The New Campus Fascism
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com
Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The big news during Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week was the disruption
of my speech at Emory University by leftists who, it so happens,
weren't actually students. They were members of the Coalition United
for Peace and Justice, one of the leading groups in the movement to
save the Islamo-Fascist regime in Iraq from being overthrown by
American forces. Shutting down peaceful campus lectures is a fascist
tactic, but in a country as committed to the principles of fairness
and free speech as this one it is not the most insidious. This
distinction must be reserved for the massive witch-hunt which attended
our events -- the pursuit of alleged "racists," "bigots" and "Islamo-
phobes" who, once labeled, can then be discredited and even silenced
if university administrators are willing.

The Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, whose founder James
Abourezk is a Hizbollah supporter, sent letters to 100 university
presidents claiming that Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week was a "hate"
campaign against all Muslims and asking them to shut us down. Since
the main agenda of the Week was to defend Muslim women, this was a
self-evident falsehood. Nonetheless, several university presidents
responded by attempting to impose restrictions on the event. They
backed down only after receiving letters from our lawyers reminding
them that the First Amendment is still around.

Far more sinister was the massive hate campaign conducted over the
Internet and in student newspapers to defame our students and speakers
as anti-Muslim xenophobes. The one way to shut down speech in America
is to call it "hate speech" and insinuate that employing it
constitutes a "hate crime." Fox News Channel host Alan Colmes,
generally a reasonable leftist, spoke for the radicals when he told
guest Steven Emerson "the term Islamo-Fascism is hate speech." Colmes
thereby embraced the ideological campaign to suppress our event.

But Colmes did not follow the statement by calling Emerson a "racist,"
the standard attack of the left itself. Because such attacks were the
essence of the campaign against our events, it is worth dissecting one
that appeared in the UC Irvine student paper New University. The
article was titled "Horowitz Disguises Racism As 'Awareness.'"

UC Irvine is a campus at which the Muslim Students Association two
years ago held an "Israel Awareness Week" at which speakers denounced
Jewish control of American politics and policy. Some years earlier, a
Muslim Students Association speaker on the same campus explained that
Jews were possessed by a "psychosis" that caused them to be "unable to
coexist equally and brotherly with other human beings." The speaker,
Muhammad al-Asi, imam of the Islamic Center in Washington DC, went on
to say "You can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you can't take the
ghetto out of the Jew."

The New University attack was written by a third year international
studies major named Nathan Tumazi, and began: "Last week marked the
beginning of a social and political wave of hatred and racist
xenophobia emanating from the violent rhetoric of conservative
students, politicians and academics everywhere. The perpetrator
responsible for what was called 'Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week' is
David Horowitz." Tumazi then proceeded not to describe actual events
or speeches associated with Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, but with ad
hominem attacks on myself and other speakers such as Ann Coulter.

These attacks were not original, but were drawn from the lies the
collective left has manufactured out of past statements attributed to
its targets. I will deal with those that are specific to me, because I
am familiar with them, and because they amply illustrate the methods
used by Tumazi and others. These people do not want to join an
argument, but to end one.

One of two citations from my writing that appeared on every campus I
visited during Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, was an article I wrote
for Salon magazine. The citation was selected to prove that I was an
anti-black racist, which was implausible on its face, since Salon is a
left-wing magazine that would not publish an anti-black racist tract.
I was, in fact, a regular columnist for Salon at the time I wrote it.

The article was called "Guns Don't Kill Black People, Other Black
People Do." It was about an NAACP plan to sue gun manufacturers and
hold them responsible for the fact that homicides were the number one
cause of death among young black males. I pointed out the obvious -
that many communities, including many poor communities have gun owners
who do not kill each other with such regularity; that children without
fathers, rampant drug epidemics, uncontrolled street gangs, too few
police and other factors were the real cause of this tragic violence
and not white gun manufacturers. I urged the NAACP to focus on the
real causes of these tragic homicide rates among young black males,
and not just grandstand it with the race card, blaming it all on
capitalism and whites.

Tumazi only quotes the title of the piece, and presents it thus:
"[Horowitz's] Aug. 16, 1999 column for Salon.com entitled 'Guns Don't
Kill Black People, Other Blacks Do,' is only a sample of his call to
arms for all conservatives, angry or not, to return American
universities to their religious and white supremacist origins." So
from being concerned about the failure of NAACP leaders to pursue a
policy that would help inner city black youths, I am portrayed as
someone who wants to make universities religious and white
supremacist. And this, in a university paper, written by a third year
international studies major at a top university!

