Stephen Schwartz (journalist)

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Stephen Schwartz (born 1948) is an American journalist and author. His background is on the political left, but now describes himself as a neoconservative.[1] He is a practicing Muslim and vocal critic of Islamic terrorism. Schwartz is also the executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism.

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[edit] Early life

Schwartz was born in Columbus, Ohio. His father, Horace, was Jewish and his mother Protestant, but the family was not religious. Instead his mother was a member of the Communist Party, and his father he described as a "fellow traveler". Schwartz was thus initially a Communist and supporter of the Soviet Union; later he would call himself a "red diaper baby".

The family moved to San Francisco when he was young, where Horace Schwartz became a literary agent while Stephen attended Lowell High School. While there he made his first serious writing attempts, focusing initially on poetry. In college his views began to shift, favoring a Trotskyist view of Marxism over Stalinism.

[edit] Labor and journalism career

After college, Schwartz became involved in the labor movement, first in the Sailors' Union of the Pacific and then the AFL-CIO. As he focused increasingly on making a career as a writer, he returned to these roots to write Brotherhood of the Sea: A History of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific, commissioned by the S.U.P. as part of the commemoration of its 100th anniversary in 1985. By this time Schwartz identified as a member of the Social Democrats USA, following a path similar to other Trotskyists who shifted from left- to right-wing politics.

During the 1990s, Schwartz was a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle for ten years. He was also involved in the union at the Chronicle, a branch of the Newspaper Guild. Later he told of his dissatisfaction with the union’s national leadership, particularly its president, Linda Foley, for emphasizing political concerns such as ethnic diversity and concentration of media ownership over traditional union issues of wages, job protection, and working conditions.

In 1998, Schwartz turned his background studying California labor and radical movements into From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind. The book was panned by New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, who called its title deceptive for a book "so narrow and so selective that one comes away with a warped caricature of California as a hotbed of radicals, bohemians and New Age eccentrics," and a "reductive and highly dogmatic book."[2] She argued that it ignored the significant conservative side of California thought as reflected in figures like Nixon and Reagan. California state librarian Kevin Starr was more sympathetic, suggesting that the title and marketing were an awkward attempt by the publisher to give national significance to an otherwise legitimate history of the radical left in California. Starr praised the book’s account of the utopian ideals that spurred the early California left; the rest he saw as a personal quest to show how the Soviets corrupted these ideals. Harold Meyerson also found it to be heavily focused on anti-Stalinism fused with a hatred for Los Angeles, which Schwartz held responsible for transforming the utopian left into "elitist but mediocre left-liberalism". Meyerson felt this and speculation about Stalinist conspiracies undermined the value in the book’s account of the San Francisco Renaissance centered around poet Kenneth Rexroth, an associate of Schwartz’s father.

In 1999, Schwartz left the Chronicle and moved to Sarajevo, living and traveling in the Balkans for the next 18 months. He had previously visited the area in 1990 to do research and maintained ties through an Albanian Catholic institute connected with the University of San Francisco.

After his return, Schwartz gained some attention for a speculative theory that the Jewish Marxist intellectual Walter Benjamin might have been assassinated. Writing in The Weekly Standard, he conjectured that Stalinist agents in Spain might be responsible, questioning evidence that Benjamin committed suicide to avoid being handed over to the Nazis. He had little evidence to support his speculation, and critics noted that unlike other assassination victims, Benjamin was never a Communist Party member. Schwartz defended the article as "just asking questions that should be asked."

As he continued writing for various publications, Schwartz strongly supported the Iraq War, identifying with other former Trotskyists who supported the war, including Christopher Hitchens and Kanan Makiya. Schwartz found support for this, among other reasons, in Trotsky’s internationalist outlook and approval of pre-emptive war.

[edit] Schwartz and Islam

Schwartz's exposure to Islam began with the study of Sufism during his early radical years, and he now describes himself as a disciple of Ibn Arabi. His biography at the Center for Islamic Pluralism adds that he is "an adherent of the Hanafi school of Islam since 1997." As he moved into conservative circles, Schwartz complained that he was sometimes seen as "a Trojan horse for Islam" despite his support for American policies in the Middle East.

