New York, Oct 20, IRNA , When David Horowitz returns to Columbia University next Friday to mark his organization’s much-hyped “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” (IFAW), he will find a determined opposition, coming from a coalition of concerned students and up to nine of Horowitz’s “101 Most Dangerous Professors.”
“The week of October 22-26, 2007, the nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever? a wake-up call for Americans, “claims the Terrorism Awareness Project, which is sponsoring IFAW together with the Young America’s Foundation. Between them, the sponsors have tens of millions of dollars in their war chest for occasions just like this.
The week will feature petitions denouncing “Islamo-Fascist jihad,” pamphlets like “The Islamic Mein Kampf,” “teach-ins” and “sit-ins” at Women’s Studies Departments, and speeches by the likes of Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Rick Santorum, and Daniel Pipes. Doing their part for the war, the sponsors urge their foot soldiers: “If you want to help our brave troops who are fighting the Islamo-Fascists abroad – bring Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week to your campus.”
NOT ON OUR CAMPUS
“NOT ON OUR CAMPUS,” counter the flyers being circulated by the hundreds from Columbia’s Intercultural Resource Center, as students prepare for a major speakout and counter-event on Friday. Many here see Horowitz’s visit as an insult and an injury to a campus community still reeling from a slew of racial attacks this semester, most recently a noose hung on the door of a Black professor at Teachers’ College.
“We’re just a group of concerned students feeling equally angry, frustrated and tired of what’s going on,” explained Keondra Prier, an activist with Students Promoting Empowerment and Knowledge (SPEaK), after a coalition meeting last week.
“Certain people are tolerated on the campus while certain people are not. And it’s very evident as to who is and who’s not, and why? This is about my life, personally, and this is about everyone’s lives in this room.” “What it does,” added Noah Baron of Columbia Students for a Democratic Society, “is it builds on people’s fears? And it makes it more difficult to discuss things that are already difficult to discuss? racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and things like that.
This is not the first showdown of its kind at Columbia. For years, the university, its faculty and its students have been targets of a relentless campaign driven by those close to Horowitz.
The Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Culture (MEALAC) came under siege in 2005 for its pro-Palestinian professors.
Horowitz, calling the university a “national scandal,” cooked up a blacklist of radical faculty. In 2006, the media crucified student activists after they confronted the Minutemen on campus. And then, of course, there was Ahmadinejad.
With IFAW, Horowitz, an ex-Leftist-gone-Right, is taking on two of his favorite enemies: Left-wing faculty and Muslim youth. In a recent statement, he claimed that “the progressive left is the enabler and abettor of the terrorist jihad,” and in the same document, he called the Muslim Students Association (MSA) a “front for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.”
Nationwide, Muslim students and other advocates have launched a rapid response to IFAW and the Horowitz offensive. The MSA recently announced its “Peace Not Prejudice Campaign.” As national organizer Asma Rehman put it, “The MSA is trying to reclaim the discourse from the hands of intolerant extremists who smear and distort Islam to further their own racist agendas.”
Ibrahim Ramey, Human and Civil Rights Director for the Muslim American Society (MAS Freedom), added that, in his view, countering IFAW is also about countering “the longer-term political agenda of Horowitz and company to further consolidate American state power, military power, and transnational capital at the expense of real democracy and social justice.”
Many students see the situation in a similar light, in which Columbia is just one front in a much larger offensive. As activist Sam Rennebohm pointed out, “It connects to the war in Iraq, it connects to the way that rhetoric is used against Iran? And it’s interesting to look at the similarities between a national resurgence in racism and Islamophobia and similar actions on our campus.”