The second ubiquitous quote that has been inserted into my dossier by
the campus left is the claim that I said blacks "benefited from
slavery." Here is Tumazi's version: "Horowitz was again called out for
his xenophobia and blatant discriminatory rhetoric for a Jan. 26, 2005
posting on the History News Network web site about 'Why I Am Not
Celebrating' the 90th birthday of esteemed African-American historian
John Hope Franklin....In the article, Horowitz launched into an attack
on Franklin and then proceeded to claim that 'free blacks and the free
descendants of blacks ... benefited from slavery.' Horowitz's anger and
bitterness against blacks is only outdone by his relentless hatred of
Muslims, anyone who doesn't have a penis, non-heterosexuals and the
working and poor classes."

Prior to the article Tumazi refers to, John Hope Franklin had written
a vicious attack on me during my campaign against reparations -- a
plan to force Hispanic immigrants, who had no part in American slavery
to pay their "debt" to multi-millionaire blacks such as Jesse Jackson
and Snoop Doggy Dog, who had never been slaves. I regarded such an
absurd, divisive and racist campaign (the payments were to be made on
the basis of skin color) as destructive to the interests of the black
community and said so in the ad I ran in campus papers and to which
Franklin responded. According to Franklin, anyone who opposed this
plan was "pro-slavery" - that was the word he actually used. What was
particularly appalling was Franklin's distortion of the historical
regard, since he himself was an eminent historian. To justify
reparations against whites (even those whose ancestors had fought
against slavery, even those whose ancestors had arrived in America
after slavery was abolished) Franklin concocted several false claims.
Among them was the statement that during slavery "all blacks had no
rights that they could claim as their own." As I pointed out in my
response to his attack, even the African slaves from the slave ship
Amistad, who were not American citizens, had rights that were
recognized by the United States Supreme Court, which (with a
slaveholding majority presiding) voted to free them.

The widely repeated quote attributed to me about the alleged benefits
of slavery was also willfully misrepresented by Franklin. What I had
said in my original article from which the ad was taken was that
supporters of reparations were claiming (without evidence) that all of
America's wealth was based on slavery, a fact that justified
reparations from whites alive today to blacks alive today. My response
was that if all of America's wealth was based on slavery then everyone
alive today, blacks as well as whites were beneficiaries. I,
personally, never claimed that slavery was the source of all American
wealth, nor do I believe it.

In his attack on me, John Hope Franklin changed the terms of the
argument in order to refute it. He wrote: "all whites and no slaves
benefited from American slavery."

this, as it appeared verbatim on the History News Network site is as
follows: "Neither I, nor the ad ever claimed that any slaves benefited
from slavery. The first question my ad raised was that if all whites
benefited economically from slavery (and a responsible historian would
certainly want to keep an open mind on this question) could one also
maintain that free blacks did not? More importantly, the question was:
if all whites alive today were beneficiaries of the wealth that
slavery produced, how could one say that blacks alive today were not?"
This quote, in the hands of leftists such as Tumazi, becomes "free
blacks and the free descendants of blacks ... benefited from slavery."

Like many other leftists our speakers and students encountered last
week, Nathan Tumazi is a hater. But he is more than that. He wants to
put his hatred into action and to silence those with whom he
disagrees: "For those of us still committed to defending peace, truth,
justice and equality there is much uniting to be done. We need to come
together and demand that the racist hate of last week's campaign be
forced off our campus." This is the new campus fascism, and it is ugly
indeed.
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David Horowitz is the author of numerous books including an
autobiography, Radical Son, which has been described as "the first
great autobiography of his generation." It chronicles his odyssey from
radical activism in the '60s to his current position as the head of
the David Horowitz Freedom Center and who one journalist has called
"the left's most articulate nemesis." His book, The Art of Political
War was described by White House political strategist Karl Rove as
"The perfect guide to winning on the political battlefield." Left
Illusions is an anthology of 40 years of his writings. His latest
books are The Professors, which documents the debasement of the
academic curriculum by tenured leftists, The Shadow Party, which
describes the radical left's control of the Democratic Party's
electoral machine and Indoctrination U., which is an in-depth look at
how indoctrination has taken the place of education in today's college
classrooms.

The New Campus Fascism
By David Horowitz