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Dear Readers, This is a hard one to write. After more or less 15 years of continuous newspaper syndication, this column you are reading is the end of the line. I am not ceasing to write, of course. All of my content -- columns, essays, posts, and, of course, books -- will continue to appear at my website, www.dianawest.net, and elsewhere. But my weekly conversation with readers in good old-fashioned newsprint stops at the bottom of the page. In some ways, that's too bad. For one thing, there is a kind of journalistic romance to appearing on the pages of...

There are several ways to see the National Cathedral's decision to host Islamic Friday prayers this week. First, the facts. The service is the brainchild of the Rev. Canon Gina Campbell, the Episcopal cathedral's director of liturgy, and South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool, a Muslim, who is delivering the sermon. Invitation-only guests include Masjid Muhammad of The Nation's Mosque, representatives of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). That's some roster if playing "Spot the Muslim Brotherhood Front" is a...

"Red Herrings" is a brilliant historical article by Andrew C. McCarthy that explains one of the most important reasons of the current dominance of the Left in the West (and more than that). It's a review and a defence of Diana West's book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , which was published last year and provoked much controversy, as you can gauge from the review itself. The way Joe McCarthy has been treated in America reminds me a bit of the way Enoch Powell has been treated in Britain: both were...

It’s 9/11 the 13th, and these United States have never been closer to losing the last vestiges of their foundational identity. Long ago, our first president, George Washington, prophetically warned against “attachments and entanglements in foreign affairs.” In the last century, such sentiments, tragically (as I increasingly believe), fell into disrepute. In our time, Washington’s 21st-century successors, George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama, have no such compunction. On the contrary, their response to the Islamic assault of 9/11 and the aftermath of continuing jihad have been to link the fortunes of this great nation with those of warring tribes...

Most of the discussion of the controversy over Diana West’s book American Betrayal centers around content rather than process.That is, people discussing the extreme reactions against her work — whether they agree with her or her critics — revisit the historical events themselves, and the inferences that may be drawn from them. Was Normandy really a better option for the Second Front than the Balkans or Italy? Could Britain and the United States have acted differently so that the Soviets would not have been able to overrun Central Europe? Was Eisenhower an inept commander? How many actual agents did Stalin...

It may surprise some to learn that almost one-quarter of the people living in Switzerland are foreigners. Even so, just over 50 percent voted last month to cap immigration, which, unchecked, could leave indigenous Swiss a minority in 50 years. Newsweek’s headline over the story was typical: “Switzerland’s Sudden Fear of Immigrants.” Fear. Immigrants. The German publication Spiegel Online wrote also about “scaremongering.” The enlightened reader’s thought-bubble is now supposed to register the word “racism.” But was it really “fear of immigrants” – read: “racism” – that drove sufficient numbers of Swiss to the polls to check their own demographic...

Red herrings - A review of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character by Diana West Stumbling into a barroom brawl was the last thing I’d intended. Lined up on one side: sculptors of a hagiography that is now conventional wisdom crow about a noble conquest over totalitarian dictators. The other side bellows: “Nonsense! In defeating one monster, your heroes merely helped create another, sullying us with their atrocities and burdening us for decades with a global security nightmare.” The first side spews that its critics are deranged, defamatory conspiracy-mongers. The critics fire back that these “court historians”...

The orchestrated attack on Diana West’s important book, American Betrayal, has been brutal and unseemly, but in one respect at least it has served a useful purpose. This lone positive angle--counter-intuitive at first glance--is that her iconoclastic Cold War history has sparked a barrage of charges about “McCarthyism” and the senator from Wisconsin who gave his name to a decisive epoch in America’s long death struggle with the Kremlin. As is well-known, “McCarthyism” was an alleged focus of political evil in the 1950s: accusations of Communist taint, without any factual basis; bogus “lists” of supposed Communists who never existed; failure...

The power of history to speak to us depends on our ability to hear it. When we are deaf to its secrets, or too confused or conditioned to decipher them, we miss the opportunity to be empowered by them. We thus fail to overcome the propaganda our own government, like the dictatorships we revile, has all too often deceived us with. I am struck by this aura of static around a sensational new discovery. Researcher and author Krystyna Piorkowska, the Associated Press reported this week, has unearthed a “lost” U.S. document, dating back to 1945, known as the Van Vliet...

On Saturday, Nov. 16, the United States marks a milestone: the 80th anniversary of when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union and "normalized" U.S.-USSR relations. It is a day that should live in infamy. But it's a day that hardly anyone has ever heard of. I certainly hadn't before researching my book, "American Betrayal." As I studied the event, however, it became clear that it was on this day 80 years ago that what I call "American betrayal" began. It is the date on which the U.S. government institutionally learned to lie. After the Bolsheviks seized dictatorial powers...

