David Horowitz’s Archives: The Problem For Our Country

As it happens, I don’t enjoy having to go to campuses under armed guard any more than anyone else would. I first became fully aware of the dimensions of the campus security problem in 2001, when I was invited to speak at the University of California, Berkeley. The chancellor (no fan of mine) assigned thirty armed guards to watch over the speech. Thirty armed guards represented the university’s judgment as to the scope of the threat posed by the Berkeley left, not mine. But I soon learned the utility of having them. Since then, I have been physically assaulted on a number of occasions — at Butler University, Ball State, MIT and Princeton — to the point where security officers had to step in between me and the attackers or, in the case of Bradley, where radicals smashed a pie in my face (it was not merely “thrown” as some reports have it). I have been rushed on the stage in such unlikely locations as the Pacific Design Center and the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles – both times by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party who were out in force during Islamo-Fascism Awareness week. In both these cases, I had failed to hire security and would have been beaten if members of the audience had not tackled the would-be assailants and wrestled them to the ground.

By contrast, the Islamo-Fascism event at Columbia was peaceful, a fact which is deceptively used by Marshall in his video to insinuate that I am a charlatan, and that the threat of violence was fabricated as a fund-raising tool. But the Columbia event was peaceful because of the heavy security not in spite of it. The previous year, when such precautions were not taken at Columbia, violent leftist thugs over-ran the stage and shut down an event at which Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist was scheduled to speak. Gilchrist had been slandered in advance as a “racist” and “fascist,” which made the attack perfectly justifiable to the “progressives” who staged it. Would they have returned to attack our event if security had not been present? Would any rational person on the receiving end of verbal attacks such as those I have enumerated risk holding a public event without arranging protection? Would any Jew, knowing that there are fanatics in our midst who are incited by their religion to regard us as apes and monkeys, and who see violence as a ticket to heaven, wish to test their forbearance? What can Joshua Marshall be thinking when he portrays me as an alarmist who fantasizes these dangers?

But, in the end, this is not really about me. It is about the state of our country, and about students at our universities who are forced to face down a hostile and sometimes violent mob in order to put on these events. It is about the fact that a movement with fascist overtones has developed within the American left. It is about the emergence of a fanatical movement in Islam, really a death cult, which has declared war on the West, and whose anti-American agendas have been adopted by elements of the progressive left, as the attacks on Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week demonstrate all too clearly.

As for liberals who should properly be appalled at these developments in the left, Joshua Micah Marshall’s videos are instructive. Instead, of being alarmed by the clear and present danger posed by these radicals, they focus on mocking and dismissing those who are addressing the threat. To explain our agendas in organizing Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, Robert Spencer and I wrote a statement called “Why Islamo-Fascism?”which is available on our websites. Marshall ignores it. Instead, in yet another gesture of derision and contempt, he posts the following from one of his fans: “In honor of Islamofascism Awareness Week I am busy rewriting all of my old history books in order to properly show that the danger of some men in caves, along with one moderate regional power are in fact a greater threat to the United States than were the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the secessionist Confederacy, and even the Redcoats from our founding days.” Well, who would have regarded Hitler as a threat when he was writing tracts in Bavarian beer halls? And, of course, the Islamo-fascists are way ahead of him already.

There have been more than 9,000 terrorist attacks since 9/11, including the murders of Western infidels such as Theo Van Gogh, whose crime was attempting to warn others. A petition is currently being circulated by leftist professors, like Eric Foner, at Columbia, which among other things condemns its president for criticizing the Islamo-fascist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when he was a guest at the school.There have been (and will be) no such petitions to condemn the campus radicals who mounted a hate campaign against conservative students and the speakers they invited to discuss the threat from Islamo-fascists like Ahmadinejad. And therein lies the problem for our country.

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