Academia, the Left, and Islamo-Fascism

The 1960’s revolutionary David Horowitz, who has gotten a bit more conservative in his old age, organised an Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week on American university campuses last week. Given what a hotbed of leftism, political correctness and intolerance most universities are, it took a lot of guts to pull something like this off. And by all accounts it was a real humdinger.

Indeed, numerous American campuses were targeted, with a stellar line-up of speakers, all well-versed in the horrors of Islamo-Fascism. They included Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Ann Coulter, Tammy Bruce and Michael Medved. They certainly rocked the house, as they say, and caused no small ruckus at our institutions of higher indoctrination, er, learning.

This is because most colleges and universities today only pay lip service to freedom of speech, but actually want students to know only one thing upon graduation: the left-liberal version of events. That means most university lecturers will feel they have failed if their students have graduated without learning to thoroughly hate Bush, the US, the war in Iraq, Christianity, the family, and a few other nasties.

So predictably there were many who sought to prevent these speakers from even getting a hearing. Horowitz actually managed to speak at the University of Wisconsin (a leading bastion of radicalism) without being martyred. Mind you, it took some bodyguards and a police presence to get him into the place, but he did manage to deliver his speech without too many disruptions. He was not so lucky at Emory University where he was shouted down by leftist moonbats and eventually forced to cancel his talk.

A few quotes from his Wisconsin lecture illustrate the sorts of things that were heard throughout the week:

“It is claimed by many that the only reason for the attacks on the United States are its policies towards Israel or because of the war in Iraq, or because of George Bush. Bush created the war on terror has become a mantra in some powerful circles of the Democratic Party around George Soros. But there is no basis in fact for these claims. The first leader of the modern Islamo-Fascist movement and the leader of the first Islamo-Fascist state was the Ayatollah Khomeini. It was Khomeni who declared America the Great Satan, and who led crowds a million strong in chants of, ‘Death to America,’ in 1979. And it was Jimmy Carter – not George Bush — who was president when he did that. But Jimmy Carter was a supporter of the Ayatollah and an enemy of the Shah whom he overthrew. Carter accused the Shah of human rights violations and undermined his rule. Carter persuaded the Shah to release Khomeini’s cohorts from prison, and allow Khomeni to return to Iran. Jimmy Carter made possible the Islamic Revolution.”

“When people say that the United States and its policies are responsible for 9/11, they’re forgetting this history, Jimmy Carter’s support for the very Islamo-fascists who are now attacking us. In the past twenty-five years far from being an imperialist oppressor of Muslims, as the Islamo-fascists and the American left would have you believe, the United States saved the lives of millions of Muslims. When Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, its armies conducted a scorched-earth policy, which means they killed everything in their way. They killed a million Muslims in Afghanistan, until the United States, by providing them with stinger missiles, by providing them with weapons, helped the Mujaheddin to defeat the Soviet Empire.”
 
“The United States went to war in Kosovo for Albanian Muslims, and saved them from extermination. The United States sent the Army Rangers into Somalia to feed starving Muslims in Somalia, and was attacked there by an Al Qaeda warlord. Al Qaeda and the Islamo-fascist movement have killed more Muslims than all the members of Bush’s ‘coalition of the willing’ and all of Israel’s soldiers put together. So it is completely absurd to hold Americans responsible for the hatred that is directed against us. It’s completely ridiculous. It is the opposite of the truth. The hatred against America is hatred of the fact that America is free and supports Muslims who don’t want to submit to the Islamo-fascists’ will.”

