(DV) Rajiva: Begging for the Brownshirts

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Begging for the Brownshirts
The Latest David Project: Horowitz Solicits for Campus Hit Jobs
by Lila Rajiva
www.dissidentvoice.org
December 25, 2005

David Horowitz frequently, I should say incessantly, corresponds with me. Why, I don’t know. I am quite sure he doesn’t either. But someone on his payroll sends missives out to me regularly, informing me of one or other of Mr. Horowitz’s perennial campaigns against anti-Americans and terrorist sympathizers. This time he seems to be raising money for a website to monitor and attack what he calls “campus radicals.” I offer readers the letter with my annotations, in brackets [], interspersed.

Here it is:

An Urgent Message
From the Desk of David Horowitz

Dear Lila,

Will you help me place the enclosed advertisement in college newspapers across America?

It conveys an important message to all Americans: There are thousands of Ward Churchills indoctrinating students on college campuses from coast to coast!

[Lila Rajiva: Too bad, Mr. Horowitz, there are not merely thousands but tens of thousands of Churchills, un-Churchills, ur-Churchills, and even anti-Churchills. And what they do is called teaching. The horror!

Is there an element of indoctrination? Of course. It’s always been there, and usually in a much stronger form than anything Ward Churchill has done or is likely to do, given the nature of the university with its umpteen sensibilities in need of assuaging and massaging, not least those of the majority. And that majority happens to be middle-class students, their parents and various donors and funders, one of the most prominent of which is the US defense department, hardly a hotbed of anti-Americanism.

As for the “radical academy”, in a UCLA survey of 35,000 professors cited by Robert Hughes in “Culture of Complaint,” only 4.9 percent called themselves "far left," while 17.8 percent put themselves down "conservative." All the rest described themselves as "liberal" or "moderate." Even at Berkeley, only one person out of thirty in the sociology department calls him/herself a Marxist. (Hughes, New York, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 59). One thing I do know about the far left - it’s noisy out of all proportion to its numbers, because by and large it’s a bookish, chatty group. Quite proud to wear its radical label. And unlikely to advertise itself as conservative, or worse yet in some views, liberal, if it were not.

In any case, indoctrination has always gone hand in hand with teaching and scholarship since the founding of Oxford in the 13^th century or Notre Dame. Various Christian doctrines duked it out in those days - one of them, the realists, prevailed at first and indoctrinated medieval students in Europe. Later, the nominalists did the indoctrination. In the nineteenth century, Shelley was kicked out of Oxford for professing he was an atheist at a time when Anglicans ran the show. There were tests of religion in most American universities until quite recently. Yesterday, Protestantism was the doctrine du jour; today it is -- contrary to your fantasy -- the philosophy of Kant. Yes, Mr. Horowitz, Immanuel Kant not Karl Marx, is the leading spirit of the universities. And with good reason, since his thought distills the ethics of Christianity from the dogma. Which means that young Americans are being radicalized today by nothing more than the Enlightenment update of the creed of a seditious Jewish preacher -- “do unto others as you would have done unto you.” You may remember it.

So, I’ll grant you indoctrination.

Still, I have yet to hear of anyone being kicked out of college today for disagreeing with any of Ward Churchill’s views. In fact, Ward Churchill is busy trying to stop himself from getting kicked out. And the people kicking him out, oddly enough, hold your views.

Maybe, then, we do have a clear case of indoctrination.... by you, Mr. Horowitz]

One of our most important missions at CSPC is to expose the Ward Churchills of America. And there are many, many more where he came from. That is one reason we worked hard with the support of thousands of Americans to create our Discoverthenetworks.org website.

Discoverthenetworks.org casts a bright light on the radical left and shows, in detail, the connections between hundreds of radical organizations. We’ve also provided substantial evidence revealing the financial support these groups receive from left-wing foundations, like Ford, MacArthur and Pew, and self-serving billionaires like George Soros and Peter Lewis.

[LR: Yes, yes, yes!

Let’s throw all these dangerous radical organizations out:

The Ford Foundation, for instance, for funding “major commitments in the areas of agriculture and rural development, forest and natural resource management, reproductive health, livelihoods, human rights, governance, education and culture, religion cooperation and security and the promotion of in-country philanthropy” in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Can’t have that sort of thing going on, can we?

