Right-wing culture warrior David Horowitz has come out with yet another anti-academic-freedom book and accompanying campus tour. The book, “One-Party Classroom,” is a virtually unreconstructed rehash of his previous books, “The Professors” and “Indoctrination U.” In these works he announces the shocking news that they teach feminism in women’s and gender studies, social movements in courses on social movements, and Arab and Muslim culture and politics in Middle Eastern studies.
Hooman helped stop a previous Horowitizan effort in Texas a couple of years ago. His quick organizing and column was a major factor in the failure of legislation that would restrict the free exchange of ideas on campus. He is also helping to organize his campus's response to Horowitz's visit.
If you want to learn more about attacks on academic freedom and how to stop them, check out the Free Exchange on Campus Coalition. Campus Progress has been working with this coalition for years to stop right-wing attacks on students and faculty. If you would like to plan peaceful responses to David Horowitz on your campus, let us know at organize@campusprogress.org.
UPDATE: Check out video from the event below. Horowitz mentions Hooman's article and Campus Progress around 1:27:
This evening a few of us interns (and by a few, I regretfully mean only myself and the National Security interns, Maggie and Dan) ventured away from the hustle and bustle that has been our first week at CAP and caught the opening day showing of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”
To be quite honest, I wasn’t expecting much. I mainly ended up going because Dan seems like a nice guy and he had been talking this film up all week. Additionally, and probably the most pure reason for why I made an effort, my social life thus far as been considerably lame as work has left me surprisingly exhausted. Every night I crawl into bed by nine or ten, usually falling asleep with the lights on, yuck! (Note: I said “surprisingly” for all of you who might be screaming at your computers WTF? you’re just the video guy!) But my apparent lack of stamina doesn’t have me worried because I figure that, just like the gentle ascension climbers must make up Mount Everest, it seems I too must acclimate; adapting my college, “concert or keg till 4am”, lifestyle to the grueling 9-6 of this pseudo “real-world” internship.
As Free Exchange on Campus points out, the University of Colorado’s Chancellor is planning on raising $9 million for an endowment to fund a “Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy” in an effort to bolster the campus’s intellectual diversity. [Campus Progress is part of the Free Exchange on Campus Coalition].
Again, there's nothing wrong with seeking job candidates who either specialize in conservatism as a substantive area of study or who bring a conservative perspective to their field. However, rather than setting up a token conservative job opening - especially one that privileges political leanings over scholarship - CU should consider working with its faculty and academic departments to create positions for these specialties within the traditional university structure.
A couple weeks ago we interviewed David Horowitz. Once we're done transcribing and editing everything, we'll be posting it, of course. Should be good.
In the meantime, I've been emailing back and forth with him a little. Though I disagree with 99% of what Horowitz says (or perhaps because of it), arguing with him has been interesting so far. I've posted a couple emails after the jump, with more to follow tomorrow. This particular chain was set off when I sent him to a recent blog post I wrote in reaction to a Weekly Standard article of his. (My co-associate editor, Kay Steiger, reacted here.)
I was on the other end of the so-called "email debate" Jesse talked about in his post. To be upfront I thought what David Horowitz wrote in his Weekly Standard piece was total bunk, through and through. But then, so is much of what is written in the Weekly Standard. Read More »
There was a brief debate yesterday via Campus Progress email that’s worth a blog entry or two. David Horowitz recently wrote an article for The Weekly Standard in which he—surprise!—attacked “the politicization of higher education.” He’s mad that the American Association of University Professors argued in a recent report that students should be taught whatever is “accepted as true within a relevant discipline.” If this is the standard, he’s saying, then any politically motivated group that gets its own “discipline” can proceed to teach whatever it wants as the truth.
“There is a three-level, handcrafted, soft-lighted waterfall cascading into the pool behind David Horowitz’s house in the chic Los Feliz district of Los Angeles. Moviemaker boulders retain the soft earth hillside behind and above the waterfall as streams trickle steadily from one carved stone basin to the next. It cost David Horowitz a lot of money to install his waterfall after he bought the home. He won’t say how much, but when he agreed to cooperate in the writing of this profile, the waterfall was one of the first things he chose to talk about. He wanted to explain it, to have it understood why he had built this magnificent toy with lights and pipes and pumps and switches.”
So goes the unlikely lead of Frank Browning’s landmark profile of David Horowitz in the May 1987 issue of Mother Jones. The other day Jonathan Schwarz inaugurated IslamoHorowitzism Awareness Week by digging up a shot that ran with the profile of a defiant Horowitz posing by what appears to be the very same waterfall. Now, using my journalism archive-searching and image-scanning skills, I’ve discovered whole new dimensions of scary in the man, the myth, the .... nouveau riche social climber? You bet. As Browning relates, perhaps the most telling symptom of Horowitz’s far left-to-far right conversion was his self-conscious adoption of truly awful taste:
...But the waterfall behind his house, like the $85 musical teakettle on his kitchen range [that’s $156 in 2007 dollars], were attachments about which Horowitz wanted not to be misunderstood—just as once he had wanted his attachment to V.I. Lenin’s idea of individual action not to be misunderstood. These new attachments, he explained, were not simply the baubles of recent success: they were the manifest signs of his own liberation from the dark self-negation of his past, from the brittle Stalinism of his Communist parents, from the murderous karma of the Panthers, from the global self-hatred of the international radical movement which he now believes to be the very child of evil itself.
A musical teakettle! If only self-actualization were so easy on the left! Meet four more Horowitzes you never knew, plus see the photo, after the jump.
