Confronting the Anti-Israel Jihad on Campus

Editor’s note: The speech below, entitled _“Confronting the Anti-Israel Jihad on Campus,” was_ given by David Horowitz _at UCLA on May 11, 2011. See the video here. Horowitz will also be speaking about the organized campaign of anti-Semitism on America’s college campuses at UC Santa Barbara this Thursday, May 26th at 7:30pm. Despite efforts by the UCSB Associate Students financial board to deny Horowitz funding and suppress his right to free speech, the event, sponsored by the College Republicans, will go on as planned thanks to several generous private donors. The Muslim Students Association is expected to protest and will be hosting a counter-event across the street, so tensions will be high. Horowitz’s UCSB speech is titled, “Infantile Disorders at UC Santa Barbara: Why the Muslim Students Association Is Afraid of David Horowitz.” For our coverage on this upcoming event, click here._

*

Confronting the Anti-Israel Jihad on Campus

I hope we’re in for a civil, intellectual evening tonight. But since this is a university – and I have a lot of experience with universities – my expectations aren’t high.

You can’t get a good education if they’re only telling you half the story. Everybody understands this. You watch a court TV show and if there’s only a prosecutor commenting on the case, and no defense attorney, you know you’re not getting the whole story. That is true with all controversies in human affairs, and all the really important questions are controversial. So I have to begin by telling you, that if you’re in a liberal arts program at this university, you’re not getting a good education. The conservative students I talked to earlier today can only identify three or four conservatives out of hundreds of faculty members in the liberal arts division, all of whom are in the closet.

In the nation outside the university, the division between self-identified conservatives and so-called liberals (I don’t like to call people who are fundamentally intolerant “liberal”) is fairly even, give or take the seasonal swings of independents in the middle. But university faculties are practically conservative-free. How does that happen? Well, it happens as a result of the largest, longest and most successful blacklist in the history of this country.

I attended Columbia University as a Marxist during the McCarthy era. McCarthy never had the ability to persecute Marxists inside the university that faculty Marxists are able to exercise against conservative students today. That is because, with rare exceptions, the senator was never able to penetrate the university community, which was hostile to him and his agendas.

Closely related to what should be the academic principle of presenting two sides to controversial issues is the general, society-wide principle of free speech. One of the problems facing us as a nation is that people take far too for granted the privileges and rights that they have as Americans. There’s no more important American right than the right of free speech. Every single right you enjoy is dependent on this right. If you don’t have the ability to express your dissent, if you can be effectively silenced, driven from the public square, then you can’t defend any of your other rights. The inevitable result is a one-party system and a one-orthodoxy society.

Free speech today is under systematic, nation-wide attack on our college campuses. It is under attack by the political Left – by people who call themselves progressives and are always screaming that it is they who are the victims of McCarthyites and witch-hunters. In fact, it is they who are the McCarthyites and witch-hunters, seeking to demonize their opponents and drive them from the discussion.

Tonight’s event is occurring under a cloud of intimidation, and determined efforts to prevent it from taking place. A speech by one individual speaking to 300 people in a single room on a campus with a population of 45,000 is apparently too much for the progressive witch-hunters who have sought to shut us down. The Muslim Students Association, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace have joined in a campaign to vilify and demonize me and claim that I am unfit to speak on their campus. It is not just me that is their target, because I come, and I go. It is the students who have sponsored me. The opponents of what you are about to hear tonight tried to prevent anyone from inviting me in the first place and then to tried to prevent the College Republicans, who did invite me, from holding the event this evening, and also from putting up the “Palestinian Wall of Lies” I created to refute the genocidal propaganda displayed on this campus during “Palestine Awareness Week.”

One of the threats against me was serious enough that the campus police notified my security. I don’t go to a university campus anymore without a bodyguard because I have been physically attacked on several occasions on university campuses. Moreover, there is such hatred directed at me, usually accompanied by made up quotes designed to portray me as a “racist” and “Islamophobe” that I have to take seriously the possibility that some deranged individual or group might want to act on that hatred and cause me bodily harm.

And this is true for many a conservative speaker. On the other hand, it is not true for any leftists. Leftists do not feel the need to bring bodyguards to campus, and university administrators do not feel the need to provide the kind of security you can see here tonight. So you can judge for yourself who is threatening whom, and to whom the label “fascist” might be appropriately applied.

