Features > November 16, 2007

Wingnut Awareness Week

Neocons beat the war drum on college campuses

By Adam Doster

You know that feeling people get when they drive past a car accident? It’s clear that the wreckage is terrifying, but they can’t bring themselves to look away. That’s how I felt wandering into DePaul University’s Cortelyou Commons on a rainy Chicago night in mid-October to attend “War With Iran?” Organized by the DePaul Conservative Alliance (DCA), this panel presentation kicked off the university’s opening contribution to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (IFAW), a nationwide campaign sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. For some masochistic reason, I had to see this wingnut carnival for myself.

To describe the evening’s panelists as wacky would be an understatement. Amir Abbas Fakhravar is a self-proclaimed “Iranian student dissident leader,” who has been embraced by neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen as an authority on the Iranian regime’s ruthlessness. Their support for him comes in spite of—perhaps because of—his dubious biography and reputation as an opportunist. In fact, Iranian journalists, student activists and former inmates told Mother Jones’ Laura Rozen that Iranian police arrested Fakhravar for a nonpolitical crime and that he took on the identity of a political prisoner once behind bars. When I emailed Ali Moazzami—a former editor at Shargh, a popular liberal newspaper in Iran that the regime shut down in August—for his opinion of Fakhravar, he replied, in all caps, “NOT ANY IMPORTANT [STUDENT] GROUP TAKES HIM SERIOUSLY.”

Next to Fakhravar sat Robert Spencer, the founder and director of the website Jihad Watch and the author of six books that blame the teachings and practice of Islam for producing Islamic terrorism.

For those in the audience who came to the panel looking to be offended (I’d guess 60 percent), Spencer did not disappoint. He chastised the left for its inability to hold discussions without “violent intransigence and smears.” He ranted about the obstinately violent nature of Islam. He bullied the first questioner, forcing the student to define neoconservatism on the spot. And he suggested that people protesting his writing were “abetting in the persecution” of Muslims.

When someone asked an insightful question about how best to deal with inflexible ideologues, he ducked it. My favorite quirk was Spencer’s insistence on quoting—four times—a line from Pope Benedict XVI’s 2006 lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany: “To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.” He neglected to share that during this talk the Pope also said: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman.”

Fakhravar was hardly better. He recounted the treatment he was subjected to in Iran, abuses that everyone in the room could agree were heinous. Then he suggested America cannot negotiate constructively with Iranian leaders because the regime has already declared war by killing our soldiers in Iraq. With that, his testimony devolved into propaganda for the current war in Iraq and a future war in Iran.

Fakhravar maintained that the Iraq War had weakened terrorism abroad. He slammed the “academic view” of Professor Scott Hibbard, who was a third panelist, for his lack of “realism” and belittled a student who suggested that such testimony could be used to lay the groundwork for a U.S. invasion.

Every dodge or denigrating insinuation from Spencer and Fakhravar riled the offended, emotional and self-righteous student activists in attendance. On multiple occasions, DCA members wrestled the microphone from the grip of a loudly indignant protester, who had thus rendered his or her potentially poignant question worthless. One student overshot his 30-second time limit and was escorted out of the room by two burly men, neither of whom seemed interested in American foreign policy. And political devotees from both sides of the spectrum booed and hissed every critical challenge.

Spencer and Fakhravar’s DePaul visit was not an anomalous event. On the same day, students across the country kicked off IFAW, the Horowitz-led effort to confront “two big ideas of the Academic Left.” First, that Bush created the war on terror. And, second, that global warming is a larger risk than Islamic terrorism.

“We think that radical Islamic terrorism is the greatest threat that America and other Western nations are facing,” says Mick Paskiewicz, a DePaul sophomore and vice president of DCA, a student group described as “a non-partisan organization that promotes all flavors of conservatism.”

“What we hoped to do was clarify what that threat is and where it’s coming from,” says Paskiewicz.

Modeled after tactics of the ’60s anti-war movement, to which the onetime-Maoist-turned-neoconservative Horowitz is no stranger, conservatives on more than 100 campuses organized a five-day binge of demonstrations, speaking engagements and sit-ins. Many of the workshops focused on the persecution of Islamic women, an issue on which Horowitz and his comrades believe the academy is resolutely silent. But their criticism ignores loads of academic research examining the treatment of women in Muslim nations, like Riffat Hassan’s studies of Pakistani honor killings at the University of Louisville and Abdullahi An-Naim’s work on religion and human rights at Emory University, to name two.

Such pesky evidence didn’t stop right-wing commentator Ann Coulter and former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum—heroes of feminists everywhere—from making their pitch at several colleges. The Young Americans for Freedom chapter at Michigan State University upped the ante, inviting British neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Nick Griffin to East Lansing. Elsewhere, students showed documentaries about “the Islamo-Fascist crusade against America,” and passed out pamphlets like “The Islamic Mein Kampf” and “Jimmy Carter’s War Against the Jews.”