Jonathan Schwarz has dug up a photo of David Horowitz from a 1986 profile in Mother Jones that you absolutely must look at. The shot kind of defies description. What I can tell you is that Horowitz is wearing Johnny Depp-in-Blow type shades and a “Support Afghan Freedom Fighters” ringer-T featuring a turbaned dude with an AK-47. What happened with that whole thing, anyways?
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.”
Phi Beta Cons’ resident Islamophobofascist, Candace de Russy, last seen smearing Muslims students nationwide, is dutifully repeating David Horowitz’s claim that “A new movement has been launched” with “Islamofascism Awareness Week.” At least she’s reading Horowitz’s FrontPageMag, so we don’t have to. De Russy digs up a passage that captures the perfect inanity of Horowitz’s entire enterprise:
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, David Horowitz spoke to 600 students and various members of the community about the oppression of women in Islam and the silence coming from women’s studies departments on America’s campuses regarding this issue. The volatile crowd quieted immediately when Horowitz began his speech by showing an enlarged photograph of a Muslim woman on her knees being shot in the back of the head by Muslim fundamentalists. “Everyone in this photograph is a Muslim,” Horowitz began. “There is a helpless victim; there are perpetrators of murder. This photograph is why we’re here tonight.”
Set aside Horowitz’s cynical expropriation of the rhetoric of women’s liberation. And keep in mind that the stated purpose of Islamofascism Awareness Week is to counter the various Big Lies of the Left. What’s ludicrous here is Horowitz’s tacit suggestion that the fact that Muslims sometimes kill other Muslims is some kind of revelation—perhaps even one that’s been suppressed or denied by the Left.
That Horowitz fancies himself a great, solemn truth-teller is so obvious it’s painful. Combine that posture with the farce of his message—and I think this entire episode pretty well defines the word “bathos.”
Inspired by our recent blog discussion about David Horowitz's latest crazy campaign against decency, reason and open dialogue? Want to speak out against the divisiveness of "Islamo-fascism Awareness Week"?
The students who canvassed GW’s campus with anti-Muslim posters Monday sent a letter to the GW Hatchet today admitting their role in the controversy.
We’d all realized that the posters were a satirical shot at Campus Progress’ archenemy, the Young America’s Foundation, which is sponsoring Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week at 140 campuses around the country from October 22-26, including GW where Campus Progress’ other archenemy David Horowitz will be speaking. But at least now we know who the students responsible for the posters were. One was Adam Kokesh, “a graduate student and Iraq War veteran, [who] gained celebrity over the past year because of his vocal opposition to the war.”
Kokesh and six other students wrote in an e-mail to the Hatchet:
"It is to our great dismay that the student body and the media missed the clear, if subtle, message of our flier: the hyperbolic nature of the flier was aimed at exposing Islamophobic racism.
There’s still a great debate raging on Jenny Odegard’s original blog post on this Monday about whether this satire is funny, whether racism is ever funny, and shitting on Paris Hilton.
...which is that no one's making enough oversimplistic, excruciatingly poorly-produced Cold War-style videos about the enemy.
Thankfully the David Horowitz Freedom Foundation (named for, and by, Mr. Horowitz) is helping to ensure that we win this war like the one before it. Presenting: "Know About Jihad," the Freedom Foundation's latest subtle effort at boosting global awareness of terrorism, a problem that goes completely ignored by the mainstream media.
Guess what, freshman conservative college student? In a couple of weeks you’re going to have your liberal campus and its professors shove more crap down your throat than Rosie does her gullet during Chili’s Monday Night Nacho Monster Blowout Special, that’s what.
In his weekly column over at Townhall.com, Doug Giles lists ten tips for young conservatives to survive college, “the Liberal’s madrasah” where “purveyors of the anti-American propaganda” deliver “the liberal Kool-Aid crunch” in every classroom. Giles warns:
Your values, for the next four years, will be violated much like Linsday Lohan’s nose, liver, Mercedes and panties have been for the last five years.
Some of you are probably familiar with David Horowitz's op-ed in the Texan last month. Unfortunately, the Horowitz lobby has been able to take their ultra-conservative propaganda into our state Legislature.
Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, has introduced SCR 3, which will be heard today at the Senate committee on Higher Education, and is part of Horowitz's politically motivated attack on universities. Read More »
In the past two days, I have had some of the most surreal interactions in my life. Unfortunately, left out of the pictures are some of the especially great moments. Hopefully, I'll get to those a bit later. Until then, here it is. (More after the jump)
Your former UN Ambassador with your fearless, intrepid, undercover blogger:
I chatted with Michelle Malkin for nearly a half hour yesterday, and for a few minutes today as well. Look for more on this in the near future
Thanks in part to the work of Free Exchange on Campus (a coalition in which Campus Progress participates), David Horowitz's censorship legislation, the Academic Bill of Rights, hasn't moved forward in eight of the nine statehouses in which it's been introduced in 2007. But look out in Arizona, where a state senate committee just approved a bill that could fine, suspend, or terminate professors for:
Endorsing, supporting or opposing any candidate for local, state or national office.
Endorsing, supporting or opposing any pending legislation, regulation or rule under consideration by local, state or federal agencies.
Endorsing, supporting or opposing any litigation in any court.
Advocating “one side of a social, political, or cultural issue that is a matter of partisan controversy.”
Hindering military recruiting on campus or endorsing the activities of those who do.
What's particularly fascistic here is the suggestion that professors can't even take a stance on "social, political, or cultural issues that are matters of partisan controversy." Could someone lose their job for suggesting gay people have the right to marry? Or that women have the right to have an abortion? Think about how this would stifle discussion in law school classrooms, for example, where questions of rights and morality are so central to interpreting the law.
Please remember that Campus Progress' terms of use do not allow promoting or endorsing any particular political party or candidate for office. Posts or comments that do this will be deleted.
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