This past weekend, students on the UCLA campus were addressed by a speaker I happen to have known when I was still a leftist – a Jew who not long ago traveled to Lebanon to meet with Hassan Nasrallah, the terrorist head of Hizbollah. Nasrallah has led tens of thousands in chants of “Death to America! Death to Israel!” and has said that he hopes that all of us Jews will gather in Israel so he won’t have to hunt us down globally. The UCLA speaker had traveled to Lebanon to kiss the ring of this fanatical Jew-hater, and had just written an article saying that Barack Obama is a murderer, that Obama murdered Osama bin Laden, and that if anybody should be assassinated, it should be George Bush because he’s a much greater monster than Osama bin Laden. Of course, the Jew I’m referring to is Noam Chomsky, who lost his mind 30 or 40 years ago, a mishap that hasn’t prevented him from becoming a progressive icon and the most widely cited intellect in the academic community today.

Nobody attacked the Chomsky event. There was no attempt by the campus Right to intimidate the left-wing groups who invited and supported a terrorist-worshipping, self-declared enemy of America and vitriolic attacker of the Jews. In fact, his talk was promoted in the campus paper, the Daily Bruin, as mine was not, and he was celebrated as an academic “star” by the same paper afterwards. The point is that Chomsky was allowed to come to campus undisturbed and to say whatever was on his degenerated mind. And that is a proper attitude on a university campus, which should be an arena for the exchange of ideas. By contrast, there was such hateful name-calling in my case, and intimidation of students who might dare to invite me, that only one campus group was willing to do so. More than one group was supportive of my publicly expressed views, but only one had the courage to actually invite me, and in doing so, to put themselves in the line of fire. That group is the Bruin Republicans, and I thank them for their fortitude.

I also attempted to express my views by asking students to put up the “Palestinian Wall of Lies” so that others could be apprised of the facts and understand the genocidal intentions of the Palestinians and their supporters. The very plan to put up the wall was also the focus of threats and attacks.

All of this could have been avoided if I had been invited to speak by a faculty member or department. I’ve given 400 speeches on university campuses, yet I’ve been invited only three times by members of university faculties. Three out of 400. I assure you this experience is not exceptional or unique among conservative speakers. The Left should be ashamed of itself for working so assiduously to deny their students the opportunity to hear the other side of these important debates. But we should not forget that leftists are totalitarians, and therefore we should not be surprised by these behaviors.

I understand why the Left seeks to suppress and silence its opponents. It does so out of fear that it is unable to answer the arguments that conservatives bring to the table. The Left does not want to be in a room with anyone who is ready to point out that these self-proclaimed champions of women and gays and minorities are acting in solidarity with Islamic Nazis who oppress women and are determined to cleanse the world of gays and Jews.

This explains why I am hated by the Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice for Palestine, and their progressive allies like Jewish Voice for Peace. I am hated because I have exposed them as agents of the Muslim Brotherhood, supporters of Hamas, and willing accomplices to the genocidal agendas of the Palestinian cause. The Muslim Brotherhood spawned al-Qaeda, created Hamas, and supported Hitler in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Its founder, Hassan al-Banna, said in 1948 that if the Jews create a state, Muslims would push the Jews into the sea. Its spiritual leader today, Yusef Qaradawi, says that Muslims will finish the job Hitler started – in so many words:

Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them─even though they exaggerated this issue─he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.

This pledge of Nazi faith was made on al-Jazeera TV for an audience of millions of Qaradawi-adoring Muslims.

During “Palestine Awareness Week” on this campus, Hamas supporters erected an “Israel Apartheid Wall” covered in lethal lies about the Jewish homeland beginning with the very claim that it is an apartheid state. Israel is in fact the only country that is not an apartheid state. Most of the Arab countries of the Middle East exclude Palestinians, which is why the Palestinian refugee camps are still filled 63 years after the 1948 war. There were 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab states as a result of that war, but they have all been re-settled in Israel. The head of the Palestine Authority has said no Jews will be allowed to live in the Palestinian West Bank. But there are more than a million Muslim Arabs who are citizens of Israel with more rights than the Arabs of any Arab state. Israel is the only place in the Middle East where an Arab who is gay can live without fear, and the only place where he can march in a Gay Pride parade. There are 57 Muslim countries but not one in which gays can hold gay pride parade. Calling Israel an apartheid state when the reality is as starkly opposite as this can have only one purpose: to inflame the ignorant and the fanatic and incite them to destroy the Jewish State.

