Intolerance and hypocrisy of liberal higher education

In the 1960s, David Horowitz was one of those angry radicals who rebelled against the "establishment," helped found the New Left, and was editor of its largest magazine, Ramparts.

And then he found himself. Today he leads the fight against the radical left and is reviled and attacked by the descendants of that movement from the 1960s. His book, Destructive Generation, chronicles the second thoughts he had about that time in our history, and he later examined the subject more closely in Radical Son (1996), a memoir tracing his odyssey from radical to conservative activist. Today he speaks around the country about the destructiveness of the radical left.

On November 4, 2009, Mr. Horowitz addressed the students at the University of California:

[Editor's note: Protected by a bodyguard and twelve armed campus security officers, David Horowitz spoke at the University of Southern California on November 4, 2009. This is a text of his remarks, edited for readability. A video of the speech is available here. To read about the efforts to censor him before the speech and the slander directed at him, click here.]

Mr. Horowitz began his remarks with this:

I want to thank the College Republicans for being brave enough to invite me, and I want to thank all of you who are here to actually listen for coming.

It used to be a pleasure for me to speak on a college campus like USC. I can remember the days when I could stroll onto the USC campus and walk over to the statue of Tommy Trojan where College Republicans had erected a platform for a rally to support our troops in Afghanistan after 9/11 at which I was to speak. Now, however, I can’t set foot on this campus – or any campus – without being accompanied by a personal bodyguard and a battalion of armed campus security police to protect me and my student hosts.

Sheer prudence forces me to visit campuses with these security measures in place because I’ve been demonized by the campus left at virtually every school I’ve visited in the past decade and physically assaulted at several. USC officials regard the threats against this event seriously enough to have assigned twelve armed officers to watch over the proceedings. These police are not here to protect you from me. They are here to protect me from you members of the USC Progressive Alliance, Students for Justice in Palestine and the USC Muslim Student Union who have made these threats and incited hatred towards this event and its speaker. These are the tactics favored by fascists – and when I use that word I mean it literally. I don’t use it the way the Left does, as an epithet for anyone they don’t like.

The attacks on this event and those organizing it are part of a national hate campaign that the left has organized against me and others who share my views. It can be tracked on numerous websites over nearly a decade and is evidenced in the common themes of slander and abuse that are directed towards me. The left’s campaign – really a declaration of war — is in part a response to my opposition to its anti-American, anti-democratic and anti-Semitic agendas.

Please take five minutes to read his remarks to the students. He closed with this:

In closing, let me revisit the issue that confronts us, the issue of free speech, of the right of critics of Islam to make themselves heard. I would like briefly to tell you what happened at Temple University so that you can see how systematic the persecution of Islam’s critics is on American campuses today. At Temple University, the students had invited Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian I mentioned earlier. The Muslim Students Association together with Students for Justice in Palestine and other leftist groups immediately attacked Wilders as a “racist” and “Islamophobe” and demanded that the proposed event be banned.

You would think that university officials would admonish the student protestors about tolerance and the importance of civility and intellectual diversity in a university setting. You might expect them to roll out the welcome mat for an important European politician such as Geert Wilders and to say, “We’re so glad you chose our campus, because now our students can learn about a crucial conflict over an issue of historic importance — whether Europe is going to reinstitute blasphemy laws or defend freedom – and to learn about it from the one of the historic actors.”

But that was far from what happened. Instead, three university administrators, led by Temple’s Vice President of Student Affairs, summoned the students who had invited Wilders and told them their invitation was divisive, and hurtful to Temple’s Muslim students. They urged the students to cancel their event and suppress Wilders’ views, just what the leftists and their Muslim Brotherhood adviser were demanding. When the students argued that this was a free speech issue, the Temple administrators told them, “Foreigners don’t have free speech rights in America.”

That’s what three Temple University Administrators told our students. Foreigners don’t have free speech rights in America. As it happens, one of the students’ fathers had actually served in Iraq defending the free speech rights of foreigners. Her name is Brittany Walsh and she resisted the pressure to close down the event, and it was held – under armed guard.

In America, the right of free speech is not a right you can put in your pocket or a right that can be withheld. It is a limit on what government can and cannot do. The First Amendment says that government shall make no laws abridging the right of free speech. It doesn’t make a distinction between restrictive laws that apply to foreigners visiting this country and American citizens. It is a designed as the cornerstone of our democratic system.

Every single freedom that we have comes from our right to speak freely, to disagree with the orthodox view. Once you remove that right, once you ban events that feature Geert Wilders or David Horowitz, once you outlaw opinions that you find offensive, you have outlawed democracy itself, which the right to disagree and therefore to oppose the power of the government or the majority, as the case may be. If we lose the right to disagree and be heard, then sooner or later there will be only one politically correct authority, and one politically correct party. And that will be the party in power. If human beings are given the power to suppress speech they don’t like they will have no trouble finding the moral justification for doing so by calling it hate speech or whatever the current fashion will bear. In Stalin’s Russia it was anti-Soviet speech that was banned.

No matter what views you hold, or what you think of anything else I have said, you need to defend this right. Because this is all you have. If you don’t have this right, you don’t have any other.

The final thought I want to leave you with is that you must continue the battle that has begun on this campus. The groups that attempted to shut down this speech need to be disciplined. This is not behavior that is appropriate to a university. This is a threat to the fundamental principles on which a university is based. All the groups that were involved in these attacks are officially recognized student groups. They have applied for official recognition and have received privileges, including money to fund their own events. Every one of them understands there are obligations involved in receiving recognition, and that they are going to come under university scrutiny. What the university now needs to do is to tell all student organizations: “If you attempt to obstruct a speaker who has been invited by another student group, or if you slander USC students or their guests, you are going to be put on probation – or suspended — and lose your privileges.”

It’s that simple. It’s how a university must function. The students who sponsored this talk are paying the same tuition as the students who assaulted them. They are going to be here when I’m gone. They did not deserve to be called racists, or to have their safety threatened, or to be viciously attacked as they were this week. No university should tolerate, let alone encourage, behavior like this. It is a deplorable fact that the University of Southern California currently does.

In closing, I want to thank you for being a good audience, and particularly those of you who disagree with me and who stayed to the end. And I want to again thank the very brave College Republicans, who invited me and suffered these indignities with me, and stood up through it all.

David Horowitz continues to travel the country trying to open the eyes of Americans.