[NYTr] Call for anti-Islamic hatred on campuses falls flat

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Workers World - Nov 8, 2007 issue
http://www.workers.org/2007/us/falls-flat-1108/

Call for anti-Islamic hatred on campuses falls flat

By Caleb T. Maupin

When the right wing announced it would attempt to hold an
“Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” from Oct. 22 to 26 on college campuses
throughout the United States, the left responded.

The founder of this “awareness week” was none other than David
Horowitz. He has founded his own “freedom center” devoted to the
removal of leftists from college campuses. He has published a book
called “The Professors,” which reads like a document of the House
Un-American Activities Committee, listing 101 college professors he
sees as “traitors” and as “un-American.”

Horowitz has in the past claimed that Black people should be grateful
for being enslaved, a blatantly racist statement if ever there was one.

It has now been proven that Horowitz inflated the number of schools
participating in his hate week. He listed Harvard and Yale as
participating, but both schools reported no events in accordance with
his campaign.

On the campuses where they did occur, the students responded to
Horowitz with a great amount of disapproval. At Emory University, when
Horowitz spoke, the audience was full of students who turned their
backs on him as he spoke.

Horowitz’ vicious anti-Islamic statement, which contained great
falsehoods, was met with laughter from the audience. The student
audience frequently challenged him, engaging in a shouting match with a
pundit who sought to remove their leftist professors from classrooms.

Soon the repressive state stepped in to silence them. A security guard
declared that all students who were standing up with their backs turned
on Horowitz should sit down or be “escorted out.” At this point, dozens
of students then stood up in defiance. The event was declared over;
Horowitz was escorted off the stage as chants of “Racist, Sexist,
Anti-Gay, David Horowitz Go Away!” were heard from students who had
shut down a bigot from spewing his hatred.

At Columbia University, Horowitz was called out strongly by the Black
Student Organization, which was appalled by his comparisons of the
treatment of Republicans to that of African Americans. “We find it
particularly reprehensible,” Tiffany Dockery told the New York Post.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Horowitz responded to a
student’s question by accusing her of being anti-American. The student,
a young woman, responded very proudly “Please don’t insult me. I’m not
an idiot!” This drew massive applause from the audience, who clearly
disapproved of Horowitz’s style of childish insults toward dissident
students, a style he was frequently reduced to throughout the week.

When Ann Coulter spoke at the University of Southern California, as
part of the “awareness” week’s efforts, 150 people protested, while
only three hundred attended the event.

In short, this hateful well-known right-wing columnist got half as many
protestors opposing her as she did people wanting to hear her views,
according to the L.A. Times.

At Penn State University popular student outrage forced the college to
demand that the name of the week be changed to “Terrorism Awareness
Week.” When Rick Santorum, the recently defeated bigoted senator from
Pennsylvania spoke, he was met with protests including the displaying
of anti-war placards during his speech.

Horowitz called on his conservative student followers to hold sit-ins
in Women’s Studies Departments in an attempt to force them to take more
anti-Islamic and pro-imperialist stances. As of yet, not a single
report of such a sit-in occurring has been released.

Students have proudly sat in to protest the war in Iraq. The Sept. 15
and 29 protests in Washington, DC, were full of radical youth. The
right wing was totally unable to rally youth to its cause on U.S.
college campuses Oct. 22-26. Horowitz and his right-wing ilk were able
to organize just a few speakers who were challenged at every turn since
support for their cause of war and repression on college campuses is
very hard to find in this modern age.

The writer is an organizer of FIST, Fight Imperialism-Stand Together
youth group. Contact FIST at workers.org

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