National Project in Defense of Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academia
October 21, 2007
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
[Download this statement (Press Release Oct20.doc)]
Contact:
Reggie Dylan: (626) 319-1730
Email: criticalxthinking@yahoo.com
Website: www.defendcriticalthinking.org
Opposition Mounts in Response to David Horowitz's Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.
There has been increasing opposition by students, scholars and organizations around the country to David Horowitz's Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (IFAW) during October 22-26. The National Project to Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academia (www.defendcriticalthinking.org) is reporting on student and faculty plans at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, USC, DePaul University, Emory University, Boise State, the University of Washington, Columbia University, and elsewhere. More activities are being announced every day.
A newly formed Chicago Committee to Resist 'Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week' is calling on "students, faculty, and all people of conscience to come to DePaul to defeat Horowitz' reactionary offensive.” They call on people to rally an hour before Robert Spencer’s speech at DePaul on Monday, Oct. 22nd, and have plans to respond to every event organized by the DePaul Conservative Alliance.
Professors Peter McLaren, Juan Gomez Quinones and Alan Jones, and Larry Everest, author of Oil, Power, and Empire will take part in a forum at UCLA on Tuesday at 1 p.m.; and Everest will join UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies graduate student/acting instructor Roberto Hernandez for a panel discussion, entitled "Who Are the Real Fascists?," Tuesday evening on the Berkeley campus.
At UC Davis, the Muslim Student Association is responding to IFAW with "Academic Freedom Week," with a series of forums and film showings. At Tulane, students are circulating a petition in opposition to Ann Coulter's talk there, saying that it is "an event encouraging violence and hate towards members of our community." Students at Emory, which is one of the schools hosting David Horowitz, began events in opposition the week before IFAW.
Many organizations have released statements condemning IFAW, including The Committee for an Open Discussion of Zionism, The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Jewish Voice for Peace, Muslim Students Association, Council on American Islamic Relations and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. World Can't Wait-Drive Out the Bush Regime has said that IFAW aims to "create an atmosphere at these colleges where it is okay to be openly racist and reactionary."
A variety of scholars and others have spoken out in opposition to IFAW and its proponents. Gary Leupp of Tufts University has said called IFAW a "hate campaign" which "is more than an affront to Muslims. It is an insult to everybody's intelligence." Noted linguist and political writer Noam Chomsky recently said of Horowitz and his allies, "It's pointless to debate such lunacy, but it's wrong to disregard it." He added that, "in a free society, there should be zero tolerance for institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young, or for the rest of the attacks on democracy under the cynical pretext of defending democracy." Chomksy made these comments at a recent forum on Academic Freedom held at the University of Chicago where nearly 1,000 people listened to and engaged scholars Tony Judt, John Mearsheimer, Tariq Ali and others.
Critics are particularly concerned about Horowitz’s plan of staging sit-ins at Women’s Studies Departments. This will be done, he says, in order to raise awareness of the oppression of women under Islamic fundamentalism and protest the “silence” of feminists on the subject. Reggie Dylan notes that, “Women's Studies scholars have actually been at the forefront of supporting the rights of women (and gays and lesbians) under Islamic fundamentalism. And without Women's Studies departments and the feminist struggles which gave rise to them, people like Horowitz would not even be giving hypocritical lip-service to the oppression of women anywhere.” Sunsara Taylor of World Can't Wait-Drive Out the Bush Regime says that given Horowitz’s track record, he “is a man who has no right to speak on behalf of women.”
Some of the speakers for IFAW, such as Ann Coulter, Rick Santorum and Horowitz himself, are well known. Many of the others are not broadly known, though some are politically well-connected and influential. Robert Spenser, the director of Jihad Watch, has led seminars on Islam and jihad for United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, a Department of Homeland Security task force, and branches of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Michael Ledeen, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was said by the Washinton Post to be Rove's main international affairs adviser. Daniel Pipes, whose Campus Watch encourages students to report on the "anti-Israel" bias of professors, recently joined Rudolph Giuliani's presidential campaign as an advisor. Nonie Darwish is an Egyptian convert to Christian fundamentalism who has said, “Islam is cruel, anti-women, anti-religious freedom and anti-personal freedom in general.”
One of the groups most concerned about IFAW has been the Muslim Students Association, along with other Muslim and Arab organizations. Horowitz has called the MSA a front for Islamic terrorists and insisted they sign his petition or be branded as an enemy of the US. Muslim students have expressed concern that women wearing head scarves could be physically attacked by students motivated by Horowitz. One student worried that IFAW represented the beginning of a "Krystalnacht for Muslims," a reference to the pogrom of Jews by the Nazis and their brownshirts in 1933.
