The Left and the Term “Islamo-Fascism”
The Left and the Term “Islamo-Fascism”
By Dennis Prager
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.
Full Townhall article here.
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Horowitz the ex Trotskyite. Mr Angry bombed last week at Islamo-Fascist week
October 31st, 2007 at 1:32 pmDon’t like the term ‘Islamo-fascism’?
October 31st, 2007 at 1:45 pmOK then… how about ‘fascists that use the political ideology of Mohammed as written in the Qu’ran a millenia ago to justify murder and oppression today’.
I hope that’s better cuz it’s the last concession I’m gonna make.
you are using the wrong term islam itself is the enemy. it needs no other word attached to it. wake up america lawmakers and make some to curtail islam attemps to use our own laws against us. SANE has some excellent ideas, a little extreme, but look at what we are dealing with. islam is a cancer and this country needs to have cut out. NOW
October 31st, 2007 at 4:55 pmroger that coldjoint—-
There is coming a day when we wont be playing this silly ass game of”good islam, bad islam”.
October 31st, 2007 at 5:52 pmIt is the same as it ever was…the puny impressionable retards who haven’t formulated any rational opinion as to the legitimacy concerning the cause and effect of both sides to a social political issue.
So being without the muscle of intelligence to hold them unwaveringly to what they apparently know to be right, they resort to being a thug and silencing anyone advocating a difference of opinion. Reason being as well is they really have little value as anything else to the cause they defend because that cause has no real interest in them.
This of course is their perverted view of freedom of speech, but really what they are is the mirror image of what they hate.
October 31st, 2007 at 7:02 pmHausser, WTF are you talking about, and try to say something that makes sense
October 31st, 2007 at 8:42 pmThere is hope at UCSB, since that columnist actually apologized to prager and was going to print a recant of his comments.
October 31st, 2007 at 10:35 pmJim
You may not be aware of this but Horowitz was a RADICAL LEFT wing guy until about 1991
November 1st, 2007 at 6:27 amNotice the handwritting in the picture above,
all the signs were written by the same person.
The “E’s” and the repeated use of the fragment
“those who insult” are a dead give away.
Probably the only one of those islamo-facists,
November 1st, 2007 at 6:53 amexcuse me “Freedom Fighters” that could speak English.
“..You may not be aware of this but Horowitz was a RADICAL LEFT wing guy until about 1991″
So you’re like 16 years too late fuckhead.
November 1st, 2007 at 10:20 pmSully I love you too.
November 2nd, 2007 at 6:52 am