Lionizing the Enemy

My article from the June 17, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine

Lionizing the Enemy

By Matthew Vadum

A project is underway to rehabilitate the self-exiled Sixties radical, anti-Semite and “black power” advocate Stokely Carmichael.

The opening salvo in this revisionist project of the Afro-centrist Marxist Left in academia is Stokely: A Life, by Peniel E. Joseph, which was recently published by BasicCivitas Books.

It is more infomercial than biography, calculated to transform its negligible subject into a towering figure of historic importance, and to whitewash the damage he did. Joseph’s central argument is that Carmichael was a “rock star” activist who inspired generations and who singlehandedly changed the course of American history.

Perversely, Joseph calls Carmichael a civil rights leader. If that fairly summarizes Carmichael’s work, he was a civil rights leader only in the bizarre modern sense that racial arsonist like Al Sharpton is a civil rights leader.

It is difficult to imagine an American civil rights leader making common cause with ruthless African dictators but that is what Carmichael did. He changed his name to Kwame Toure to honor two of them. 

In his self-imposed exile he was a courtier to brutal racist tyrants. He was a friend of Ugandan butcher Idi Amin, and rationalized away the relationship by reminding himself that Amin was anti-American and anti-Zionist. Carmichael even accepted Ugandan citizenship.

He was also a friend of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Libya came closest to accomplishing Carmichael’s vision of a socialist state, according to Joseph.

It is difficult to image an American civil rights leader going abroad to help hostile powers, but this is what Carmichael did.

Carmichael visited Communist Cuba, giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies abroad. While there he called Abraham Lincoln a racist and helped Cuba’s propaganda effort against the United States. 

After spending three days with Fidel Castro he told reporters that the conversations he had with him were the “most educational, most interesting, and most enlightening of my public life.”

Carmichael praised the world’s most prolific mass murderer, Mao Zedong, as “a great Chinese leader, the greatest Chinese leader there is.” He palled around with Communist Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh and called for the U.S. to be defeated in Vietnam.

Unhinged leftists like Tavis Smiley are howling over the budget deal, but are there any actual cuts?

(originally posted at NewsReal)


Was the deal Speaker John Boehner made to prevent a federal government shutdown really the best he could get? Who knows, but it's far from clear if the deal actually involves a net cut in government spending.

After promising to slice $100 billion from the federal budget, the GOP capitulated and the final number dropped down to $61 billion... and then down to a mere $39 billion. The fiscal 2011 budget request from President Obama, which was never actually adopted, called for an unprecedented $3.8 trillion in spending. A $39 billion cut, if it really is a cut, represents an infinitesimally small percentage of that budget.

Mark Levin agrees that the deal is "a historic scam." He says:

Since Boehner has said the Republicans will never shut down the government and since he has said repeatedly we're only half of one third of the government, well then what the hell are they going to do on the other issues? What is their strategy exactly?

Exactly. What are the Republicans going to do about raising the debt limit and reforming out-of-control entitlement programs?

Meanwhile, the nutroots are going crazy. For example, professional America hater Tavis Smiley (at left in above photo), who frequently collaborates with pseudo-intellectual Cornel West (at right in above photo), is outraged that any cuts --if that's what they actually are (see below)-- were agreed to. From his far-left point of view the deal is "capitulation." America "avoided a shutdown of government, but now we have a lockout of the American people. Namely, the poor."

Economic Terrorism's Big Comeback

"Economic Terrorism's Big Comeback" is the name of my latest piece at Front Page Magazine.

Here's the top of it:

Radical activist groups associated with President Barack Obama have launched a campaign of economic terrorism and sabotage – possibly with his blessing. Mortgage and student loan strikes, crippling bank boycotts, intimidation, and who knows what else are all on the agenda.
The idea of leftists using terrorism to achieve political objectives isn’t new. Leon Trotsky supported the use of terrorism to advance so-called social justice. Decades before an ice-axe found its way into his skull, Trotsky argued in Dictatorship vs. Democracy that Communists who reject “terrorism in principle” weren’t bona fide Communists. Years before that, he justified “proletarian terrorism” because the capitalist state itself, with its “entire state apparatus with its laws, police, and army is nothing but an apparatus for capitalist terror.” In the upside-down world of Marxists, radical activists’ frightening, violent, in-your-face tactics are thought of as merely fighting fire with fire.
Since at least the 1960s, the American Left has embraced terrorism. Striking fear into the hearts of big corporations has proven to be politically useful and lucrative, as the shakedown artists of ACORN and Jesse Jackson’s Wall Street Project can attest.
While most of its practitioners conceal the true nature of what they do, others revel in their depravity. For example, Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America head Bruce Marks has proudly described himself as both a “banking terrorist” and an “urban terrorist.”