Posted on 10/29/2007 9:37:56 PM PDT by goldstategop
Last week, at universities around America, the conservative activist David Horowitz organized "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week." The week featured a guest speaker, the showing of the documentary, "Obsession," about radical Islam, and related activities.
As one of those speakers -- at the University of California at Santa Barbara -- I was particularly interested in the controversy Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week engendered as well as in the larger question of whether the term "Islamo-Fascism" is valid.
Various Muslim student groups condemned these awareness weeks and the term itself, charging that both are no more than expressions of anti-Muslim bigotry, i.e., "Islamophobia." Nevertheless, Muslim student groups decided not to actively disrupt the week. Therefore most of the opposition to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week events came from Leftist student groups.
This opposition took the form of opposing funding of speakers invited to campus; writing articles in campus newspapers attacking the speakers, the Awareness Week and the term "Islamo-Fascism" as essentially racist; and in some cases disrupting the speech.
I experienced the first two forms of Leftist opposition; David Horowitz experienced the third as well. He was invited to speak at Emory University, but Leftist students packed the hall and shouted him down. Emory officials did nothing to stop the harassment and the suppression of speech, and Horowitz was unable to deliver his talk. It is considerably more difficult to get conservative speakers invited to most American universities -- or for them to be able to speak without being harassed -- than it is for a Holocaust-denying, genocide-advocating leader, such as Iran's Ahmadinejad at Columbia University, to deliver a speech at an American university.
In my case, about a quarter of the 300 students who came to my talk at UCSB were Leftists opposed to my coming. But they allowed me to deliver my remarks without once trying to shout me down. There were, I believe, three reasons for this. One is that UCSB has a relatively calm political climate. Second, there was a serious police presence and it was clear that disrupters would be removed, if not arrested. Third, students told me afterward that I disarmed those who came to oppose me. Contrary to the demonized figure they had assumed I am -- in one UCSB student newspaper column, I was compared to a Ku Klux Klanner for speaking on Islamo-Fascism -- they saw a decent man, a sometimes funny guy, and heard a low-keyed, intellectual speech that contained not one word of gratuitous hatred.
It is worth mentioning that following my lecture, the student who wrote the column comparing me to a Ku Klux Klanner came over to me and said he was writing a column of apology to me and asked to be photographed with me. This is not surprising. Students at most universities are almost brainwashed into being Leftist -- and the way they are taught to disagree with their political opponents is by using ad hominem attacks. Conservatives are described over and over as mean-spirited, war-loving, greedy, bigoted, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, sexist, intolerant and oblivious to human suffering.
Such ad hominem labels are the Left's primary rhetorical weapons. So when Leftist students are actually confronted with even one articulate conservative, many enter a world of cognitive dissonance. That is one reason why universities rarely invite conservatives to speak: they might change some students' minds.
Regarding the term "Islamo-Fascism," most students heard the arguments I presented for the legitimacy of the term for the first time in their lives. Very briefly summarized, these arguments were:
First, the term is not anti-Muslim. One may object to the term on factual grounds, i.e., one may claim that there are no fascistic behaviors among people acting in the name of Islam -- but such a claim is a denial of the obvious.
So once one acknowledges the obvious, that there is fascistic behavior among a core of Muslims -- specifically, a cult of violence and the wanton use of physical force to impose an ideology on others -- the term "Islamo-Fascism" is entirely appropriate.
Second, the question then arises as to whether that term is anti-Muslim in that it besmirches the name of Islam and attempts to describe all Muslims as fascist. This objection, too, has a clear response.
The term no more implies all Muslims or Islam is fascistic than the term "German fascism" implied all Germans were fascists or "Italian fascism" or "Japanese fascism" implied that all Italians or all Japanese were fascists. Indeed, even religious groups have been labeled as fascist. During World War II, for example, Croatian Catholic fascists were called Catholic Fascists, and no one argued that the term was invalid because it purportedly labeled all Catholics or Catholicism fascist. When the Left uses the term "American imperialism," are they implying that all Americans are imperialists? Then why does Islamo-Fascism label all Muslims?
Third, given the horrors being perpetrated by some Muslims in the name of Islam -- from the genocide currently being practiced by the Islamic Republic of Sudan, to the mass murders of innocents in Iraq, Israel, America, Britain, Bali, Thailand, the Philippines and elsewhere -- what term is more accurate than "Islamo-Fascism"? "Islamic totalitarianism"? "Jihadists"? "Bad Muslims"?
