Much of the blame for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks rests on an apologist stance from liberals, which has been encouraged on college campuses, says conservative author and columnist David Horowitz.
Horowitz, a former liberal who sparked controversy last year when he placed advertisements in college newspapers criticizing reparations to relatives of slaves, spoke about his conversion to conservatism and other issues to a crowd of about 150 at UNM Tuesday night.
He said that in the wake of the advertising, which caused a furor when some publications rejected it and others were harshly criticized for publishing it, he has become the target of a national hate campaign. In a subsequent speaking tour, he said he discovered that liberal organizations had driven conservative voices off the campus.
"They're a small political minority, but they are tolerated and even abetted by the administration," he said. "This is a reflection of a much larger problem."
That problem, he said, is that university administrations exercise political preference when hiring faculty. He said he was alarmed when he asked members of the UNM College Republicans, who organized the event, about conservative faculty sponsors for student organizations.
"Three professors were available to the College Republicans," he said, accusing administration of McCarthyism. "I'm sure there's more on the faculty, but they're too scared to come out and endorse viewpoints like this."
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After suggesting an investigation into university hiring practices, Horowitz went on to outline a string of events and an ideology that he said led to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He said leftists have undermined national security since the early 1900s.
Horowitz, who is now president of the Los Angeles-based conservative group Center for the Study of Popular Culture, says he considers himself a liberal because he champions free speech and other issues. His definition of leftists include communists, environmentalists, Democrats and other groups.
Horowitz said former President Bill Clinton, who he called "the most wretched human being to ever occupy the White House," made the first misstep by not responding with force to the Feb. 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center. He said the bombing and a series of attacks on military installations and embassies were ignored by an administration that was too soft - cutting intelligence and military budgets rather than strengthening them in response to a growing threat from the Muslim world.
"Clinton showed that we are a paper tiger," he said. "We don't live in a world where we can just sit down and agree to disagree. It's a world where war is inevitable. You better have the biggest military force, or they're going to take you down."
He said one of his biggest problems with the leftist cause was its tendency to blame the United States for the attacks.
"People talk about 9/11 as though America must have done something," he said. "After Oklahoma City, we didn't have 150 demonstrations on college campuses because America had caused Timothy McVeigh to do this. Yet there is an army of people in this country who will tell you that America caused the attack on itself."
He said the attacks could have been easily prevented by security measures that some argue threaten civil liberties.
"Seventy-one percent of African Americans in this country support the racial profiling of Arab Muslims," he said. "It protects all of us."
Horowitz compared leftists to his communist parents, who he said were once part of a Moscow-based conspiracy to overthrow the government.
"Today's leftists pretend to be pacifists, but every leftist had to be jumping for joy when the World Trade Center blew up," he said. "That's Wall Street. What do you think these anti-globalization radicals are protesting? America is the great oppressor."
Conservatives, which he characterized as often too polite, were struggling to figure out why there has been any opposition to the war.
"Many Americans are bewildered," he said. "Sure, America has done some bad things, but all countries have. To themselves, the left are the army of saints. We are the armies of Satan."
Horowitz, a University of California at Berkley alumni, who once was editor of the left-wing magazine Ramparts, said he became a harsh critic of liberalism after a close friend was murdered by members of the Black Panther party while he was helping them build a school.
"When this woman was killed, I was mugged by the recognition that these were evil people," he said. "I then realized there had to be a government and laws. And what better system than the American one? So presto - I was a conservative."
He touched briefly on the reparations issue, calling the current state of the civil rights movement nothing more than a "shakedown."
"The reparations campaign is an appeal to black Americans to go against the country that freed them," he said, adding that slavery had existed in Africa for thousands of years, and it was Christian white men who decided it was immoral and waged a campaign to eradicate the practice worldwide.
Horowitz said in an interview before his speech that he had changed the focus of his speech from reparations to the follies of the left, but that he would not give up on trying to open dialogue on the issue.
"When they attack you for racism, it's like being called a communist in the '50s - it's designed to prevent people from listening to you at all," he said. "It revealed an ugly side of American campuses. On some issues, you can't open your mouth if you don't tow the party line."
