David Horowitz: Proto-Fascist
A simple survey of modern Middle Eastern history will show that Muslim women have been bombed, shot, arrested, and tortured by colonial and imperial authorities for centuries. The number of Muslim women languishing under the Arab dictatorships propped up by the American government, under the Israeli apartheid regime that corals Palestinians into the open air prisons called Gaza and the West Bank, under the US occupation of Iraq, are in the tens of millions. In Iraq alone – a country that was for decades tyrannized by the American-backed dictatorship of former CIA agent, Saddam Hussein, and which now is utterly destroyed by the American occupation – civilian casualties as a result of the war, and the US-led sanctions that preceded it, are now over one million. Yet, white racists like Horowitz, who have no interest in the liberation of the Middle East, repeatedly whine about the veil and the lack of freedom in Muslim societies. This should give us pause. Simple math shows that the number of Muslim women dead due to American foreign policy is more than the most egregious Muslim patriarchs could ever hope to accomplish with all the stones in the Middle East. The Horowitz-led diatribe against “Islamofascism” is not a good faith attempt at solidarity with Muslim women suffering under patriarchy, but a shallow, opportunistic demonization of an entire religion and culture, all for the ultimate purpose of justifying American imperialism in the Middle East. These people do not feel anything for the women of Islam. They preach from a pulpit of bones.
This recent event by the Horowitz Freedom Center needs to be seen in the broader political context of two different yet related historical developments. The first is colonial ideology. The second is the rising tide of fascist and white supremacist forces currently gaining sway in the United States.
Horowitz’ denigration of Islam is not a new attack but actually a classic tradition of justifying colonial and racist violence, one which has a long, tired history in the annals of Western imperialism. During French colonialism in Algeria, scores of French political and cultural organizations, as well as the French government itself, justified the violence and totalitarianism of their settler society by claiming that Islamic culture was backwards and patriarchal, and that the French empire was a force of enlightenment and civilization. During the Vietnam War, American government spokesmen claimed that Buddhist culture was backwards, citing the Buddhist religious detachment from desire and earthly suffering as proof that Vietnamese Buddhists do not value human life. This ostensibly made them feel better about all that napalm and all those millions of Vietnamese dead, but rational people recognize that occupation and carpet bombing have nothing to do with democracy, cultural values, or women’s liberation. Western women’s rights groups have been trying to pierce the Muslim veil for almost a century, providing ideological cover for Western imperialism by dehumanizing the culture of their conquered subjects. The United States and the David Horowitz Freedom Center are no exception.
Islamofascism Awareness Week (and not to mention the MSA establishment) has also attempted to create a separation between “good” (moderate) Muslims and “bad” (extremist) ones. Good Muslims are Muslims who endorse the so-called war on terror, apologizing for “their people’s” terrorism, and endorse the American imperial project in the Middle East. Bad Muslims are those Muslims who use Islam to inform an anti-colonial politics and resistance to US empire in the Middle East. Thus, Horowitz conflates right-wing authoritarian political Islamic organizations such as the Wahhabists and Al Qaeda, with popular-based anti-colonial ones such as Hizbullah. The ultimate goal is the demonization of any Muslims who attempt to use Islam to forge an identity and ideology that can defend everyday Muslims against US empire in the Middle East.
Horowitz himself represents a growing and unique political tendency in the United States that needs to be put into context if it is to be understood. An ex-Stalinist and fellow-traveler of the Black Panthers, David Horowitz, like some other white radicals of the 1960s, abandoned his Marxist and Black nationalist friends when Stalinist theories did not pan out, turning instead to radical neo-conservative and white nationalist ideas. Horowitz claims to oppose fascism in his “Islamofascism Awareness Week,” but a brief survey of his political record shows that he has openly associated with fascist and white supremacist forces in the United States and abroad since the late 1980s. A supporter of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the Contra fascists in Nicaragua, apartheid South Africa and apartheid Israel, and the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, David Horowitz has posted articles on his website frontpagemag.org by Jared Taylor and James Lublinskus, key leaders of the white supremacist group American Renaissance. He has also expressed critical support for David Duke, former member of the Klu Kux Klan. David Horowitz is a central organizer of a growing and insurgent right wing movement in the United States, and Islamofascism Awareness Week was designed to recruit and consolidate this movement’s campus youth forces. The threat that he poses to communities of color in this country, as well as to all Americans’ basic democratic rights, should not be underestimated or misunderstood.
In the wake of the popular opposition that Islamofascism Awareness Week met last week on many college campuses, many liberals have asserted that this resistance was somehow a violation of university principles, out of step with the spirit of civil dialogue and academic discourse. This is a grave misunderstanding of what Horowitz’s forces represent, and is emblematic of a profound political apathy that values assembly hall etiquette above human, anti-racist solidarity. Because a question arises. If universities across America were to host a “Blackofascism Awareness Week” or a “Jewofascism Awareness Week,” would this be acceptable university speech? Would we tolerate it? Would we engage it in the spirit of “civil dialogue,” treating it like so many normalized, academic discourses? Or would we confront it, choosing to take a stand against anti-Arab and Muslim bigotry, choosing to challenge what is becoming the most invisible racism of our generation? Frantz Fanon once said that it is the duty of every generation to discover its mission, and to either fulfill it or betray it. Arab and Muslim people are under daily attack in this country, and all people of good faith need to stand up and stand with the Arab and Muslim communities in this country, fighting for a truly democratic and multiracial America.