To its credit, the DCA tried to foster a more amicable atmosphere by promoting the week’s events under the less-controversial banner “Terrorism Awareness Week.” It also offered Hibbard a chance to present a dissenting opinion, which he used to eloquently downplay ideology in favor of an understanding of U.S.-Iranian tension through the broader lens of regional power and control of natural resources. But giving Fakhravar and Spencer such a prominent platform—and the vast majority of speaking time—legitimized their fringe positions and invalidated the students’ attempt to raise consciousness about the dangers of terrorism.

If awareness was, in fact, the intention, the DCA and its chosen speakers could have analyzed a politically and religiously divided Muslim world. They could have questioned how, if Islam is inherently violent, nearly 1.5 billion people study and worship the religion peacefully. They could have considered Middle Eastern tensions pragmatically, focusing less on religious fundamentalism and more on the incentives that push countries like Iran toward nuclear enrichment. They could have studied how Western imperialism—and, more recently, American involvement—helped radicalize Muslim jihadists. Hell, they could have scrutinized Horowitz’s motivation for using the term “Islamo-Fascism”—an ahistorical, over-generalized neologism that alienates potential allies.

But IFAW does not exist to promote the exchange of ideas. Rather, it creates a facile dichotomy between Good and Evil, exemplified by Horowitz’s petition drive designed to force students and faculty “to declare their allegiances: either to fighting our terrorist adversaries or failing to take action to stop our enemies.” This intensifies fear and Muslim xenophobia, both of which are tools in the neoconservative strategy to build public and legislative support for imperial actions. And when members of the left protest these efforts, the right paints a caricature of them as naive and weak, lacking the fortitude to ignore the “PC police” and smoke those terrorists out of their holes.

IFAW deliberately blurs the diversity of Muslim identity and blocks the intellectual dialogue folks like Spencer purport to seek. No wonder one-third of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was “personally involved” in 9/11, according to a September New York Times/CBS News poll.

I didn’t learn a great deal about Salafists or jihadists during IFAW, but I did take away a message central to the evening’s discussion. “If you’re not offended four or more times a day on campus,” DCA President Nicholas Hahn III warned the audience, “you should probably ask for your money back.”

That statement reveals how conservatives view the role of higher education. It is not an impassive search to deepen, broaden, and complicate our understanding of the world, but a commodity that should titillate or anger. And that makes sense: Calm, rational people do not rush to join irrational demagogues—at home and abroad—who beckon us toward never-ending war.

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• Reader Comments

  When we get outside the gates of college campus sanctuaries, we find that most average Americans appreciate the opportunity to gain more insight into what they quite rightfully perceive (after 9/11, the shoe-bomber, 7/7, and 9000 or so other Muslim terrorist attacks, bombings, countless threats and promises) to be a threat to their security. 

  There have been many attempts such as this by college conservatives or Jewish student organizations to host people who dare to sound a warning about, and provide valuable insight into this threat.  They are invariably met with protest marches, shouting down and often their events are canceled due to concerns for safety.  However this particular event went down - I haven’t seen video of it - I think the author mischaracterizes and covers up the prevalent true nature of conservative sponsored events on college campuses. 

  Personally I resent one side being free to invite their speakers, put on their events and yell out loudly their opinions largely unchallenged, and another side not being afforded anything close to that luxury.

  Posted by Natalie on Nov 18, 2007 at 3:57 PM

  The young man in the YouTube video from Natalie’s link has it dead on, right on the money. I’ll be showing that clip to my students.

  However, although it is obvious that leftish types who shout down their rightish opposite numbers and refuse to allow the airing of their views are guilty of being boorish, illiberal fools, I think the same can be said about a number of public personalities and leaders who claim to be on the side of “right”, not least George W. Bush and the faction who brought him to power, and the media apologists who stump for both.

  When, for example, discussions about the Iraq War are met with, “Are you with America or the terrorists?”, or equivalent dichotomies, it’s no less of a block to intelligent discourse. Patriotic but angry people who consider the war a terrible transgression find themselves forced into a false choice, as though the uncritical backing of that or any war is the difference between loving one’s country and its ideals, and outright treason.

  It’s just a rhetorical tactic, to force the conversation into channels the dichotomists want to control.

  The same is true of cultural imperialists who want to enshrine their own religious understandings within the law, particularly in the form of Constitutional amendments. Pluralism and active democracy is what they aren’t about. What both of those factions desire is mass conformity, in a way no different in spirit than any communistic suppressors they might point fingers at, for shutting down views they consider an impediment to their program.

  In that way, although they’re not looking forward to the same specific goals as the jihadists, they certainly are cut from the same rigid, anti-pluralistic cloth.

  Posted by Kuya on Nov 19, 2007 at 12:17 AM

  In that way, although they’re not looking forward to the same specific goals as the jihadists, they certainly are cut from the same rigid, anti-pluralistic cloth.

  I think you vastly overstate the mindset of (I assume you mean) the “religious right”.  Not only are you being inaccurate, but in so doing, you are demonstrating a fear-engendering, policy shaping agenda of your own.  You’re putting average Americans, who simply resent long held standards and values being unjustly redefined and shut out of the public square, in the same cubby-hole as murderous, torturous barbarians, in an effort to demonize them and marginalize them politically. 