And let’s also throw out the sinister MacArthur Foundation, which doles out as much as $500,000 to individuals like Danielle Allen, a Classics professor at University of Chicago, to help her write about Thucydides, Aristotle, and Hobbes. Or what about Pew, which among other things, rescues galleries of impressionistic art? Between abetting Aristotle and Renoir, can the decline and fall of Western Civilization be far away?

And then there’s George Soros. Well, one can say many things about MoveOn.org, the chiapet funded by Soros, but wild-eyed radical is not one of them.]

I’m hoping you’ll help us prepare for 2006! I want to place this advertisement in at least 250 student newspapers across America over the next 60 days. To do that, the Center must raise $131,250.

Will you help me do that today? Will you take a moment to make a contribution of $25, $35, $50, $100 or even $1,000 to CSPC right now?

[LR: Cadging money like some hard-up hippie organization? Have you no shame, sir?]

We want to open 2006 by getting students, professors, and administrators’ attention: we’re watching radicals on campuses and we’re going to expose them to the public! We know from experience that running ads in 250 student newspapers that nearly 500,000 people will see this ad and be exposed to our Discoverthenetworks.org website.

And the first papers we hit will be the hotbed schools for anti-Americanism -- schools like Cal-Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia!

[LR: Berkeley, I’m sure, will wear that moniker like a carnation on its lapel. No question. Why not? Surely even lefties need one major university to themselves. After all, look at what’s fielded on the other side -- Princeton, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins -- which only approved the admission of women to undergraduate studies in 1969, University of Virginia, University of Chicago -- the Chicago boys have given their name to free-market economics, St. John’s College -- I love their Great Books curriculum, but radical it is not.

And the liberal universities? Blacks were admitted into the Ivy League not primarily because of the persuasive power of the civil rights movement but out of fear of inner-city riots. Yale, like Princeton, only accepted women because it was losing male students to colleges such as Harvard and Stanford that had begun taking women in.

Not that Harvard was a beacon of progressive thought. It started admitting women only after the Second World War and did so fully only in 1975. Harvard, note, was founded in 1636. (American Association of University Women). It also had a quota on intellectuals until not too long ago. And in the 1980s, several elite schools discriminated against Asians much as they had done against Jews earlier in the century.

So let’s judge the radical postures of the colleges to which you refer, not by what goes on in random student publications but by what the people really in power -- administration -- have to say about progressive policies, especially the one that’s really at the heart of your jihad -- the movement to discipline Israel for its misdeeds through disinvestment.

Let’s go down the roster.

Harvard? President Lawrence Summers was recently hit by his own faculty with a vote of no confidence after he privately wondered about the abilities of women in science and math. (Steven Senne, AP). Summers dubs the disinvestment campaign against Israel “anti-Semitic.”

And then there’s the well-known flower child, Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard University Law School, who opposes divestment since Israel “is a functioning democracy that guarantees full equality before the law to all its citizens, regardless of race, ethnicity or religion.” Israel’s Arab population no doubt will be enchanted to hear this. Dershowitz is also an enthusiast of legalizing torture in the name of the war on terror. Solzhenitsyn, take note.

Lawrence Bacow, President of Tufts thinks divestment is “misplaced”.

University of Pennsylvania President Judith Rodin wrote to the university community that "the University of Pennsylvania will not support divestment from Israel...”

As for Columbia, University President Lee Bollinger stated that he would "not lend any support to this proposal [divestment]." Columbia of course is where Middle Eastern studies professor, Joseph Massad, is being hounded by right-wing student zealots intent on finding the inner terrorist in a mild-mannered scholar. Massad was singled out for allegedly telling a Jewish student that if she was going to deny Israeli atrocities, she would have to leave his class (Counterpunch, April 11, 2005, “Smearing Joseph Massad -- Scapegoated at Columbia,” by Monique Dols). Just two people corroborated the "main elements" of the story, only one of whom was actually registered; in fact, the two graduate teaching assistants there and one undergraduate have no recollection of the incident and one student gave three different versions of her story. Bollinger, it should be underlined, never met with Massad, though he met with his accusers. Yet he told students publicly, “Let's just assume they're (the accusations) true.” The investigating committee followed his example and simply assumed Massad’s guilt. Bollinger continued mum right through death threats, racist e-mail, and calls from politicians and New York media demanding Massad’s firing. The class was finally canceled.

That’s how radical Columbia is.

