Really, who’d have imagined it? A raging left-wing radical and campus organizer becoming a brave, self-sacrificing and extremely effective American patriot?
To me, it evokes the New Testament account of Saul of Tarsus, first seen persecuting Jewish disciples of Jesus, throwing them in prison and even holding the coats of men who were stoning to death the young Christian martyr Stephen. After a very dramatic encounter on the road to Damascus, Saul became the Apostle Paul and repeatedly risked everything, including his life, to proclaim the very truths he’d been persecuting others for preaching.
And being the most intellectual and educated of the early disciples, Paul wrote lengthy letters to churches in the first century A.D. that became about a third of the New Testament itself. Who’d have imagined such a thing?
Well, to my mind, David Horowitz is a modern embodiment of that very kind of phenomenon. In his young adult years, he was a socialist, an anti-war activist, an organizer of demonstrations on college campuses – a firebrand anti-establishment spokesman. His personal story and the events that led to his 180-degree political turnaround are related autobiographically in his “Radical Son,” too long to elaborate here, but a fascinating story, to say the least.
In 1988, he founded, with Peter Collier, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. A nonprofit organization, its expressed purpose was to do just what its title proposed – look analytically at our society and determine what was enhancing and promoting it, and what influences were threatening it. Over time, through Horowitz’s tireless and inventive efforts, the Center became one of the most effective voices in America – for America, and its traditional best interests.
Recently renamed the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the tight-knit organization has created the website www.terrorismawareness.org and launched an urgent campaign to combat the lack of understanding as to the need for the War on Terror, especially on college campuses where, too often, the unwillingness to focus on the face of our real enemies is compounded by a tendency to blame America first.
The Freedom Center has recruited exemplary young campus coordinators (in the very mold of young David, but with conservative and pro-American ideology) – some 146 of them at last count. Their Terrorism Awareness Project, or TAP, produces materials on terrorism for distribution on campus and in the general populace. So far, in its 18-month history, TAP has released or has in production 10 major pamphlets about the origins and intentions of radical Islam, over 250,000 of which will have been distributed, primarily to university students, by the end of 2008:
- “What Americans Need To Know About Jihad”
- “The Islamic Mein Kampf”
- “The Nazi Roots of Palestinian Nationalism and Islamic Jihad”
- “The Oppression of Women in Islam”
- “Jimmy Carter’s War Against The Jews”
- “Plan For Genocide”
- “The Muslim Students Association and the Jihad Network”
- “Palestine: America’s Enemy”
- “Muslim Persecution of Christians”
- “The Next Mideast War”
In addition, TAP has created and is completing six flash videos. About six minutes in length, each has been sent to the electronic mailboxes of over two and a half million students and faculty and members – and the general public – on these same topics.
Why the heavy emphasis on colleges and universities? Because David knows firsthand that these are the main breeding ground for anti-American ideology! These materials constitute a counter curriculum with a two-fold objective: to discredit the anti-American propaganda that has become the “white noise” in the college classroom, and to educate students on the realities of Islamic fundamentalism’s threat to America and the West. It’s real, it’s extremely serious, and must be recognized for what it is – war, from without and within.
And – David insists we recognize – a main battlefield is our college classrooms!
The Freedom Center translated this counter curriculum into action in Islamo-Fascism Awareness Weeks, in October 2007 and again in April 2008. Both events generated national news coverage and involved thousands of students on over 100 campuses, all over the country. Both featured noteworthy speakers, including former senators and Muslim dissidents, and screenings of documentary films about Islamo-Fascism like “Obsession” and ABC’s powerful “The Road To 9/11.” The second event focused heavily on the role played by the Muslim Students Association, an increasingly potent organization fomenting a “stealth jihad” on our campuses – in heartland America.
The Center has documented, and the speakers emphasized, that Middle Eastern Studies departments have been “colonized” through Saudi and Arab Emirate money. As a result, these departments – UC Berkeley and Columbia University are the most notorious examples – have become strongholds of jihadist apologetics that are anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-West and “understanding” on the issue of radical Islam (which is to say that the terrorist acts are the result of American policy rather than the warped religious ideologies of the jihadists).
Most of us have no idea that the Muslim Students Association has 150 chapters at elite universities, or that it was created by the Muslim Brotherhood, godfather organization to Hamas and al-Qaida, as part of a plan to build a network of institutions that would, in the manner of communist front groups (with which young Horowitz was intimately familiar), subvert America from within, starting with our young college kids.
The Muslim Students Association chapters make no effort to conceal their objectives. The USC chapter not far from my home, for instance, brazenly displays the Islamic hadith (“holy teaching”) calling for the murder of all Jews on its website. Members of MSA at UC Irvine wear the Hamas armbands and green sashes of the shahada (suicide bombers) during graduation ceremonies!
Just bringing our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan will not end the war we’re in. The war has been going on for at least 15 years now, and our mortal ideological enemies are more dedicated to our total destruction than ever. And now they’ve cunningly devised a way to invade our college campuses to corrupt our own young.
David Horowitz, an unlikely but courageous patriot, is the Gen. Petraeus orchestrating the essential “surge” confrontation of the jihadist Islamo-Fascists on our college campuses. We all should go to the www.terroristawareness.org website and see how we can support David and his student army – before the poison becomes permanent.
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