Fund-Raising on the Prospect of Catastrophe

The best thing I can say about this particular fundraising letter is that at least it's not connected to a memorial service.

From David Horowitz, President & Founder of The David Horowitz Freedom Center... by way of my inbox:

Breaking News: The Brotherhood takes over in Egypt It's official. Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi was declared Egypt's first democratically elected civilian president after the fall Hosni Mubarak nearly 17 months ago. Morsi won approximately 52 percent of the vote, while Ahmed Shafiq, the preferred candidate of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces earned 48 percent.  What does this mean for Egypt, for Israel and the region? What is the impact globally? You can turn to the main stream media, our political leaders or to the State Department to get those answers, but of course these are same people that consider the Brotherhood a secular humanitarian organization. They are the same ones that have downplayed the extreme nature and the radical ideological roots of the Brotherhood. They got it all wrong. If you are reading FrontPageMag however, none of this comes as a surprise. Does this mean that you, the readers of FrontPageMag are better informed than those in Washington, in the White House, the State Department and those in the main stream media? In a word, yes!  Our online magazine has been providing daily coverage of the quickly changing politics in Egypt that is not only fair and balanced but also farsighted and commonsensical. FrontPage is one of the few publications that experienced a chill when the rest of the mainstream press was blithely predicting a sunny future for the Arab Spring. In a rapidly changing and ever more dangerous world, honest reporting and good information is critical—for individuals as much as for governments..... The Freedom Center's Robert Spencer is the leading authorities on Islamic extremism in the country. Raymond Ibrahim is an Egyptian Coptic Christian, fluent in Arabic, who has been reporting on the violence committed by Islamists against Christians and other religious minorities in the region for years. The FrontPage team also includes scholar Bruce Thornton, and reporters Daniel Greenfield and Mark Tapson, all of whom who have closely tracked the insidious war of Islamists on American values, and two leading writers from Israel, David Hornik and Stephen Plaut, who write in real time about facts on the ground from the front lines of the Middle East.  So what will happen now? .... ...  what we can promise you is some of the best coverage and analysis in print and online for what has happened, what is going on today, and most importantly, what to expect in the future.  Please consider making a donation today to help us continue to provide the unfiltered truth about what is happening behind the scenes in the historic election in Egypt and in other hotspots of the Middle East where the history of the region's future is being made in events unfolding today. For a donation of $50, I will send you "The Browning of the Arab Spring," a collection of FrontPage articles ... This pamphlet will show you how mistaken the careless optimism of our pundits and policy makers has been over the past year. It will prepare you for the next act in the regional tragedy now taking place in Cairo and elsewhere in the Middle East. It will forewarn and forearm you.

 

Hey, donate to us and we'll keep you advised of all that could/might happen to your Jewish brothers and sisters on the other side of the world. We won't really do anything to prevent death or destruction but if you donate, you can feel better about the fact that you're not doing anything either, and we can keep producing and selling pamphlets of articles by "experts" (like the people who exploited fears that Rick Perry was somehow a dangerous "Stealth Jihad Candidate" running for president).

Now if you believe that a pamphlet of articles can really and truly "prepare you for the next act" in the "unfolding regional tragedy" that threatens to engulf the Jewish homeland, Gd forbid, then by all means donate to the Horowitz "cause."  

Be smart, though, and do some research on any organizations to which you would contribute. Take the example at hand; David Horowitz pays himself $436,000 a year, is sitting on net assets of nearly a million dollars, and will spend 20 cents of every dollar you donate on more fundraising. You decide... but make an informed decision.

And don't get me wrong, there's everything right and absolutely nothing wrong with keeping people informed; I try to do it myself, all day every day. It's just that to my mind, there's a difference between informing people and trying to get their money by exploiting their fears.

I'm sure David Horowitz does a lot of good things, and in general I mean him no disrespect. I just despise this kind of fundraising.  

 

 

 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

Another breath-of-fresh-air post, Yael. Many thanks. We live in the Age of the Hustler. Where once the song of the turtledove was heard in the land, all we hear now is the call of the pitchman. The worst of it is, the whole practice has something funereal about it: These guys are like morticians following an ambulance in search of a corpse. As soon as some disaster strikes (and Morsi's election is nothing if not a disaster) they batten and try to fatten themselves on it. Their motto (and this goes for all these guys -- libs and conservatives) is -- or ought to be -- "Bad News is Good News." We're not going to see the end of these spielers for a long time to come, so the very least we can do is -- as you've so adroitly done -- expose them for the flimflammers they are.

[Joel]

"and we can keep producing and selling pamphlets of articles by "experts" (like the people who exploited fears that Rick Perry was somehow a dangerous "Stealth Jihad Candidate" running for president)." Those bloggers who pushed that line (bloggers who had a hidden agenda of destroying any one who was in the way of the coronation of Sarah Palin) - and they know who they are - were really despicable.