You gotta hand it to David Horowitz. He’s compiled a roster of speakers for Islamofascism Awareness Week that will keep you up at night. You got the laptop bombardier (Michael Ledeen), the radical Zionist (Daniel Pipes), the occasional anti-Semite (Ann Coulter), the man-on-dog guy (Rick Santorum), the slavery apologist (Michael Medved), and on and on. Reads kind of like a who’s who of CP’s own “Know You Right-Wing Speakers” series.

Well here’s another for the list: Nonie Darwish, the self-styled “Arab feminist.”

Darwish was at Berkeley Monday and will be at UCLA Wednesday. Originally from Egypt, Darwish is a convert from Islam to evangelical Christianity who founded a group called Arabs for Israel and wrote a book called “Now They Call me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror.” As you might imagine, that biography constitutes a pretty quick route to the good graces of Horowitz and Santorum, both of whom blurbed Darwish’s book.

Darwish came to Brown last spring and delivered a highly emotional appeal on the evils of Islam, the heroics of Israel, and the overwhelming necessity of Western military intervention in the region. The whole scene was pitiful, almost heartbreaking, as Darwish’s knowledge of politics, religion, and history fell short—way short—of matching her passionate declarations. Elliott Colla, a professor of Arabic literature, later noted that “Darwish committed so many basic factual gaffes concerning modern Middle Eastern history and Islam that many in the otherwise friendly undergraduate audience turned against her.”

At the time I became perversely fixated on reading the archives of Nonie’s column at FrontPageMag.com, the Horowitz outfit. Here are a few graphs from a column I wrote about it:

Here's Darwish on the massive anti-Iraq war protests: "All protest organizers agree on one thing: They hate America and want to see it transformed from the democratic and capitalist entity that it is." Here she is on racial profiling: "This is one U.S. citizen of Arab/Moslem background who has no problem being profiled until the U.S. conquers the war on terrorism. ...

And what about Darwish's specialty, the grave threat radical Islam poses to America? She seems confused about the basics. From the 2003 column, this gem: "As an American of Arab origin, I laugh every time I hear someone in the media asking 'How can you prove that Saddam and al-Qaida are cooperating?' How can anyone imagine that two outlaw organizations with a common enemy would not cooperate? They are both Moslem, Arab and live in the same neighborhood. Do these same people doubt that a fire can ignite when matches are struck near gasoline?"

I guess I'd grasp all this better if I had a deeper understanding of the Arab world. Being only an American of European origin, all this time I was foolishly thinking that two organizations in the same neighborhood - Saddam's regime and Islamic terrorists - could actually be enemies. How silly of me! I forgot to lump all Arabs and Moslems into the same category. Thank you, Nonie.

There’s more in the full column about Darwish’s putative feminism. One quick point in relation to a critical comment on my previous post. As with Horowitz, Darwish’s brand of feminism—if it can be called that—is more about bombing people than helping women. Molly Ivins said it best: “It's damn hard to convince people you're killing them for their own good.