Here’s one thing you can’t blame on President Obama: the politically correct approach to radical Islam on American campuses was well under way before he took office. “The Achilles’ heel of democratic societies, as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski once observed, is also their moral foundation—the principle of tolerance, which they extend even to those who want to destroy them,” author and activist David Horowitz writes in The Black Book of the American Left. “The Islamists understand this vulnerability and therefore have exploited it as a central strategy along with the intimidation they conduct through terror.”
“By deploying defamatory expressions like ‘bigotry’ and ‘Islamaphobia,’ they seek to stigmatize their opponents, namely anyone who attempts to draw attention to the political nature of their movement, its imperialistic ambitions, its support for terrorism, its oppression of women, its hostility to other religions, and its virulent hatred of Christians and Jews. By casting themselves as the victims of religious persecution, Islamists have succeeded to a remarkable extent in censoring and marginalizing these critics.”
Horowitz knows whereof he speaks. He attempted to draw attention to this trend in a series of events on colleges campuses, which Accuracy in Academia covered, that were, to put it mildly, tumultuously received. The founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center chronicles these efforts in The Black Book.
“From the attacks of September 2001 until the fall of 2007, the term ‘Islamo-Fascism’ had been all but banned from public discourse—most incomprehensively in the university community, the center of the nation’s intellectual discourse, where presumably every idea exists to be examined,” Horowitz writes. “Aside from a handful of conservatives and Christopher Hitchens, a radical chastened by the attacks of 9/11, virtually no one was using this term.”
“Or, more precisely, no one was willing to take the risk of using this term, given the kind of slander that CAIR and its supporters on the left were ready to direct at them.” CAIR would be the Council on American Islamic Relations.
This is the fourth volume of Horowitz’s collected writings, subtitled Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews. You can get more recent information on this conflict at the Horowitz Freedom Center’s news website—www.jewhatredoncampus.org.