The UCLA students who supported these lies during Palestine Awareness Week and who have opposed tonight’s event – the Muslim Students Association, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace – are accessories to the genocide of the Jews that Hamas and Hizbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood are openly planning. Why is there no outrage from UCLA faculty and administrators? Why aren’t there adult voices on this campus saying these are lies and this is just wrong? That it violates every precept of diversity and tolerance and respect for the other professed by this academic community?

Muslims are protected on this campus; blacks are protected on this campus; Hispanics are protected on this campus; but not Jews. When they go to classes, Jewish students have an Apartheid Wall thrust in their faces accusing other Jews of stealing a whole country and being racists and oppressing an entire people. Confronting Jewish students on the UCLA “apartheid wall” erected by Students for Justice in Palestine is a worshipful image of Sheik Yassin, leader of Hamas and a Nazi terrorist personally responsible for the murder of more than 350 innocent Jews – solely because they were Jews. They were not soldiers; they were not policemen; they were Jews.

I want to read some of the statements recently made by Hamas leaders, now part of a unity coalition representing all Palestinians. If, during the question period, there is anybody from Jewish Voice for Peace who wants to explain these quotes and how, as Jews, they could embrace a movement that lives by them, be my guest.

The head of Hamas, Mahmoud al-Zahar, recently said, “There is no place for you Jews among us and you have no future among the nations of the world. You are headed to annihilation.” The speaker of the Hamas-controlled Gaza parliament said this: “Be certain that America is on its way to disappear. Make us victorious over the infidel people. Allah take hold of the Jews and their allies, Allah take hold of the Americans and their allies, Allah count them and kill them to the last one and don’t leave even one.” That’s everybody in this room, in case you didn’t get his point.

Keep in mind that Hitler hid the Final Solution from the Germans because he thought they were too civilized to accept it. Ahmadinejad shouts it from the rooftops. Where is the Palestinian leader who has condemned it? Where is the Palestinian leader who recognizes the right of the Jewish State to exist? Where is the Palestinian who stands up for Jewish rights and Jewish survival the way hundreds of thousands if not millions of Jews in Israel the United States and Europe stand up for Palestinians?

Hamas is the sworn enemy of all Americans, and the sworn enemy of all Jews. Yet there are Americans and Jews on this campus who support Hamas. How would you describe the statements I have just quoted which promise the extermination of Americans and Jews? These are the statements of Nazis. Enshrined in the Hamas charter is the vow to obliterate Israel and exterminate its Jews. Yet this is the party supported by the Muslim Students Association, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace on this campus, and by the progressive Left generally.

It is because I am determined to confront these Jewish and Muslim and leftist UCLA students with the evil they have embraced that I am hated and feared by them – that they distort what I have said in the past, and slander me to prevent others from hearing the truth. The Muslim Students Association has described me as saying that all Muslims are Nazis. This is a lie. I have said that Hamas Muslims and Hizbollah Muslims and PLO Muslims are Nazis – and I stand by that. When I made these same charges at Brooklyn College earlier this spring, using the identical quotes, the first words in response to my speech from the members of the “Palestinian Club” who came to protest were: “you want to lynch all Muslims.” Note that these Palestinians did not identify as Palestinians but as Muslims. That is the reality of the conflict in Middle East: it is not about establishing a Palestinian state; it is about purging the Muslim ummah of the Jews. And it is perfectly Orwellian. The agents of a genocidal movement to exterminate the Jews claim the mantle of victims, and slander the victims and their defenders as persecutors: Islamophobe! Racist!

This is the charge being made against me now at UC Santa Barbara where I am scheduled to speak in two weeks. Horowitz says all Muslims are Nazis. He is a threat to Muslim students on this campus. He should not be allowed to speak. I had spoken at UC Santa Barbara last year, so they knew what to expect. Thirty members of the Muslim Students Association were in the audience when I spoke. Throughout my speech, I asked them if they would condemn Hamas as a genocidal terrorist organization. Not one of them – including their president, to whom I put the question directly – would.

The president said, “That’s too complicated a question for a yes/no answer.” So I said, “Let me put it to you this way: I am a Jew. The head of Hizbollah has said he hopes that we Jews will all gather in Israel so that he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. For it or against it?” He would not answer. Last May, I spoke at UC San Diego and was confronted by a young woman who was a member of the Muslim Students Association. You can see our exchange on YouTube. She answered the question more honestly than the Santa Barbara MSA president. She said “For it.”