I am very happy to reveal that at this year's gathering of the Pumpkins Papers Irregulars, a deluxe dinner held in Washington by intelligence experts and interested observers to honor the memory of Whittaker Chambers and his triumph over the traitor Alger Hiss, I was given the annual honor of lighting the pumpkin and later addressing the assembly about American Betrayal. Highlights of the evening included warm tributes to fallen Cold Warriors: M. Stanton Evans on the late Herbert Romerstein (1931-2013), and Paul Kengor on the late Judge William P. Clark (1931-2013). This year's "coveted" Victor Navasky Award, presented by...

Diana West, author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character— has been attacked, not from the Left but from prominent pundits who identify themselves as conservatives. “Why did the U.S. and Britain not prevent the totalitarian USSR from taking over Eastern Europe after it had defeated the totalitarian Nazis?” Ronald Radosh wrote on frontpagemag.com. “It had nothing to do with the Rubik’s Cube of diplomatic and military considerations, a calculus that had to take into account the willingness of the American and British publics to continue to sacrifice and their soldiers to die. No, it was a...

Out of the public eye and far from the daily headlines, a fierce verbal battle is currently being waged about the course of American policy in the long death struggle with Moscow that we call the Cold War. At ground zero of this new dispute is author Diana West, whose recent book, American Betrayal (St. Martin's), is a hard- hitting critique of the strategy toward the Soviet Union pursued in the 1940s by President Franklin Roosevelt, his top assistant Harry Hopkins, and various of their colleagues. Ms. West in particular stresses the infiltration of the government of that era by...

Back in 2004, when a NYFD chief reminded the 9/11 Commission that it was never in "anyone's consciousness" that the Twin Towers would fall, he underscored a terrible truth. After 9/11, we entered the Age of the Unthinkable. Seared into our collective consciousness is that the Twin Towers could and did fall. So could the U.S. Capitol, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Superdome. Our children know that which we as children never before imagined -- passenger planes may become guided missiles, and skyscrapers may turn into smoking, twisted rubble. This age of Islamic jihad against the West has indeed...

The two most ardent boosters of the Normandy invasion were Stalin and Harry Hopkins ... Churchill famously urged that the advance on Germany continue from already-won bases in Italy and elsewhere in south-central Europe. Stalin’s demand for the big U.S.-British push in northern France, however, prevailed. According to the tally of one peeved letter to the editor in the New York Times, this would put the Allies on track to open their ninth front. Of course, in order to gather sufficient forces for the June 1944 D-Day invasion, men and equipment, particularly landing craft, had to be withdrawn from the...

On November 14, 2002, the late, great New York Times columnist William Safire wrote a column called "You Are a Suspect." It is posted below, an early signpost to our current state of dislocation and upset. It is dislocating and upsetting to be confronted with the Edward Snowden leaks: the leaked court order, the leaked logistical scope of what is being aptly labeled the Surveillance State. This what Safire predicted would be foisted on Us, the People. We are told it is The Only Means Possible to prevent "another 9/11." The mendacity of this rationale is as appalling as the...

Surveillance: Can We Take a Step Back? Written by:Diana West 6/8/2013 7:56:00 AM I'm taking a short break today from promoting "American Betrayal" to write about the latest stages of tyrannical development in these United States for Dispatch International. The assignment is the burgeoning Obama scandals -- IRS, Prism, whatever breaks next.This means two things: One, this assignment is really no break at all from promotion of American Betrayal, because American Betrayal is a history of tyrannical development in these United States, and why we can't see it. Two, partly because of the newspaper's mainly Euopean readership, I will be...

“A confidential message from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, reproduced in [Diana] West’s new book, told [White House aide Harry] Hopkins that a ‘continuing’ investigation had discovered that Russian diplomat (and Comintern agent) Vasily Zarubin had made a payment to U.S. Communist Party official Steve Nelson to help place espionage agents ‘in industries engaged in secret war production … so that information could be obtained for transmittal to the Soviet Union.’ This information had come from a ‘bug’ at Nelson’s home in Oakland, California, through which the FBI first learned of the Soviet effort (code-named ‘Enormous’) to obtain the atomic...

<p>Diana West’s new book unravels the lies Americans have been told about Cold War history.</p> <p>There is no statue of Elizabeth Bentley at her alma mater, Vassar College, nor is there any memorial to her at Columbia University, where she received her master’s degree. Bentley’s career as a Communist spy could be the stuff of a Hollywood thriller, complete with a romantic interest in the form of her lover, Soviet intelligence agent Jacob Golos...</p>

Author Diana West says the Obama administration’s attempts to engage with the Islamic world are “very similar” to the “appeasement” policies pursued by Cold War-era presidents towards the Soviet Union. “[The Benghazi attack] is sort of the ideological anomaly, the thing that is not supposed to happen,” West, the author of “American Betrayal,” told The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas. “It threatens the whole strategic premise of supporting al Qaeda in Libya — This is what we did to over throw Gaddafi. This doesn’t really seem to have even registered with the Congressmen now investigating…It’s reality, it’s what happens when you...