  Now of course the religious left employs its own “discourse blocking rhetoric” in order to move toward their socialist utopia.  We are all made to feel guilty about not supporting government enforced redistribution, supposedly to help the poor.

  The climate change hysteria is another perfect example of the left employing “discourse blocking rhetoric”.  Anyone who dares to question the particulars of the relationship between CO2, the sun, man and warming, or the wisdom of putting world-wide brakes on growth and energy use is singled out as a “flat-earther”, or a “denier”, in reference to the Holocaust type.

  No, George Bush and religious right have no corner on the “rhetorical tactics that force conversations into channels” market.

  My opinion is that it’s far more common on the left, actually.  And when it comes to the simple common courtesy of allowing others to present their views, they display little or no desire to even enter that market.

  Posted by Natalie on Nov 20, 2007 at 1:47 PM

  Hello Natalie,
  I suppose it’s a difference of experience between the two of us. It’s true what you say that lefty partisans can be guilty of forcing false choices with bullying talk, and the example you cite is a good one because when I’ve tried to talk to some acquaintances I know who are global warming partisans (e.g. mentioning Freeman Dyson’s skepticism about the computer models used to measure and anticipate climate change effects), I have been shut down and the conversation pretty much ends.

  Questioning the faith, yes? Guilty of heresy.

  Yes.

  Thank God for heresy. That’s only partly tongue-in-cheek.

  (For the record, I think it’s mad not to rein in emissions by way of applied technology, and I don’t believe we have to scuttle economic development in order to do so. Using efficient approaches to energy is itself an aspect of that development, regionally and globally, but does require a future-oriented emphasis more so than an immediate-profit emphasis. The atmosphere is thin.)

  But again, I have also had quite a few arguments online and in person with so-called “religious rightists” (forgive the generality) who are at least as intransigent as their lefty opposite numbers.

  It’s surely because of several of my own views, not least my attitudes on marriage rights

  ...I want you to be able to marry whoever you love…

  and the Iraq War

  ...in the last 4 years I’ve had three “friends” and two family members call me a traitor in anger! That’s just bitter.

  ...it’s because of those views that I’ve smacked heads with more of the rightish kind of dogmatism than the leftish. But I don’t respect left-dogmatists either. In a nutshell, they both shout or talk stridently a lot, and do not listen, ever.

  That means they already think they know it all, that they have nothing to learn from the other. That’s illiberal (in the classical sense, not this blue-v.-red, either-or, “opposite of American” stuff that’s called “liberal” in sneering media-hyped tones… there’s that false dichotomy again).

  I try to take people as individuals and speak with them and hear them out about what they think, but it is easy to get overly general, so I take your point about (accidentally) implying that all “religious rightists” think monolithically, or that regular folks singing psalms at worship are like suicide bombers.

  Nonetheless, I do feel that the president and at least his more shrill apologists have helped create an atmosphere in which ordinary folks who don’t buy the “with us or against us” line get drowned out by all the shouting, in regards to this war in Iraq. You may know, I’ve thought all along it was a monumental travesty, if putting the brakes on jihadism was the goal.

  And regarding your point about a fear-engendered policy of my own, I actually do have a deep feeling of foreboding about any religion, Judeo-Christian or Chic-Pagan or Caliphate-Islamist, that is able to lay hands on the law and bend it to their doctrinal will, since I consider the law to be a bludgeon, at best a bridle, almost always. I want religious values and behavioral limits to be personal, a matter of individual conviction and discipline, not enforceable by law. I think only devotedly secular legal norms can uphold real freedom of religious expression, or free expression of any kind.

  I simply don’t trust, and do expect the worst from, those who approach their attempt to control the power of the law from the position of certitude that religion fosters (including secular “religion”, e.g. Maoism). It’s that assuredness that they have the whole truth. Yes, people like that are scary. I don’t want them to control the law, majority or not. They never doubt their own righteousness. That’s a dangerous way to think. Dangerous for the rest of us.

  Like I said, in large part it’s a matter of personal experiences. But I will keep your criticism in mind.

  That’s what good liberals do, if they’re really liberal and not collectivists.

  Posted by Kuya on Nov 21, 2007 at 3:00 AM

  “Personally I resent one side being free to invite their speakers, put on their events and yell out loudly their opinions largely unchallenged, and another side not being afforded anything close to that luxury.”

  Right on, Natalie. This is the reason that I’m going on tour next week myself, to promote “Judaeo-Terrorism Awareness Week.” Remember how Israel dropped over 1 million cluster bombs on civillian neighborhoods in Lebanon last year - just one incident in a long string of ‘terrorist attacks’’ that the US media pretends never happened?

  For quick updates on my tour, be sure to tune in to Fox “news.” You know that Fox will make sure that both sides are heard.

  Posted by Nike on Nov 23, 2007 at 6:57 AM

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