“This October 22-26, I am declaring Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” declared David Horowitz Tuesday in a friendly interview on http://FrontpageMag.com, one of Horowitz’s many front groups. “I will hold demonstrations and protests, teach-ins and sit-ins on more than 100 college campuses. Our theme will be the Oppression of Women in Islam and the threat posed by the Islamic crusade [????] against the West.”
Horowitz, who, along with Frank Gaffney, James Woolsey, and Rick Santorum has played a truly vanguard role in the “Islamo-Fascism” movement, apparently has few doubts about his impact. “During the week of October 22-26, 2007, the nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever – Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a wake-up call for Americans on 200 university and college campuses.” The event will confront the two “Big Lies of the political left:” that “George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat.” In fact, according to Horowitz, Islamo-fascism constitutes “the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted.”
Horowitz, president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (previously the Center for the Study of Popular Culture) editor-in-chief of http://FrontPageMag.com, and founder of Students for Academic Freedom, is, of course, a former leading New Leftist who has found fame and fortune – he made $352,647 in 2005, according to tax records – on the extreme right and has done particularly well since 9/11 when he got in on the “Islamo-fascist” ground floor.
“Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” according to Horowitz will be a “national effort …to rally American students to defend their country” and will feature “memorial services for the victims of Islamic terror both in America and around the globe” (the guide suggests putting up crosses to commemorate victims presumably regardless of their religion); sit-ins (Horowitz suggests the office of the Women’s Studies Department or the campus Women’s Centers “to protest their silence about the oppression of women in Islam”) teach-ins on ‘’The Oppression of Women in Islam;” “a student petition denouncing Islamo-Fascist violence against women, gays, Christians, Jews and non-religious people” (and press releases at the ready if Muslim student groups, campus administrators, or student government officers fail to sign); and prominent speakers, such as the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Ayan Hirsi Ali, columnist Mark Steyn, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, Rick Santorum, as well as Horowitz himself.
In addition, participants will distribute pamphlets on Islamo-Fascism, including “The Islamic Mein Kampf,” “Why Israel is the Victim,” “Jimmy Carter’s War Against the Jews,” “And What Every American Needs to Know About Jihad.” Films to be shown include “Suicide Killers,” “Obsession” (about which my colleague, Khody Akhavi, wrote earlier this year), or “Islam: What the West Needs to Know.” For the films, Horowitz advises campus organizers to invite a “local radio host or other local figure to introduce the film and possibly moderate a discussion on it afterwards.” Organizers are encouraged to request funding from the student government. If is not forthcoming, according to the Guide, “it will prove the hypocrisy of your university’s claim to be committed to intellectual diversity and academic freedom.” Other possible funders and sponsors include Young Americans Foundation, the Leadership Institute, the campus College Republican club and Hillel,
The program clearly models itself after strategies employed by left-wing radicals in the 1960s and 1970s but is careful to protect the campus rules and local laws that Horowitz’s ideological enemies on the left would blatantly disregard. Organizers of the sit-ins are explicitly warned not to obstruct university operations or violate university rules. As my colleague, Eli Clifton noted, it combines some of the hardware of the 1960s student movement with the software of Horowitz’s hard-right – dare one say it? Islamophobic — ideology.
According to tax records obtained through the Foundation Center, Horowitz has been the beneficiary in recent years of a number of far-right foundations, including the Allegheny ($575,000 since 2001), Carthage ($125,000) and Sarah Scaife Foundations ($800,000) – all three are part of Richard Scaife’s empire and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (nearly $1.3 million). The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation ($475,000) also contributed nearly $500,000 to Horowitz’s enterprises over the same period.