Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’sad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly apoplectic, and equally unwarranted condemnation, even before getting underway.
Mamet’s invocation of Witness, and the repeated hysterical, if groundless, objections to the second round of hearings by Representative King’s Homeland Security Committee (June 15, 2011, on Muslim radicalization in U.S. prisons), are fitting reminders that today marks the 50th anniversary of Whittaker Chambers’s death. ...
Chambers’s own brief 1947 comparison of Communism and nascent Islam should be seen in the context of more extensive, independent characterizations by Western scholars and intellectuals who also juxtaposed these ideological systems. Three other logical connections can be made:
● Chambers’s searing critique of Communism, and his related criticismof the West’s embrace of godless secular humanism.
● Chambers’s understanding that faith in the Judeo-Christian God was conjoined to Biblical freedom, a concept that was antithetical to the conception of modern atheistic totalitarianism epitomized by Communism — and to the Islamic doctrine regarding “hurriyya,” which, while “hurriya” is Arabic for “freedom,” refers to submission to the will of Allah.
● Chambers’s apostasy from Communism — and the shared insights of contemporary apostates from Islam.
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