Schwartz also became a vehement critic of Wahhabism in particular and the Saudi regime generally, which he contends dominates American Islam. He says his experiences with Islam in the Balkans brought the threat of Wahhabism to his attention. Within days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Schwartz wrote an article in The Spectator drawing a connection between the Wahhabi movement and terrorism. In it he argued, "Not all Muslims are suicide bombers, but all Muslim suicide bombers are Wahhabis."

The following year, Schwartz published a book on the subject called The Two Faces of Islam. The book blamed Islamic terrorism on the religious establishment fostered by the Saudi government and also criticized Bush administration officials for their associations with Saudi Arabia. Shortly before it came out Schwartz was dismissed from his position as a news writer for Voice of America. The stated reason was that his work was not competent, although his sympathizers claimed the real motive was his differences with the news director and official concern about his increasing criticism of Saudi Arabia. Schwartz's abrasive personality was also said to have alienated colleagues. He then became a senior policy analyst and the director of the Islam and Democracy program at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a conservative think tank.

The Two Faces of Islam received mixed reviews. Paul Marshall, in the Claremont Review of Books, described it as an "otherwise good book…marred by Schwartz's almost Manichean approach wherein all bad things in the Muslim world are ascribed to the work of the Wahhabis." New York Times book critic Richard Bernstein said the book demonstrated "a comprehensive mastery of history and historical connections, as well as a deep humanistic concern for those who have been oppressed by Wahhabi ruthlessness." However, he also questioned whether Schwartz had not overstated its significance compared to other extremist elements in Islam, such as the Iranian role in supporting terrorism. Clifford Geertz concluded that the book was founded upon a "conflation of Wahhabism with Islamism generally".

Schwartz followed this with a pamphlet, An Activist's Guide to Arab and Muslim Campus and Community Organizations in North America, written under the name Suleyman Ahmad al-Kosovi. This covered a number of organizations he identified as being part of the "Wahhabi lobby" in the United States, including the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Arab American Institute, the Muslim Student Association, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the American Muslim Council, and the Islamic Society of North America. According to Schwartz these groups were "crafted in direct imitation of the leading American Jewish organizations." However, he contended that they lacked the diversity of the Jewish groups because they were all dependent on Saudi money and their ideology made them see the Jewish groups as "all controlled and coordinated by a single, commanding power, i.e. the Israeli embassy."

To counter this perceived influence and promote "moderate Islam", Schwartz launched the Center for Islamic Pluralism on March 25, 2005. The Center is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., with Schwartz as executive director. Louay Safi, an executive director with the Islamic Society of North America, dismissed this as an effort to "invent" moderate Muslims by "hardliners" trying to discredit mainstream American Muslim organizations. Safi charged that "those who are busy producing moderate Muslims have long time ago moved from the center to the ideological fringes of the American society."

[edit] Publications

  • A Sleepwalker’s Guide to San Francisco: Poems from Three Lustra, 1966-1981. San Francisco: La Santa Espina, 1983.
  • Brotherhood of the Sea: A History of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1986. ISBN 0-88738-121-9.
  • Spanish Marxism vs. Soviet Communism: A History of the P.O.U.M (with Victor Alba). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988. ISBN 0-88738-198-7.
  • A Strange Silence: The Emergence of Democracy in Nicaragua. San Francisco: ICS Press, 1992. ISBN 1-55815-071-4.
  • From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind. New York: The Free Press, 1998. ISBN 0-684-83134-1.
  • Intellectuals and Assassins: Writings at the End of Soviet Communism. New York: Anthem Press, 2001. ISBN 1-898855-55-2.
  • The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror. New York: Doubleday, 2002. ISBN 0-385-50692-9. (Note: The subtitle on the paperback version was changed to Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism.)
  • Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan Jewish Notebook. London: Saqi Books, 2005. ISBN 0-86356-592-1.
  • Is It Good for the Jews?: The Crisis of America's Israel Lobby. New York: Doubleday, 2006. ISBN 0-385-51025-X.

[edit] References

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Schwartz, Stephen (2003-06-11). "Trotskycons?". National Review. Retrieved on 2006-07-28. 
  2. ^ Kakutani, Michiko (April 7, 1998) "Anatomy of the Left Coast without the Sunshine." New York Times.

[edit] External links

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