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Horowitz at Columbia
I attended David Horowitz’s talk on “Islamo-fascism” at Columbia University this afternoon, as a guest of the Columbia Republicans’ club (though perhaps as a Columbia alumnus I could have gotten in on my own). There was a lot of onerous and annoying security to get through, all made necessary by the campus left and the campus Muslims. Inside the Alfred Lerner theater, a sterile postmodern affair, the audience, which seemed disappointingly small after all the build-up, perhaps 200 people at most, was quiet and orderly. I said I attended Horowitz’s talk, but one can hardly call it a talk. For an hour and a half, Horowitz held the microphone, walking back and forth behind the lectern, and disjointedly rambled about the left, the left’s attacks on him, the terrible state of the universities, and on and on—the usual David Horowitz obsessions. For the last 30 minutes he answered written questions, and in his meandering way took about ten minutes to answer each one, so that hardly any questions got asked. A large fraction of the 90 minute event was given over to his other crusade, for academic freedom. What this suggested to me was that for Horowitz, “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” is just a part of his continuing campaign against the campus left. He was no more focused on Islam than he was on, say, Ward Churchill, whom he discussed for several minutes, or the Democrats’ betrayal of Bush on Iraq, or the left’s hate campaign against himself as a racist. He said self-pityingly that when people call you a racist, that’s like drawing a target on your back, and later he returned to the subject, saying, “You call someone a racist it’s the verbal equivalent of a bullet” (a comment that could not but strike me personally as deeply ironic). In brief, the speech consisted of David Horowitz free associating, with some stuff on Islamo-fascism thrown in. What he said about Islamo-fascism, when he talked about it, was sketchy and superficial. It all came down to the idea that Islamo-fascists persecute women and homosexuals, and seek a totalitarian order in which all aspects of life are controlled. And of course that Iran represents a great danger, possibly seeking the end of the world. Beyond those familiar statements, which took up ten or fifteen minutes of his talk at most, there was no substance, nor the slightest notion of what we ought to do about these problems (other than to stand up to Iran on the nuclear issue, which I agree with). No student coming away from that talk would have any deeper understanding of the nature of the threat that Islamic jihadism poses to our society. The word immigration was not mentioned. The Islamization of Europe was not mentioned. The steady spread of Islamic customs and Islamic sharia law throughout the West was not mentioned. In my own written question which I submitted, but which the host did not get around to reading during the question period, I asked: “Should we support the immigration of Muslims who seek to spread Islamic sharia law in this country, so long as they are spreading it by peaceful means? And are such Muslims moderate Muslims?” No wonder the host didn’t read it. As logical and direct as my question was, given the intellectual level of Horowitz’s talk it would have been like reading a PhD paper in a nursery school. Listening to Horowitz, I realized to my dismay that while he has published hundreds of informative, ground-breaking articles by Islam-critical scholars and journalists at FrontPage Magazine about the nature of Islam, he himself has internalized almost nothing from those articles. His idea of Islam comes down to a few slogans. If he has any conceptual framework for understanding Islamo-fascism, it is not Muhammad, the Koran, the Islamic law, and jihad; it is the notion that Islamo-fascism is similar to Communism. He pointed out that just as Communists like his own father dreamed of a perfect world to come and de-valued their present life, Islamo-fascists like Muhammad Atta dream of a perfect world to come and de-value their present life. As though such a comparison adequately explains Muhammad Atta! In reality, Atta was a jihad warrior dying ecstatically for Allah while killing the infidel, as millions of Muslims, following the Koran, have done before him. Horowitz has no notion of this. For Horowitz, Muhammad Atta is like Horowitz’s bitter, frustrated, Communist father in Forest Hills. It’s Horowitz’s own non-Islam theory of Islamic extremism. Inevitably, people will defend Horowitz (just as the friend with whom I attended the talk defended him) by saying that he is addressing college students who have their heads full of anti-American mush, so he has to speak to their level of ignorance. I don’t buy it. When a nationally prominent conservative organizes and endlessly promotes an unprecedented week-long series of lectures and panels at 115 college campuses around the country about radical Islam, telling everyone that this is a historically significant event that cannot be missed, and then, on the final day of this five-day extravaganza, comes to his alma mater in New York City and gives such an empty, vapid speech on the subject, something is amiss. Far from being a galvanizing event, “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” at least as presented by its own organizer, epitomizes the conservative establishment’s intellectual bankruptcy on the subject of Islam.
LA writes:
Though, as I pointed out above, there was very little substantive content about Islam in his talk, in fairness to Horowitz we should also remember that for today’s reflexively anti-Ameican college students simply to hear the message that there is something bad in the world, and that it’s not America, could be an earthquake for them, the effects of which may well be on balance positive. Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 26, 2007 04:24 PM | Send Email entry |