There are plenty of myths circulating about the Middle East as well. Again, a few more quotes from Horowitz:

“There are over 5 million Palestinian Arabs living in refugee camps today; there no Jews living in refugee camps. Why is that? Because the state of Israel, re-settled the Jewish refugees, gave them homes, gave them citizenship, and gave them jobs. But the Arab states deliberately kept the Palestinians in refugee camps, refused to allow them to become citizens of Jordan or Saudi Arabia or other Arab countries. Billions of dollars have been poured into the Arab refugee problem by the United States and Israel and the UN. But all that money has done has been to maintain the refugee problem. There’s a reason for that. It is because the Arab states and the Palestinian leadership want poverty stricken Arabs as cannon fodder for their hateful war against the Jews. That’s what the Middle East conflict is about. “

“There are one million Arabs who live peacefully in Israel. These Arabs have more rights living in Israel than the Arabs in any Arab state. They vote. They are elected to Israel’s parliament. They have the rights of the only democratic state in the entire Arab world. These facts expose the attacks on Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank for the propaganda they are. If Arabs can live in Israel, why can’t Jews live in the West Bank or Gaza? The answer is - the answer is, the Jew hatred shared by all Arabs, which wants to push the Jews into the sea. This racism whose agendas are genocidal is being inflamed by the Islamo-fascists. This is what the Middle East conflict is about.”

Finally, for those who might be squeamish about the term Islamo-Fascism, a few thoughts from another speaker involved in last week’s activities, Dennis Praeger. He says the term is quite appropriate for at least three reasons: “First, the term is not anti-Muslim. One may object to the term on factual grounds, i.e., one may claim that there are no fascistic behaviors among people acting in the name of Islam - but such a claim is a denial of the obvious. So once one acknowledges the obvious, that there is fascistic behavior among a core of Muslims - specifically, a cult of violence and the wanton use of physical force to impose an ideology on others - the term ‘Islamo-Fascism’ is entirely appropriate.”
 
“Second, the question then arises as to whether that term is anti-Muslim in that it besmirches the name of Islam and attempts to describe all Muslims as fascist. This objection, too, has a clear response. The term no more implies all Muslims or Islam is fascistic than the term ‘German fascism’ implied all Germans were fascists or ‘Italian fascism’ or ‘Japanese fascism’ implied that all Italians or all Japanese were fascists. Indeed, even religious groups have been labeled as fascist. During World War II, for example, Croatian Catholic fascists were called Catholic Fascists, and no one argued that the term was invalid because it purportedly labeled all Catholics or Catholicism fascist. When the left uses the term ‘American imperialism,’ are they implying that all Americans are imperialists? Then why does Islamo-Fascism label all Muslims?”
 
“Third, given the horrors being perpetrated by some Muslims in the name of Islam - from the genocide currently being practiced by the Islamic Republic of Sudan, to the mass murders of innocents in Iraq, Israel, America, Britain, Bali, Thailand, the Philippines and elsewhere - what term is more accurate than ‘Islamo-Fascism’? ‘Islamic totalitarianism’? ‘Jihadists’? ‘Bad Muslims’?”

And he also knows the importance of getting truth (or trying to get the truth) onto the university campuses. He spoke at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and also experienced charges of being racist and Islamophobic. One UCSB student newspaper columnist compared him to a Ku Klux Klanner for speaking on the topic. Yet he was able to calmly and rationally present his case, to the amazement of some students. Indeed, after his lecture, the student who wrote the nasty column came over and said to him that he was writing a column of apology to him, and asked to be photographed with him.

Says Praeger, “This is not surprising. Students at most universities are almost brainwashed into being leftist - and the way they are taught to disagree with their political opponents is by using ad hominem attacks. Conservatives are described over and over as mean-spirited, war-loving, greedy, bigoted, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, sexist, intolerant and oblivious to human suffering. Such ad hominem labels are the left’s primary rhetorical weapons. So when leftist students are actually confronted with even one articulate conservative, many enter a world of cognitive dissonance. That is one reason why universities rarely invite conservatives to speak: they might change some students’ minds.”

Horowitz and Co have a lot of courage and deserve a lot of credit for standing up to both the Islamo-Fascists and the Campus Fascists. Both in their own way despise freedom, democracy and genuine debate. The question that remains is this: Who will hold such a week here on Australian university campuses?