David Horowitz, Meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Don't you love it when American right wing nutjobs start crawling even further right and bump right into their avowed enemies?
Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Tuesday for a purge of liberal and secular teachers from the country's universities, urging students to return to 1980s-style radicalism.
"Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities," the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying during a meeting with a group of students.
David Horowitz, publisher of FrontPage magazine, and whose archive of articles is available online, has long advocated for something he calls "an academic bill of rights." Essentially, the academic bill of rights argues in language that would make the sophists blush with pleasure, that universities are not teaching, they are indoctrinating, and therefore, "intellectual balance" should be brought to bear. It's carefully worded to indicate that no professor should be hired or fired based on political views. It all sounds so reasonable. And then, when you click on Professor Horowitz's blurbs for his most recent book, The Professors, you find this:
The Professors
by David Horowitz
$27.95 $17.45
David Horowitz reveals a shocking and perverse culture of academics who are poisoning the minds of today's college students. The Professors is a wake-up call to all those who assume that a college education is sans hatred of America and the American military and support for America's terrorist enemies.
Or you can follow the links to his other web site: Dangerous Professors. What's interesting in reading through Horowitz's constant refrains about dangerous professors is they all seem to be tarred with the same "leftist" brush. If Horowitz has openly criticized a conservative professor, I've yet to see it.
In an article entitled "The Campus Blacklist," Horowitz asserts the following.
In state universities the political bias against conservatives in the hiring process amounts to an illegal political patronage operation, which provides huge advantages to the Democratic Party and to the political left. Democratic and leftwing activists are subsidized and provided platforms at institutions with billion dollar budgets. Allegedly scholarly reports on capital punishment, racism, poverty and other volatile political issues that make their way into the national media are virtually guaranteed to have a leftwing spin. Leftwing political journalists are themselves provided sinecures in the form of university professorships, while politically left journals are often underwritten by university presses. Leftist journalism schools provide a steady stream of cadre to the nation’s media institutions. Campus funds available for political activities are inequitably distributed to student groups with leftwing agendas. (The ratio is normally in the neighborhood of 50-1.) These fees underwrite an army of radical speakers and agitators who operate nationally, while skewing the politics of the campus strongly to the left. Among its other effects is the spread of political hypocrisy. The same people who demand campaign finance reform in national politics enjoy the benefits of a system in which students are taxed to provide funds almost exclusively to one side of the political debate.
From today's Middle East Times:
TEHRAN -- Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Tuesday vowed to cleanse schools and universities of liberal influences, continuing a drive to restore revolutionary values to the Islamic republic.
"Our educational system has been influenced by secular thoughts for 150 years in a way that self-belief and identity have been ignored," the student news agency ISNA quoted him as telling a gathering of elite students. "There has been an effort to promote a secular system and thoughts in society. To change it is difficult. We have to do it together, but things have started."
Censorship parties are great: you purge your enemies, get rid of pernicious secularism and liberal thought, you party like it's 1099. And then, you wake up, "cheek to cheek, with a pig in a blanket." Horowitz and Ahmadinejad, an anti-liberal marriage made in heaven.
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I see you've risen to the bait
Submitted by Lorraine on 6 September 2006 - 12:22pm.
Thank you for getting the irony of my post. See, Horowitz has no problem referring to "dangerous radicals" and "liberal" professors who are traitors, but those of us on the left usually refuse to engage in such rhetoric because we recognize it to be inflammatory and, quite frankly, puerile. But it was a fun post to write.
By the way, Horowitz spoke on a local college campus in the spring, and announced to the audience that a certain professor on said campus, who had an anti-Bush bumper sticker on his door should "not be allowed to teach."
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But you haven't addressed my
Submitted by Unregistered Robert (not verified) on 6 September 2006 - 12:32pm.
But you haven't addressed my questions.
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sophistry
Submitted by Lorraine on 6 September 2006 - 12:58pm.
Yes. I know Horowitz eschews words like "purge," and argues that professors should not be fired. Instead, he advocates that professors who represent "diversity," read: conservatives, should be hired to counterbalance the preponderance of "leftists" in the academy. Of course, the whole argument is cover for the real agenda, which is to convince the public that academia is the refuge of terrorist supporters. Or, to quote your man himself:
The Churchill affair is an expression of the degenerate state of American social science and humanities faculties. It illuminates the political subversion of the academic enterprise by tenured radicals who have made universities like Boulder political institutions of the left, and in the process so diminished the presence of conservative, libertarian and even centrist thought from university faculties that hate-America radicals like Churchill are now pillars of the profession.
"political subversion,"
"tenured radicals"
"political institutions of the left"
"hate-America radicals"
See? Disagree with Horowitz and you get smeared with the traitor's brush. You can couch the academic bill of rights in whatever language you want; it has arisen from a campaign to squash any kind of intellectual inquiry that does not support a particular political view.
The comparison to Iran was deliberate provocation on my part, not unlike the bullshit that comes out of FrontPage magazine every single day.
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Getting smeared with the
Submitted by Unregistered Robert (not verified) on 6 September 2006 - 1:52pm.
Getting smeared with the traitor's brush is a far cry from having the president of a major nation call for you to be run out of your job on a rail, which is what Iran's president is explicitly doing, in the name of religious fundamentalism no less.
"The comparison to Iran was deliberate provocation on my part, not unlike the bullshit that comes out of FrontPage magazine every single day."
Well, I was sort of hoping for something more substantive than "irony", "deliberate provocation", "bullshit", or whatever you want to call it, on this issue. There is a serious crisis in academic freedom going on over there, by forces many orders of magnitude more powerful and anti-freedom than David Horowitz -- and the silence from the American higher education community on this has been deafening. Instead, we have the umpteenth anti-Horowitz post of the day rather than trying to stand up for something.
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Getting smeared with the
Submitted by Unregistered Robert (not verified) on 6 September 2006 - 1:52pm.
Getting smeared with the traitor's brush is a far cry from having the president of a major nation call for you to be run out of your job on a rail, which is what Iran's president is explicitly doing, in the name of religious fundamentalism no less.
"The comparison to Iran was deliberate provocation on my part, not unlike the bullshit that comes out of FrontPage magazine every single day."
Well, I was sort of hoping for something more substantive than "irony", "deliberate provocation", "bullshit", or whatever you want to call it, on this issue. There is a serious crisis in academic freedom going on over there, by forces many orders of magnitude more powerful and anti-freedom than David Horowitz -- and the silence from the American higher education community on this has been deafening. Instead, we have the umpteenth anti-Horowitz post of the day rather than trying to stand up for something.
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Some questions....
Questions:
(1) Where exactly does Horowitz propose a purge of liberal academics? Can you give me a quote?
(2) In exactly what way is the Academic Bill of Rights congruent to an explicit call by the president of a country to run all the professors who don't toe the line out of their jobs?