Jacques Pluss was a history professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University. In his spare time, he affiliated with the National Socialist Movement, which bills itself as "America's Nazi Party." As a result, he was fired. Afterwards, Pluss went on the NSM's radio show, "White Viewpoint," to denouce FDU as a "Jewish plutocratic university." While he was at it, he called the school's basketball team, "nigger to the core."
Now, David Horowitz has taken up his cause.
On Moonbat Central, the blog of Horowitz's "Discover the Network," one of Horowitz's sycophants writes,
What do we learn from this? We learn that it's not enough to be a socialist to remain a college professor; one must also be the right (i.e., left) flavor of socialist.
If only Pluss had remained the kind of socialist who preaches hatred and violence based on class -- e.g., kill the Jews because they are rich, or because they were "little Eichmans" serving capitalism who deserved to die in the World Trade Center on 9-11 -- he would still have his job and be getting promotions and invitations to speak as a celebrity at other universities.
Pluss is as much of a "socialist" as french fries are French cuisine. Only a post-op lobotomy patient would believe otherwise. But this is the type of sophistry that Horowitz and his cadres rely on time and again to defend the indefensible. All they have to do is allege some double-standard foisted on American society by left-wing elitists -- who are invariably portrayed as closet anti-Semites or self-hating Jews -- and suddenly, they sound more like eager, young "conservatives" vying for a place at the grown-ups table than insidious Nazi apologists.
Moonbat Central contributor Debbie Schlussel recently used this technique to smear the heroic humanitarian worker Marla Ruzicka as a "treasonatrix barbie" whose death from a roadside bomb in Iraq was "poetic justice." (A quick glance at the webpage of Schlussel's fan-club, where she describes herself as the "latest and greatest sexy, blonde, and beautiful commentator," reveals what a sad projection her smear was.) Schlussel's angle was that the liberal media had covered Ruzicka's death at the expense of "young American men and women Ruzicka’s age and younger who’ve been brutalized or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan." Just when Ted Koppel was about to spend an entire episode of Nightline reading the names of America's war dead, this treasonatrix comes along and ruins everything!
Horowitz has made a career out of promoting perverse views like those of Schlussel. Sactioning the defense of a neo-Nazi, however, has got to be a novel endeavor for the former White Panther. So perhaps it makes sense that Horowitz has hooked up with Christopher Hitchens. In a 1996 Vanity Fair article, Hitchens defended David Irving, a Holocaust denier who once said, "The holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened. That of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention." In his Vanity Fair piece, Hitchens wrote, "And, incidentally, [Irving] has never and not once described the Holocaust as a 'hoax'." That was true. Then happy hour ended.
Next month, Horowitz and Hitchens will tour England together. With Horowitz at his side, Hitchens will "give lectures drawing on his expansive knowledge of Britain and America." It is only the latest leg in their permanent vacation from reality.