The Left's organized crusade against Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week was simply the latest shame in the long and shameful history of the Left's inability to confront those engaged in great evil -- like the Left's ferocious opposition during the Cold War to labeling Communism as "totalitarian" or "evil" and its nearly universal condemnation of President Ronald Reagan's description of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire."
That Muslim student groups and other Muslim organizations joined with the Left in the ad hominem condemnation of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week was most unfortunate. Many Muslims know well that there is indeed such a thing as Islamo-Fascism, and they should be the first to join in fighting it. It is not those who use the term "Islamo-Fascism" who are sullying the name of Islam; it is the Islamo-Fascists.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Prager bump.
Islam has not been hijacked. It is what it is. A child molesting, murdering, soul destroying cult. And that’s putting it nicely.
well put!!!
[Students at most universities are almost brainwashed into being Leftist — and the way they are taught to disagree with their political opponents is by using ad hominem attacks. Conservatives are described over and over as mean-spirited, war-loving, greedy, bigoted, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, sexist, intolerant and oblivious to human suffering.]
That backfired, in my case. I attended university in the late 80’s and I was pretty much a “save the whales, no nukes and tax the rich” guy going in. Some of my teachers started in on Ronald Reagan and how he was happy when bums went hungry and gays died of aids and how he couldn’t wait to push the big red button that would kill all our communist friends in Russia because he was too stupid to realize that all of humanity would die in the same nuclear holocaust.
Such over the line talk and obviously hate and fear based rhetoric caused me to question the valildity of what the political left was saying.
Dennis is a good guy. I’ve not been able to listen to him in recent years, but I have enjoyed his views since his ‘Religion on the Line’ program Sunday evenings at least twenty years ago.
He is a very clear thinker, so much so that I try to review my own beliefs if they are in conflict with his.
Here he lays it on the line, but does it so clearly and non-confrontationally that it’s hard to deny his views are solid as a rock.
Nice to see UCSB display the civility that Mr. Praeger is due.
It may just turn out to be true that not all of us Californians are as whacky as is so oft claimed, including here on this (California based) website.
You can listen to his show on-line at Townhall.com
Are those archived?
Yes it is. The left recognizes and embraces it.
To a certain extent yes.
If you have iTunes on your computer (available at Apple Downloads websitie for free) you can sign up for pod cast and then select which programs you wish to download.
Dennis’s programs are free as are Hugh Hewitt’s
Well good. I might give that a try. Thanks.
“He was invited to speak at Emory University, but Leftist students packed the hall and shouted him down. Emory officials did nothing to stop the harassment and the suppression of speech, and Horowitz was unable to deliver his talk.”
Uh, that is FACISM.
When is America going to wake up and understand that they want to chop our heads off, or better (for them) yet, incinerate us.
Huh? Fascism was a term used by the leftists to make fun of the right. Why are these leftsists supporting fascism?
That is because they share the evil of a totalitarian root. The degrees of blindness these sock puppets suffer is comensurate with the size of the totaliltarian log-in-their-eye they carry.
Tasers were obviously not allowed at this event. . .unless they were told only use them against David’s team - if necessary.
Islam is fascistic.
jw
Interesting that you should say that. I have a couple of kids in their mid-20's, who went to a public school in a University town where such ideology was rampant. What I saw among them and their classmates was that in every area where over-the-top ideology ruled, the kids didn't buy in to any of it.
I look at the environmentalist movement, and the attempt to indoctrinate our kids into the 'live simple so others can simply live' point of view, and I can tell you that despite Captain Planet and mandatory recycling education, kids aren't growing up to be environmentalists. They see littering as a joke, they leave the lights on and turn the heat/AC up for their comfort, buy disposable goods, and generally do most of what they are taught in school not to. They see eco-friendly as kid stuff. Look around at photos of environmental group activities, or membership of said groups - you have aging baby-boomers everywhere. They are unable to recruit new members because of the indoctrination back-lash (even the "volunteers" all are paid through Americorps).
I think your experience is being magnified by a huge amount with the politicization of our public schools for the young generation. That's why I'm optimistic about a future of freedom, capitalism and love of God for the US.
bump
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