If the Nazi statements by Palestinian leaders that I quoted are not what they actually said, my critics would have a legitimate argument. Unfortunately for all the progressives in this room, these are not my versions of what they said. This is what they said, and what they believe and what they are fighting for.

I recently placed an ad in The New York Times whose headline said: “The Palestinian Case Against Israel Is a Genocidal Lie.” The Times published it. But when I submitted the same ad to the UCLA Daily Bruin, whose editor is an Arab, they refuse to print it. Earlier, the Bruin had printed an ad, which made the same claim. My suspicion is that the editor was besieged by the campus supporters of Nazis in the Middle East and the pressure was so great that he rejected the statement that had been printed in the Times. What the Daily Bruin did not want members of the UCLA community to see a second time is the refutation of the claim that Israel occupies Palestine or that the Palestinians have any right to Israel’s land. These are genocidal lies.

Israel was not created on any land that belonged to Arabs, let alone “Palestinians.” Israel was created on land that belonged to the Turks for 400 years before the birth of the Jewish State. Four hundred years is longer than America has been in existence. The Arab claim has less justification than the claim of the Iroquois to New York. If one is going to roll back the map 400 years, why not 1,000 or 2,000? The land that is Israel today was owned by the Turks and the Turks are not Arabs, and certainly not Palestinians.

How many people under the age of 25 in this room know this fact, that Israel was created on land belonging to the Turks? I see by your hands that there are about ten. Out of more than several hundred. Some education you’re all getting at this university. For those of you new to this history, the Turks could not prevent this transfer from taking place because they had chosen the wrong side in World War I and were defeated. One of the rules of war is that when you lose, the victors get to redraw the map. This also applies to aggressors in war. The Arabs of Jordan and of all the Arab states bordering Israel launched, not one, but three wars of aggression against the Jewish State. By all the laws of international warfare, the Jews had every right to expel all the Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza. But in fact they didn’t.

After World War II, the entire region of East Prussia – the industrial heartland of Germany – was taken from Germany and given to Poland. That was because they had invaded Poland three times in a century. Twelve million Germans were removed from Prussia and from the homes and lands which they had occupied for nearly a thousand years. That was their punishment for being aggressors, like the Arabs.

There were other nations created out of the ruins of the Turkish empire – Arab nations: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan. Jordan is 70 percent made up of the same ethnic people who live on the West Bank and in Gaza – in other words, Palestinian Arabs. But they are ruled by a Hashemite minority. Where are the calls for the liberation of the Palestinians of Jordan? There are none. Nobody calling for the liberation of Palestine is interested in the self-determination of Palestine. Their first priority is getting rid of the Jews. “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.” The Jordan River is the eastern boundary of Israel, the Mediterranean Sea is the boundary to the West. In other words, Palestinian freedom is synonymous with Israel’s destruction. Who can fail to understand this?

Even the word “Palestine” is not Arabic. It is Latin. The Romans gave the region around the Jordan the name “Palestine” as a humiliation for the Jews whom they had just conquered nearly 2,000 years ago. The name referred to the Philistines, who were the Jews’ enemies but were not Arabs. There were no Arabs in the area until 500 years later. Throughout the subsequent two thousand years, there has never been a political entity or state or country called “Palestine.” The idea of such a country was invented in 1964, fifteen years after Israel’s birth.

In 1948 when Israel was created, there was no Arab people self-identified as “Palestinians.” The Palestinian national identity was invented in 1964 with the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In 1949, after the Arab war against Israel, Jordan annexed the West Bank and the so-called Palestinian homeland disappeared from the map. The same thing happened to Gaza, which was annexed by Egypt. But if you read the PLO’s founding charter you will not see a single reference to the fact that Jordan had swallowed the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip. The PLO charter is all about getting rid of the “Zionists,” i.e. the Jews. The only reason the West Bank is not still part of Jordan and Gaza part of Egypt is because the 1967 Arab war of aggression against Israel was defeated and Israel generously – and foolishly as subsequent events have shown – did not annex these areas and expel the Jew-hating aggressors, but maintained them as “territories” awaiting a peace treaty that would never come.

The famous “Palestine Mandate” refers to a geographical region, not an ethnicity, not a people. It is a term like “New England” – not a country or a people, just a region. The Palestine Mandate was a portion of the Turkish Empire promised to the Jews. They got a tiny sliver of the Mandate, less than ten percent and more than half of which was an arid desert. But that was too much for the xenophobic Jew-hating Arabs and Muslims of the region who could not tolerate a Jewish state in their midst.

