the politics of
personal destruction”.

It
seems that no matter how far to the “right” an old Stalinist moves, he still
carries his own private Lubyanka around with him, ready to be dusted off and
reoccupied whenever the occasion warrants.

#
# #

Of Malice and Memory Holes

By
Edward Cline

The
Center for the Advancement of Capitalism

September 08, 2013

There is a purge afoot, not at the behest of
the Left or the White House, or at the Huffington Post or Salon, but in the
ranks of "conservatives" and "neo-conservatives." The
purge, instigated by the Neocon editors of FrontPage Magazine, is designed to
discredit and smear Diana West and her book,
American Betrayal
: The Secret Assault
on Our Nation's Character
, and to claim any
collateral damage in the meantime. I have written on this purge in my August
8th column, "
FrontPage's
Spitballs Strike Diana West
," and also
reviewed
her book. It is the Neocons who are sniping at West and anyone
who defends her. I will not repeat everything I wrote in the
"Spitball" column, except this:

But, then, we are dealing with Neocons here.
Neoconservativism is simply a smorgasbord of supposedly "right-wing"
ideologies populated largely by former communists, retired radical left-wing
activists, cringing liberals, and even ex-SDS members such as
Radosh
. It is as philosophically rudderless as traditional
"right-wing" Republican philosophy (provided anyone can find it). As
a movement, it is so open-ended it may as well admit Barack Obama and all three
Clintons as honorary members. Neoconservatism can accommodate just about every
ideology but Islam.

And to judge by the way FrontPage's leading
editors
are conducting the smear campaign, it's not beyond fantasy that
they could also accommodate totalitarian Islam. Islam is against everything,
too. FrontPage may as well run ads on Al Jazeera TV. Perhaps the editors could
also pen a series of defenses of
Walter Duranty
, the New York Times writer who helped to whitewash Stalin's
(and Lenin's) skull-crushing, famine-as-policy régime.

On a dramatic note, the campaign against West
brought to mind Milan Stitt's 1976 play,
The
Runner Stumbles
, in which an attractive nun is murdered by a Catholic
convert, because she was too tempting to the parish priest.

The chief problem with Neocons is that while
they are
against
Islam and make token
noises about their opposition to "big government," they are not
for
anything. This partly explains why
the Neocons are fulminating against West. West, after all, is for the truth
about the U.S.'s role in aiding and abetting, by design or by default, the
perpetuation and arming of the Soviet Union. She is for revealing the depths
and scope of the Big Con, a con which is reflected in academia and in the
history of WWII found in most standard textbooks and read by most living
Americans in their formative years. That con has been established dogma and
narrative, and that dogma and narrative originated with FDR and his
administration.

Woe to those who depart from it or challenge
it.

West's compellingly demonstrated and amply
documented thesis swims against the current of standard history, which is that
FDR cut cards with a very personable devil (Josef Stalin) in order to crush
Nazism and Hitler, and that it wasn't his fault or that of his cronies, dupes,
and advisors (chiefly Harry Hopkins) that Stalin got atomic bomb materials and
know-how and helped to replace Hitler's murderous totalitarianism in Europe
with the Soviet Union's after the war.

The standard history is that it just
"happened." No fingers should be pointed at St. Franklin, because up
to a point, Stalin was viewed as just a benevolent despot looking out for
"his people." That is how Stalin was sold to Americans during WWII in
propaganda. After it was "revealed" that the U.S. was ignorant of
Stalin's responsibility for the murders of millions of Russians in a concerted
campaign to eliminate all opposition to the Soviet régime, and that it really,
really was the totalitarian horror that others had described, the standard
history is that the U.S. could only adopt an
Alfred E.
Neuman-like
"What-Me-Know??" stance.

West and her book have been defended by
Andrew
Bostom
,
Michael
McCann
and
Shari
Goodman
, among others. The contemptible behavior of
FrontPage's editors has been noted and highlighted by Family Security Matters,
Breitbart
, and
Gates
of Vienna
. West has published the first part of a
lengthy and detailed rebuttal (not on FrontPage, of course)
here
.

I mentioned collateral damage. On September 3
^rd
The Gatestone Institute published an article by Clare Lopez, "
Recognizing
the Wrong People
," in which she
cites Diana West's book and focuses on what moved
West
to write it, the baffling accommodation by especially the Obama
administration of hiring Muslims into the most sensitive realms of policy and
in indiscriminately patronizing the Muslim Brotherhood. Lopez discusses the
distinct and observable parallel between that and FDR's accommodation of the
Soviet Union with its formal recognition in 1933 and its consequences.

Without warning or explanation, that article
was removed by Gatestone the very same day. The next day Lopez was removed from
Gatestone's stable of writers and researchers. Shall we say
expelled
or
purged
? Qua terms, there's not much difference in the motive or the
consequence. The
Gates
of Vienna
relates the sequence of events.

In late August 2013, Clare Lopez, then a
Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, submitted an article for publication
at the Gatestone Institute’s website. It was entitled “Recognizing the Wrong
People”, and drew on the U.S. government’s 1933 formal diplomatic recognition
of the USSR as described in Diana West’s book
American Betrayal
to form
an analogy with the U.S.’s present day recognition and/or support of other
fundamentally-anti-American entities, such as the AQ/MB-dominated rebel and
opposition forces in places like Egypt, Libya, and Syria….

…The article was duly published the morning of
Tuesday 3 September 2013 at Gatestone and was sent out to an email list of
subscribers. Sometime shortly after that, however, it was pulled from the
website, with no notice or explanation.

…The real shock came the following morning,
though, on September 4, when Ms. Lopez received an email from Nina Rosenwald
notifying her that her relationship with the Gatestone Institute had been
terminated at the request of the Gatestone Board of Directors. On September 5,
Ms. Rosenwald confirmed in an email sent to Ms. Lopez and others what some had
already suspected, that her firing was due to her “choice of books to
promote…,” a clear reference to Ms. Lopez’ citation of historical events from
Ms. West’s book….

Gatestone's removal of Clare Lopez's further
association comports neatly with FrontPage's designation of West's book as a
product of "incompetence." However, see Lopez's exemplary
bona
fides
, still up on Gatestone's website (unless by
now her page has been removed, as well, in that happy Big Brotherish tradition
of designating certain individuals as non-persons).

Clearly, to Gatestone, Lopez's credentials
(not to mention West's to FrontPage) are irrelevant in the light of her having
made an important, just, and favorable mention of West's book. She must be
vaporized and all record of her erased from the official gazette of
Neoconservatism. She never happened. Was Clare Lopez one of Gatestone's stellar
writers? Who? Blank out.