Diana West - The Rebuttal. Defending ‘American Betrayal’ from the Book-Burners

PART ONE

PREFACE

I will open with an email from Frontpage Magazine editor David Horowitz. I received this message after I declined Frontpages invitation to reply at Frontpage to the August 7 Radosh review of American Betrayal. Most readers dont realize that the Radosh review is Frontpages second review of my book. The first, a positive review by Frontpage writer Mark Tapson, was removed from the website by Horowitz on July 8. I declined Frontpages invitation to reply to the Radosh review on the principle that eliminating one opinion, as Horowitz did, and replacing it with a more correct opinion is no way to conduct a debate. I had and have no intention of legitimizing such an uncivil action, which, among other things, makes a mockery of Frontpages commitment to free speech.

David Horowitz has, to date, written two pieces attacking me and American Betrayal. In the first, he cited the first reviewers alleged lack of expertise as the reason for his decision to take down the positive review. (In the second, Horowitz writes: She should not have written this book.) As an example of the first reviewers inexpertise, Horowitz wrote, the reviewer readily conceded he was not familiar with the sources and could not properly assess such crucial matters as her claim that Soviet agents had gotten the United States to ship fissionable uranium to Stalin via Lend-Lease.

As an aside, the word fissionable doesnt appear in American Betrayals discussions of uranium. I mention this to flag a consistent pattern of misrepresentation or distortion that is evident in the Radosh review and follow-up pieces in which critics overstate a fact as stated in American Betrayal and criticize their own exaggeration.

That said, uranium shipments did indeed go to Stalin during World War II under the Roosevelt administrations Lend-Lease program. Among my sources for this shocking fact is one source familiar to all: the United States Congress. I cite Hearings on the Transfer of Atomic Material to the Soviet Union During World War II. As such, this is quite easy to properly assess if one has read my book.

This is just one of dozens of false claims about American Betrayal that Radosh and Horowitz and the echo chamber they triggered have made, some even written by people who admitted they havent read it., The baseless sloganeering against me now includes such falsehoods as: I called Eisenhower a Communist (false); I claimed the FDR administration was run by Soviet agents (false); that I portrayed Churchill as a Soviet dupe (false); that I argued for an entente with Hitlers army against Stalin (false).

If there is a beginning to the lies, gross distortions and outright fabrications that I now must sort through, it is the editors note posted (in full knowledge of its gross distortion of the facts) over the Radosh review at Frontpage.

Editors note: Frontpage offered Diana West equal space to reply to Professor Radoshs points below. She refused.

I refused to reply only at Frontpage and the editors know that I refused to reply only at Frontpage. In other words, they decided to publish a gross distortion of the truth to encourage readers of the Radosh review to believe I am either incapable or uninterested in responding to the charges therein.

Not true.

Here is the Horowitz email.

Dear Diana,

Our decision to remove the review of American Betrayal was not because it offered an incorrect opinion that we wanted to suppress. The review was removed because the reviewer was as incompetent to provide an informed assessment of your book as you were to write it.

David

My task is to disprove this intemperate and, worse, baseless charges against my competence in handling evidence and evaluating it. This is the basis of the Radosh-Horowitz critique, and, therefore the basis of the multiple copy-cat critiques that have been written since, even by people who openly admitted they had not read my book. (I repeat this fact because it is incredible to me.) This competence issue makes my rebuttal about more than score-keeping, or tit-for-tat. These widely repeated attacks on me and my book undermine my integrity as a writer, and thus my livelihood.

My challenge to readers: Determine for yourselves who is incompetent.

There is something else. The vitriolic intensity of the attacks against me and my book is harder to analyze, veering into a murkier realm of the psychological. Nonetheless, this vitriol remains the leading edge of the story.

In his Frontpage editorial against American Betrayal, Horowitz wrote:

Neither West nor her supporters have begun to meet that standard or attempted to answer even one factual claim that Radosh has made about her book.

Mind you, Horowitz was writing one day after the Radoshs 7,000-word take-down appeared.

He continued:

I don't have a lot of hope that this will change because West has already shown herself to be a very angry, very self-centered and very reckless partisan, with a paranoid streak and a disposition to think in extreme terms that have only a tenuous and deceptive relation to the truth.