Get out your handkerchiefs

David Horowitz has taken exception to Chip Berlet's inclusion of him and his nonprofit Center for the Study of Popular Culture in the incisive Southern Poverty Law Center report, Into the Mainstream: An array of right-wing foundations and think tanks support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable:

David Horowitz, a former leftist born again as a right-wing conservative, founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1989, and is also the editor of the Net publication FrontPageMagazine.com. Although he makes much of his past working for civil rights for blacks and others, he more recently has blamed slavery on "black Africans … abetted by dark-skinned Arabs" - a selective rewriting of history. He also claims that "there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians -- Englishmen and Americans -- created one." That, of course, is false. Critics note that Horowitz is ignoring everything from the slave revolt led by Spartacus against the Romans and Moses' rebellion against the Pharaoh to the role of American blacks in the abolition movement. He has attacked minority "demands for special treatment" as "only necessary because some blacks can't seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others," rejecting the idea that they could be the victims of lingering racism.

Horowitz first responded by writing "An Open Letter to Morris Dees" in which he decried Berlet's characterization of him as a "smear" and "filth."

Berlet, however, responded with a detailed rebuttal of Horowitz's claims, drawing at length from Horowitz's own words, both spoken and written. It was frankly devastating, particularly since the quantity of citations made clear exactly how bankrupt Horowitz's thinking is.

Horowitz has since retorted that Berlet's response comprised "tendentious mis-readings and misrepresentations of the original report and adds 19 pages of additional quotes wrenched out of context, misrepresented and accompanied by further tendentious claims and further smears."

Of course, it is nothing like this. Berlet's citations are detailed and clearly contextual. It is wondrous, really, how right-wingers hate having their own words thrown back at them.

I expect Chip will at some point respond in detail, but in the meantime, one example from Horowitz's counter is illustrative of his huffing and puffing:

The sentence Berlet mangles is not a historical statement about slavery but a polemical response to the proponents of reparations who are demanding that only whites pay blacks for an institution – slavery – that has been eradicated in the western world (but not Arab and black Africa) for more than 100 years. It is intended to remind people that the slaves transported to America were bought from African and Arab slavers – not to blame Africans and Arabs for sole responsibility for slavery.

Well, this is accurate only if one defines "polemical" as "nakedly false" or "distorted beyond recognizability".

Just for the record, here's exactly what Horowitz said, in the citation by Berlet:

"Slavery itself is the most obvious example. It was not whites but black Africans who first enslaved their brothers and sisters. They were abetted by dark-skinned Arabs (since Robinson and his allies force us into this unpleasant mode of racial discourse) who organized the slave trade."

Is it possible to read this any other way than as clearly arguing that blacks and Arabs organized the slave trade? Or that they had, if not sole responsibility for the slave trade, at least primary responsibility?

One hopes the GOP keeps getting advice on minorities from guys like Horowitz, though. It only compounds their cluelessness.