TO: SCMS Executive Council
FROM: SCMS Middle Eastern Caucus; SCMS Caucus on Class
DATE: October 11, 2007
RE: Emergency Resolution on “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”
(October 22-26, 2007)
We are writing to request that the SCMS Executive Council place the following proposed resolution to an emergency vote among the Membership:
Whereas recent attacks on academia by non-academic, neoconservative entities such as Campus Watch, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA), and David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and Terrorism Awareness Project (TAP) represent an ongoing trend towards increased policing and censorship of higher education;
Whereas these attempts to undermine professors’ abilities to teach and do research are increasingly directed at scholars who seek to provide a contextualized and critical view of recent international developments and their interaction with U.S. foreign policies and practices;
Whereas neoconservative interference in institutional decisions to deny university tenure and academic rights and provisions to qualified scholars and professors, especially to those engaged in scholarly critiques of historical and continuing conflicts in the Middle East, have become increasingly common in North American universities;
Whereas the current political context increasingly permits anti-Muslim discrimination with regard to dress codes, school prayer, security screenings and other racially and religiously overdetermined profiling;
Whereas post-911 Islam in North America is consistently maligned in neoconservative and mainstream media outlets as anti-democratic and fundamentalist;
Whereas the figure of the oppressed Muslim woman has been appropriated and is often cited by neoconservative groups as the supreme justification for waging war on sovereign nations;
Whereas scholarly methodologies and academic program curricula in the areas of Gender and Sexuality Studies have recently become the focus of debates, both public and academic, over these issues;
Whereas female and glbtq students and scholars across North America are especially likely to be targeted by this trend;
Whereas a preponderant means by which these recent attacks have been waged is the cinema (e.g., The David Project), while feminism and queer theory have been of marked significance in the growth and development of Cinema and Media Studies;
Be it resolved that SCMS opposes all privately and politically motivated, especially non- and extra-academic attempts that seek to influence the content and direction of academic programs, curricula, and methodologies by fostering a hostile, anti-intellectual campus and professional environment for teaching and learning.
Background and Justification for the Resolution:
This Emergency Resolution confronts an initiative spearheaded and sponsored recently by David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and TAP with support from his Students for Academic Freedom. The initiative, “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” is scheduled for October 22-26, 2007 and is advertised widely as “the biggest conservative campus protest ever…a wake-up call for Americans on 200 university and college campuses.”
The stated purpose of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is to expose the “Big Lies” perpetrated by the political left concerning the origins of the current “War on Terror” and the nature of scientific research concerning global climate change. Horowitz asserts that the Bush regime bears no responsibility for this “war,” and that global climate change is a hoax perpetrated by an unpatriotic “academic left” meant to distract public attention from the more urgent “terrorist threat” he claims the U.S. is facing. Despite longstanding critiques by Gender and Sexuality Studies scholars of patriarchal formations on an international scale, and notwithstanding historically documented, opportunistic support by the U.S. itself for militant Islamic leaders such as Osama bin Laden and military dictatorships including those of Saddam Hussein, Horowitz accuses Women’s Studies programs and departments of enabling these “lies” through purported ironic silence regarding the patriarchal character of Islamic fundamentalism, and of thereby exhibiting “sympathy for the enemy” of American freedom.
The Freedom Center and TAP are disseminating information and student guides for hosting Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (http://www.terrorismawareness.org) and claim to have already begun organizing events on more than 110 campuses nationwide. Many of these campuses house well-known programs and departments in Cinema and/or Media Studies as well as in Women’s Studies, including University of Iowa, UCLA, USC, UC-Berkeley, Emory University, Temple University (Philadelphia), Brooklyn College-CUNY, George Mason University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Brown University, University of Pittsburgh, Duke University, University of Colorado-Boulder, College of New Jersey, University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign, UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Delaware, Stanford University, Penn State, Tulane University, Georgia Tech, and NC State University. We believe that scholars, professors, and students belonging to these racially and religiously diverse urban and suburban campuses shall draw strength from this Emergency Resolution as it reaffirms their right to uphold for rigorous intellectual scrutiny Horowitz’s erroneous and prejudicial characterization of Islam in these guides as “the violent expansionist ideology of the so-called ‘religion of peace’ that seeks the destruction or subjugation of other faiths, cultures, and systems of government.”