The trouble with you, Mr. Horowitz, and the rest of the pro-war right is that your propaganda is so incessant, even you seem to have swallowed it.]

The Center made tremendous strides against the left this past year.

[LR: Yes, indeed, it has. Campus spies, orchestrated character assassinations in the blogosphere, “google smears,” such as the two against Professor Juan Cole who runs the widely respected liberal blog, Informed Consent. The smear involves creating a web of links that increases the chance that an infinitely repeated and amplified slander will come to the top of any Google search.

Some idea of what we can expect from the future activities of your Center for the Study of Popular Culture can be gauged from the past.

Here is how you and your pals characterize the American Library Association - “The ALA Library: Terrorist Sanctuary." (“The ALA Library: Terrorist Sanctuary, Paul Walfield, FrontPageMagazine.com, May 8, 2003). With equal moderation, you characterize Noam Chomsky’s work as “demonic and seditious,” list Chomsky with Eric Alterman and Edward Said in an “Intellectual Rogue's Gallery,” and insinuate that peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was deliberately mowed down by an Israeli bulldozer during a round of home demolitions, was a terrorist supporter. Yet you have nothing to say about your fellow scribe on the site, Ann Coulter, who suggested that nuking North Korea would be “fun” and that 9/11 hijackers should have flown into the New York Times offices.

Let me list some of your other accomplishments:

You are the primary figure behind the “Academic Bill of Rights,” an exercise in pure doublespeak, being introduced by Republican politicians in legislatures in Ohio, Florida, Indiana, New York, Pennsylvania and California, among other states (see “A Student Bill of Fights,” The Nation, 04/04/05).

To match this legislation, you promote campus spy-squads of young Republicans called Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), who demand the firing of liberal and radical professors by dragging unsupported student charges up to state legislative hearings while whipping up lynch-mob hysteria in the conservative blogs and media. The result is that professors like Oneida J. Meranto of Metropolitan State College of Denver, have had to tape their lectures to prove their innocence. Ms. Meranto, a 55 -year-old Native American and a single woman who was battling cancer at the time, also received death threats, had her photo posted on Frontpage Magazine, and was not given even such minimal protection as a changed email address or a lecture room close to her office although she was completely exonerated of the charges made against her, all of which had to do with exchanges with students outside, not inside, the classroom. (“A Liberal Professor Fights a Label,” by Jennifer Jacobson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/26/04)

Your legal arm, the Individual Rights Foundation, represents police officers and college professors who see themselves as victims of affirmative action. Your Wednesday Morning Club draws speakers like Newt Gingrich, George Will and William Kristol to a schmooze you host every month. The Matt Drudge Defense Fund raised $50,000 for the conservative blogger’s defense against a libel suit and provided him with two pro bono lawyers. (“David Horowitz's Long March,” Scott Sherman, July 3, 2000).]

Now we must take advantage of the momentum we’ve generated over the past year and take our battle for our culture to the next level. Discoverthenetworks.org is a vital tool in that battle.

[LR: Kulturkampf! I wondered when you were going to get to that. Maybe Ward Churchill wasn’t so wrong with that German comparison after all. Mr. Horowitz, in this country, people have a constitutionally protected right to their opinions, especially, political ones. It’s called Free Speech. It’s one of the things about America the whole world loves. Except you.

In waging kulturkampf in academia, you play bad cop to Lynn Cheney’s not-so-bad- cop. Lynn, wife of Dick, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Daddy Bush, a Kant specialist as well as bodice-ripping novelist, heads the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), which created a post-9/11 hit-list of suspect professors in need of big brother’s zealous eye. During the Eichmann fracas, it was members of ACTA’s "Governors’ Project" - the governors of Colorado and New York -- who bayed most fiercely for Ward Churchill’s blood.]

Discoverthenetworks' “Unholy Alliances” section shows the links between the so-called peace movement and Islamic radicals as well as the anti-Patriot Act coalition and Islamic radicals. It identifies pro-terrorist radicals -- like Churchill, of course, as well as Berkeley's Hatem Bazien, who called for a holy war in the United States -- and carefully details their radical positions.

