National Project in Defense of Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academia:
Opposition Mounts to David Horowitz’s Islamo-Fascism
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Reggie Dylan: (626) 319-1730
Email: criticalxthinking@yahoo.com
Website: www.defendcriticalthinking.org
Opposition Mounts to David Horowitz’s Islamo-Fascism
Awareness Week.
There has been increasing opposition by students,
scholars and organizations around the country to David
Horowitz’s Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (IFAW) during
October 22-26. The National Project to Defend Dissent
and Critical Thinking in Academia
(www.defendcriticalthinking.org) is reporting on
student and faculty plans at UC Berkeley, UC Davis,
UCLA, USC, DePaul University, Emory University, Boise
State, the University of Washington, Columbia
University, and elsewhere. More activities are being
announced every day.
A newly formed Chicago Committee to Resist
‘Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week’ is calling on
“students, faculty, and all people of conscience to
come to DePaul to defeat Horowitz’ reactionary
offensive.” They call on people to rally an hour
before Robert Spencer’s speech at DePaul on Monday,
Oct. 22nd, and have plans to respond to every event
organized by the DePaul Conservative Alliance.
Professors Peter McLaren, Juan Gomez Quinones and Alan
Jones, and Larry Everest, author of Oil, Power, and
Empire will take part in a forum at UCLA on Tuesday at
1 p.m.; and Everest will join UC Berkeley Ethnic
Studies graduate student/acting instructor Roberto
Hernandez for a panel discussion, entitled “Who Are
the Real Fascists?,” Tuesday evening on the Berkeley
campus.
At UC Davis, the Muslim Student Association is
responding to IFAW with “Academic Freedom Week,” with
a series of forums and film showings. At Tulane,
students are circulating a petition in opposition to
Ann Coulter’s talk there, saying that it is “an event
encouraging violence and hate towards members of our
community.” Students at Emory, which is one of the
schools hosting David Horowitz, began events in
opposition the week before IFAW.Many organizations have released statements condemning
IFAW, including The Committee for an Open Discussion
of Zionism, The US Campaign to End the Israeli
Occupation, Jewish Voice for Peace, Muslim Students
Association, Council on American Islamic Relations and
the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. World
Can’t Wait-Drive Out the Bush Regime has said that
IFAW aims to “create an atmosphere at these colleges
where it is okay to be openly racist and reactionary.”
A variety of scholars and others have spoken out in
opposition to IFAW and its proponents. Gary Leupp of
Tufts University has said called IFAW a “hate
campaign” which “is more than an affront to Muslims.
It is an insult to everybody’s intelligence.” Noted
linguist and political writer Noam Chomsky recently
said of Horowitz and his allies, “It’s pointless to
debate such lunacy, but it’s wrong to disregard it.”
He added that, “in a free society, there should be
zero tolerance for institutions responsible for the
indoctrination of the young, or for the rest of the
attacks on democracy under the cynical pretext of
defending democracy.” Chomksy made these comments at a
recent forum on Academic Freedom held at the
University of Chicago where nearly 1,000 people
listened to and engaged scholars Tony Judt, John
Mearsheimer, Tariq Ali and others.
Critics are particularly concerned about Horowitz’s
plan of staging sit-ins at Women’s Studies
Departments. This will be done, he says, in order to
raise awareness of the oppression of women under
Islamic fundamentalism and protest the “silence” of
feminists on the subject. Reggie Dylan notes that,
“Women’s Studies scholars have actually been at the
forefront of supporting the rights of women (and gays
and lesbians) under Islamic fundamentalism. And
without Women’s Studies departments and the feminist
struggles which gave rise to them, people like
Horowitz would not even be giving hypocritical
lip-service to the oppression of women anywhere.”
Sunsara Taylor of World Can’t Wait-Drive Out the Bush
Regime says that given Horowitz’s track record, he “is
a man who has no right to speak on behalf of women.”
Some of the speakers for IFAW, such as Ann Coulter,
Rick Santorum and Horowitz himself, are well known.
Many of the others are not broadly known, though some
are politically well-connected and influential. Robert
Spenser, the director of Jihad Watch, has led seminars
on Islam and jihad for United States Central Command,
United States Army Command and General Staff College,
a Department of Homeland Security task force, and
branches of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Michael
Ledeen, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute, was said by the Washinton Post to be Rove’s
main international affairs adviser. Daniel Pipes,
whose Campus Watch encourages students to report on
the “anti-Israel” bias of professors, recently joined
Rudolph Giuliani’s presidential campaign as an
advisor. Nonie Darwish is an Egyptian convert to
Christian fundamentalism who has said, “Islam is
cruel, anti-women, anti-religious freedom and
anti-personal freedom in general.”
One of the groups most concerned about IFAW has been
the Muslim Students Association, along with other
Muslim and Arab organizations. Horowitz has called the
MSA a front for Islamic terrorists and insisted they
sign his petition or be branded as an enemy of the US.
Muslim students have expressed concern that women
wearing head scarves could be physically attacked by
students motivated by Horowitz. One student worried
that IFAW represented the beginning of a “Krystalnacht
for Muslims,” a reference to the pogrom of Jews by the
Nazis and their brownshirts in 1933.
Besides their specific concerns about IFAW, these
groups have pointed to Horowitz’s website
frontpagemagazine.com as a regular source of
anti-Islam material. One article called for “a
complete stop to Muslim immigration, and … creative
ways to deport all Muslim non-citizens” in order to
create “an environment where the practice of Islam is
made not easy but difficult.” Another says an
“average” devout Muslim is a “soulless robot … [who]
hates all non-Moslems, a “beast” with only “the body
of a human being.” Other Horowitz allies have said
“Osama bin Laden is a very good Muslim — a model one,
in fact, and one of the most devout in the 1400 years
of Islam,” and “Muslims have no allegiance to any
country. Their only allegiance is to Islam.”
IFAW comes in the wake of a number of high profile
cases in which professors have been forced from their
university. In June, tenured Ethnic Studies Professor
Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado-Boulder
was fired – many felt that he had been subjected to an
intense investigation solely because of his political
views. In May, prominent DePaul University political
scientist Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure, with
many DePaul faculty and others seeing it as an attempt
to punish one side of a controversial debate.
Together, these two cases were seen by many in
academia as part of a much broader attack on academic
freedom, critical thinking and dissent. Reggie Dylan
notes that “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is a
dangerous offensive intended to deepen the already
serious chill in academia by bringing together an
aggressive social base and unleashing it on what
Horowitz calls the “tenured left.” He adds, “IFAW
cannot be allowed to go down unchallenged. It needs to
be thoroughly exposed, repudiated and politically
defeated.”
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