Besides their specific concerns about IFAW, these groups have pointed to Horowitz's website frontpagemagazine.com as a regular source of anti-Islam material. One article called for "a complete stop to Muslim immigration, and … creative ways to deport all Muslim non-citizens" in order to create "an environment where the practice of Islam is made not easy but difficult.” Another says an "average" devout Muslim is a "soulless robot … [who] hates all non-Moslems, a "beast" with only "the body of a human being." Other Horowitz allies have said "Osama bin Laden is a very good Muslim -- a model one, in fact, and one of the most devout in the 1400 years of Islam," and "Muslims have no allegiance to any country. Their only allegiance is to Islam.”
IFAW comes in the wake of a number of high profile cases in which professors have been forced from their university. In June, tenured Ethnic Studies Professor Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado-Boulder was fired – many felt that he had been subjected to an intense investigation solely because of his political views. In May, prominent DePaul University political scientist Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure, with many DePaul faculty and others seeing it as an attempt to punish one side of a controversial debate.
Together, these two cases were seen by many in academia as part of a much broader attack on academic freedom, critical thinking and dissent. Reggie Dylan notes that "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is a dangerous offensive intended to deepen the already serious chill in academia by bringing together an aggressive social base and unleashing it on what Horowitz calls the “tenured left.” He adds, "IFAW cannot be allowed to go down unchallenged. It needs to be thoroughly exposed, repudiated and politically defeated."
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The National Project in Defense of Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academia has a number of spokespeople available. Contact the following for comments on David Horowitz, Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week and the need to defend dissent and critical thinking in academia. Except where indicated, they are also available for radio and television interviews.
Bill Ayers: (312) 343-0101, bayers@uic.edu
Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and founder of both the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, teaches courses in interpretive and qualitative research, urban school change, and teaching and the modern predicament.
Noam Chomsky: (617) 253-7819, chomsky@mit.edu
Noam Chomsky is one of America's most prominent political dissidents. A renowned professor of linguistics at MIT, he has authored over 30 political books dissecting such issues as U.S. interventionism in the developing world, the political economy of human rights and the propaganda role of corporate media. Chomsky is not available for television interviews at this time.
Reggie Dylan: (626) 319-1730, criticalxthinking@yahoo.com
Dylan is the spokesperson for The National Project to Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academia.
Larry Everest: (510) 684.2104, larryeverest@hotmail.com
Larry Everest's most recent work is Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the US Global Agenda (Common Courage Press, 2003). Everest has covered the Middle East and Central Asia for over 20 years for the Revolution newspaper and other publications. In 1986 Everest wrote Behind the Poison Cloud: Union Carbide’s Bhopal Massacre, based on his on-the-scene investigation in Bhopal, India shortly after the gas disaster. In 1991, shortly after the end of the Persian Gulf War, Everest went to Iraq to document the impact of the war on the Iraqi people and filmed the award-winning video Iraq: War Against the People.
Richard A. Falk: (90-216) 318 6672, rfalk@Princeton.edu
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice at Princeton University; Visiting Distinguished Professor (since 2002), Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Falk is currently traveling in Turkey and may be unavailable at times.
Henry Giroux: (905) 525-9140 ext. 26551, henry.giroux@gmail.com
Giroux currently holds the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. He is the author of 39 books, including The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy, Paradigm Publishers (2004), Against the New Authoritarianism: Politics After Abu Ghraib, Arbeiter Ring Publishing (2005), Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability, Paradigm Publishers, (2006), and The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, Paradigm Publishers, (2007).
Gary Leupp: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion, at Tufts University and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He has written articles for Dissident Voice and Counterpunch.
Yifat Susskind: (212) 627-0444
Yifat Susskind, MADRE's Communications Director, was active in the Israeli women's peace movement for several years and directed a project at a joint Israeli-Palestinian human rights organization in Jerusalem before joining MADRE. She is the author of a MADRE report entitled ‘Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq,’ which examines the incidence, causes, and legalization of gender-based violence in Iraq since the US-led invasion. She has written extensively on US foreign policy and women's human rights; her critical analysis has appeared in online and print publications such as TomPaine.com, Foreign Policy in Focus, and The W Effect: Bush's War on Women, published by the Feminist Press in 2004. Ms. Susskind has been featured as a commentator on CNN, National Public Radio, and BBC Radio.
Sunsara Taylor: (626) 319-1730, sunsarasworld@yahoo.com
Sunsara Taylor writes for Revolution newspaper and sits on the Advisory Board of The World Can’t Wait—Drive Out the Bush Regime. She has appeared on/in The New York Times, The O'Reilly Factor, CNN's Showbiz Tonight, Fox's Hannity & Colmes, Fox & Friends, the Alan Colmes Radio Show, and her writing has appeared in Revolution (revcom.us), TruthDig.com, TruthOut.org, CounterPunch.org, OnlineJournal.com, OpEdNews.com, SmirkingChimp.com, and numerous blogs.
John K. Wilson: (773) 227-8136, (773) 606-7830 (cell), collegefreedom@yahoo.com
Founder, Institute for College Freedom, www.collegefreedom.org, collegefreedom.blogspot.com: Author, "Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies" (Paradigm Publishers, December 2007): Author, "Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest" (Paradigm Publishers, October 2007), www.obamapolitics.com