The Palestinian cause is not about Palestinians. If it was, there would be a liberation movement in Jordan and protests against the bans on Palestinian immigration to other Arab states. It is about pushing the Jews into the sea. That is why there has been no peace in the Middle East, why the Arabs rejected the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza in 1948, and the offer of 98% of what they claimed to be asking for from Clinton and Barak in 2000. The terms were intolerable to them in both cases because they included a Jewish state, however tiny – in fact less than 0.02% of the entire land mass of the Arab Middle East. The Arab Middle East must be Judenrein. That is the true agenda of the Arabs and their supporters on the Left.

I’m very confident, by the way, that even though this event is being videotaped, absolutely nothing that I say will be reported accurately on this campus, or on progressive sites on the Internet. My remarks will be twisted to portray me as a racist and Islamophobe in order to bury the truth about the Islamic war to exterminate the Jews of the Middle East.

I am confident of this because a speech I gave earlier this year at Brooklyn College was filmed by the Palestinian Club, who then doctored it and posted it on YouTube with the endearing title: “Horowitz Spreading Hate at Brooklyn College.” You can see the full, undoctored film of my speech here.

The doctored film was shown by a member of the Muslim Students Association to the Legislative Council at UC Santa Barbara to persuade them not to allocate funds to the College Republicans who had invited me to speak. Another member of the Muslim Students Association accused me of saying that “all Muslims are Nazis.” At Brooklyn College, I had read the same Hamas quotes as I read here – but they were not included in the Palestinian Club’s film. Only my statement that “they” were Nazis – “they” being the Hamas leaders who made them, a fact also removed from the film.

I was then quoted in the Palestinian Club’s film as saying that the Palestinians were “sick,” as I regarded them as sick merely because they were Palestinians. What I said was that people who claim to be progressive justify the Palestinians’ support for organizations with Nazi agendas by claiming that they’re “oppressed.” But even if they were oppressed, that is no excuse for embracing Nazism. People have been oppressed for thousands of years yet there has never before been a people that has strapped bombs onto its own children, told them to blow themselves up along with other children who were Jews, and if they did so, they would go to heaven. Moreover, if they were lucky enough to be male, they would be rewarded with 72 virgins. That is sick. Suicide bombing in the Palestinian territories is a national, government sanctioned and encouraged and honored cult. There is no excuse for the Palestinians, and there are no visible exemptions.

That is the message that they don’t want to hear, the reality they don’t want to face. It interferes with the fiction they want to impose on others – that Israel is a racist state and should be destroyed. Part of the problem, certainly on this campus, is that Jews are not standing up for themselves the way they need to. It is disgraceful that the Jewish community at UCLA, and people who regard themselves as enlightened and progressive and liberal have not said that the Israel Apartheid Wall is a violation of the very spirit of diversity and tolerance that the University of California claims to represent. What kind of respect is it to call a people, and a nation, which is one of the most tolerant societies on the face of the earth, an apartheid state? That is the defamation of a people, pure and simple, a prelude – given the realities of the Middle East – to genocide.

If I may digress in closing, the threat I mentioned at the outset of this talk, reported by the campus police, was from the Afrikan American Students Union. Why did they threaten me? They explain their animus in the leaflet they’ve distributed here tonight, which focuses on something I said ten years ago during my campaign against slave reparations which were being demanded 137 years after the fact: “As a result of America’s efforts to realize the ideals of equality and freedom, blacks in America are now the freest and richest black people anywhere on the face of the earth, including all of the nations that are ruled by blacks.”

This is a fact, even if the Afrikan American Students Union is desperate to deny it. It is a fact in the same way as that Israel was not created on Palestinian land is a fact. I forgive students for making these kinds of errors. I don’t forgive their professors. Professors who do not provide students with contending opinions on controversial issues and don’t provide them with materials that will allow them to think for themselves are derelict in their duty as teaching professionals. Contrary to the propaganda of the Left, I have never called for the firing of a single leftist professor. I am a defender of the academic freedom of students who have a right not to be subjected to political speeches in the classroom or to attempts to tell them what to think. That is the problem at this university and others on the matter of the Middle East but also on all matters that affect our social and political futures generally. Students are being told what to think by leftists who have effectively excluded conservatives from their academic faculties, and converted their classrooms into political soapboxes. And that has got to stop.

Thank you. You’ve been a very civil audience.