AMADINEJAD AND THE SAUDIS PLAN TO DISRUPT FREE SPEECH ON AMERICAN CAMPUSES STARTING TOMMORROW
By Phyllis Chesler
We have just been informed that President Amadinejad, who himself enjoyed no disruption when he spoke at Columbia University, has called upon American students and faculty to disrupt the handful of panels and lectures at Columbia University and at the more than one hundred other universities where Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week will take place from October 22nd to October 26th, 2007.
By the way, the term “Islamo-fascism” was coined by Algerian Muslims and ex-Muslims to characterize the Islamic fanatics who slaughtered 150,000 of their Algerian Muslim brethren in the 1990s—and all in the name of Allah.
I am speaking at Columbia on a panel with my esteemed colleagues Ibn Warraq and Christina Hoff-Sommers on the evening of October 24th. David Horowitz, whose Freedom Center has organized the week-long Teach-In, is speaking there at noon on October 26th.
There will be security, cameras, and perhaps even media. These add-ons have become increasingly necessary in order that those who hold minority anti-fascist viewpoints may nevertheless engage in the joys of academic freedom.
We have also just been informed that Saudi money, (what an everlasting surprise), has apparently funded the various pro-Palestinian, anti-American, and anti-Israeli campus groups to launch a defamation and disruption campaign against us. And, the religious Jewish left has also weighed in with an emailed campaign that opposes our telling the truth about how Muslims are blowing other Muslims up, and persecuting women, intellectuals, and homosexuals.
Apparently, if you don’t blame America first, and Israel soon thereafter; and if you don’t continually apologize for the Christian Crusades and for the West’s past colonialism and imperialism—you do not deserve to speak or, perhaps, to live. This way of thinking represents an utter failure to understand that jihad against infidels and other barbarisms are intrinsic to the Arab Muslim Middle East and were not necessarily caused by Western actions.
As to Columbia: In 2004, my answer to a single question sparked a near-riot and I had to be hustled out for my safety. In 2005, the graduate students at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA—the group that invited Amadinejad), boycotted a student-organized and rather illustrious panel about Israel of which I was a member. Also in 2005, at an all-day conference with enormous security, my words still “provoked” a planned pro-Palestinian “acting up” (or is it “acting out” or “shaking off?”). There is more. You get the picture.
Today, speaking the truth about fascism means that you have to do so under hostile and perhaps even dangerous working conditions. The truth-tellers are defamed as “fascists” and “racists.” Those who silence all free speech other than their own view only themselves as anti-racist liberators.
I will have more to say about this. Stay tuned.
Shalom Keelie,
My immediate inference re the baseball bats is that you’re out of order.
Kol tuv,
Free speech restrictions on American college campuses didn’t start on 22 Oct 07.
The Algerian fighting that started in 1992 was when the Islamic Salvation Front won the national legislative elections. The Army nullified the vote that started the civil war. Algeria fared better when it was 3 Departments of France. Don’t blame – or give credit to – the Arab barbarians who had intellectual support from the “civilized” world. Remember the term “self-determination” ? The French withdrawal from Algeria led to the French rapprachement with the Arab world and the dissolution of the French-Israeli alliance.
Who sponsors the Freedom House ? How does Columbia University relate to freedom of speech? This place recently provided a rostrum to a world dictator.
David Horowitz and Phyllis Chesler might have chosen Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow – if still around – for a more productive use of time and resources.
What an expression “the “religious Jewish left” ! Is this oxymoronic or a tautology? Joseph Proskauer and his American Jewish Committee fits somewhere in the above expression. He was more anti the establishment of Israel than contemporary Columbia University and their petrodollar accounts.
A chat session that’s really a pre WWII coffee club meeting with different imagry, convinces me, in general, American Jewish history is an unknown field and, specifically, that the contemporary “Jewish” American order of battle is unknown.
Well, how did Saudi Arabia acquire that “Saudi oil money” ? From pearl diving investments ?
Columbia University is not the institutional problem.
“the two greatest events in modern Jewish history, the murder of six million Jews by Hitler and the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine, have had remarkedly slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.”
AMERICAN JUDAISM,1957, by Nathan Glazer, pg 114
Kol tuv,
We don’t need charity to buy baseball bats…