[LR: What is an Islamic radical, Mr. Horowitz? Is that someone who believes their religion is the verifiable truth (like, say, a fundamentalist Christian or Jew) or is it someone who wishes the whole world to be converted to their religion (like, say, Billy Graham) or someone who actually wants to go to war for their religion (like, say, Pat Robertson and Ann Coulter)? I believe that Robertson and Graham are friends of the president. Would you consider them Christian radicals? Doesn’t that also make President Bush a Christian radical?

So, unless you have proof that Ward Churchill is a terrorist, stop smearing him. I won’t even call it McCarthyism because McCarthy did unearth a few communists. You, on the other hand, have not exposed one solitary terrorist.]

What emerges is undeniable proof of the radical left’s anti-American agenda. They’re not anti-war. They just hate America. And they’re camped out in our classrooms spewing their hatred to our young, future leaders.

[LR: If Ford foundation supporting left-wing causes is undeniable proof of anti-Americanism, then I have undeniable proof that American universities are knee-deep in killing fields around the world since at any given moment hundreds of research projects at institutions from Princeton and Berkeley to Cal Tech and Vanderbilt are being funded by the Defense Dept.]

By placing our ad in student papers across the country we can expect our already popular and useful website’s influence to grow. Frankly, without your support we won’t be able to get into the trenches with the radical left and battle them into submission.

[LR: Why ever not, Mr. Horowitz? The Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation has given you more than $3.5 million since 1988 and roughly a third of your center's annual budget of approximately $3 million, comes from the Olin, Bradley and Scaife foundations.

I am inclined to believe that adding up you speaker fees and other income, you live a much cushier life than the professors whom you think are so under-worked and over-paid. You’re also not subject to any peer-reviews and controls as they are, are you? You can pretty much claim whatever you want to without any evaluation. Nice work if you can get it.]

That’s why I’m asking for your financial support today.

Discoverthenetworks.org is doing what the major media won’t: exposing a serious threat to our nation’s well being, the powerful, well-financed radical anti-America left! I’m counting on you to stand beside me in the months ahead and I look forward to your help today. God bless.

Sincerely,

David Horowitz

President & Founder

[LR: The major media? Or the drum major media? Cheerleaders for non-existent WMD, enablers of Fallujah and Abu Ghraib. They let out barely a squeak about the passage of the Patriot Act and its successors. But they roar about the radicalism of the academy.

On March 29, 2005, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post highlighted a new study that found 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative (“College Faculties A Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds,” Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, March 29, 2005). The study showed up in the Post just after the Churchill affair broke out and as a nationwide campaign for a Student Bill of Rights had started making headway. How opportune. The bill, SB24, aims for diversity of opinion at universities. A noble goal but surely one that should extend to other institutions in the country. Why not, for instance, a quota for left-anarchists on the board of Viacom, at least two Maoists on the editorial board of the Washington Post or equal time for the Christian Peacemakers Team at the next meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?]

P.S. Please make a generous contribution right now and help me raise the $131,250 needed to run our special Discoverthenetworks.org ad in 250 college papers around the country. This will put get our website in front of at least 500,000 Americans from coast to coast.

[LR: Will do, Mr. Horowitz, as long as we also get an ad about a namesake of yours, the pro-Israeli activist group that calls itself the David Project. Its website lists the following members:

Aish HaTorah/Hasbara Fellowships, Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) Fraternity and Foundation

American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), American Jewish Committee (AJC)

The American Jewish Congress, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE)

Americans for Peace Now (APN), Anti-Defamation League (ADL),

CAMERA, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Hamagshimim, sponsored by Hadassah

Hillel - The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, Israel Program Center

Israel University Consortium (IUC), Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA)

Jewish National Fund (JNF), KESHER - Union for Reform Judaism (URJ)

KOACH - United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ), Media Watch International (MWI), Stand With Us, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America (OU), United Jewish Communities (UJC), USD - Hagshama of the World Zionist Organization, Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).

The ADL and AIPAC are two of the most powerful lobbies in the US and they routinely disrupt or influence legislation by orchestrating “astroturf” campaigns against pro-Palestinian initiatives as well as against any investigation of Israeli activities in the US. CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) intimidates print or TV journalists who dare contradict the official line on Israel.

The David Project also produced the documentary that was used to smear Joseph Massad.

David Project? Goliath seems more accurate.]

Lila Rajiva is a freelance writer in Baltimore, and the author of the must-read book The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the US Media (Monthly Review Press, 2005) She can be reached at: lrajiva@hotmail.com. Copyright (c) 2005 by Lila Rajiva