Among other things, the TAP guides promote campus teach-ins on “The Oppression of Women in Islam” as well as supply petitions denouncing “Islamo-Fascist violence against women, gays, Christians, Jews and non-religious people,” and promote sit-ins at Women’s Studies departments and Women’s Centers and campus screenings of films about “the Islamo-Fascist crusade against America, Israel and the West.” The stated goal of these events is to “refute the curriculum of the left, which teaches that America is the enemy in the war on terror and that terrorists are ‘freedom fighters’ whom progressives should support.” Insofar as the promotion of several anti-Muslim films, complete with canned post-screening discussion questions, is a key element in Horowitz’s campus initiative, we believe that SCMS members are uniquely qualified to expose and counter the superficial and literalist character of that initiative as it propagates theoretically uninformed, ideologically displaced understandings of the production, dissemination, and reception of moving images.
Though Horowitz is likely to declare success if his self-proclaimed “controversial” initiative diverts any amount of time and resources from more productive pursuits, we believe that it is worth taking a public position against the ostensibly planned events, which we re-understand as occasions for students and scholars, feminists and cineastes among them, to educate their peers and colleagues about the larger issues which conservative groups such as TAP and ACTA (the latter spearheaded by Lynne Cheney and Joseph Lieberman) claim to represent and for which they deem to hold the moral high ground. The planned series of students protests will likely be “astro-turf” affairs largely devoid of genuine student support—Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom chapters are little more than Potemkin villages funded by neoconservative foundations. However, like Horowitz’s prior, failed initiative, the Academic Bill of Rights, and echoing heightened public discourse around continuing neoconservative attacks on scholars of Middle Eastern history and culture (among them Nadia Abu El-Haj, Norman Finkelstein, Mehren Larudee, Wadi Said [son of the late Edward Said], Hamid Dabashi, Rashid Khalidi, Joseph Massad, and others), these “protests” will also likely attract significant attention in the media and among politically sensitive college and university officials and may result in deleterious actions against Women’s Studies programs and departments, many of which are already hard-hit by politically motivated budget cuts and impending closures since at least 9/11/01.
According to the U.S. Supreme Court, “It is the business of a university to provide
that atmosphere which is most conducive to speculation, experiment, and creation. It is an atmosphere in which there prevail ‘the four essential freedoms’ of a university—to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study” (stated by Justice Felix
Frankfurter in Sweezy v. New Hampshire [354 U.S. 234 1957] and Justice Lewis Powell in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke [438 U.S. 265 1978]). According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), however, the political interference by conservatives demanding “political diversity” on so-called left-dominated campuses is a direct assault on the First Amendment. It marks “not an alignment of conservative versus liberal, but rather individuals for and against institutional autonomy” (http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/protectrights/legal/Updates-speeches/Baruchupdate.htm). Therefore, according to the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), “academic freedom is not a liberal, progressive, or leftist issue, but a matter of concern for all scholars, regardless of their political beliefs” (http://www.meanthro.org/Handbook-1.pdf).
As the above-referenced MESA handbook reminds, teachers and academic scholars have a professional obligation to fulfill our responsibilities in the classroom, in the wider university, and to the academy at large—responsibilities which demand imparting to students and colleagues our clearest understanding, based upon the best research available, of the events and ideas central to our courses and research, even and especially when this understanding is unpopular or runs counter to prevailing norms and preconceptions.
In view of these points, we urge the SCMS Executive Council to encourage an adoption of this proposed Emergency Resolution against “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” and in that way to take a leadership position amongst North American academic organizations by formally challenging the deleterious trend marked by TAP and ACTA toward increasing censorship and intimidation of U.S. students and scholars.