[Marxism] "Islamofascism" week at Columbia University

[Louis Proyect]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071112/kaplan

The Culture War Descends on Columbia
by ESTHER KAPLAN

In the past few years, the students and faculty of Columbia University 
have found themselves in the midst of a culture war. They've seen their 
Middle East Studies department targeted as "anti-Israel" by one 
right-wing organization, the David Project. Two assistant professors, 
Joseph Massad and Nadia Abu El-Haj, were publicly smeared by another 
right-wing outfit, Campus Watch, as they underwent tenure review (see 
"The New McCarthyism" by Larry Cohler-Esses). And at the start of this 
school year their own president, Lee Bollinger, seemed to pander to this 
right-wing pressure by slamming Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 
the name of "the modern civilized world."

This week they've got David Horowitz, of the modestly named David 
Horowitz Freedom Center, best known in recent years for his ads in 
campus papers opposing slavery reparations, in which he argued that 
there is no evidence that the legacy of slavery has harmed any living 
African-American and demanded "the gratitude of black America" for the 
white Christians who "created" the antislavery movement. Now he's here 
to teach them about "Islamofascism."

His "Islamofascism Awareness Week" descended this week on dozens of 
college campuses across the country (he claims more than 100) with 
vigils here, sit-ins there and scattered forums featuring "aware" 
individuals such as former Senator Rick Santorum. But Columbia has been 
showered with special largesse: an entire week of activities, kicked off 
by a candlelight vigil on Monday, where a dozen or so College 
Republicans remembered "the untold millions who suffer under tyrannical 
Islamic regimes" and closing on Friday at noon with a speech by Horowitz 
himself (Columbia College class of '59).

"I had thought, probably stupidly, that the David Project had 
accomplished its purpose when they hit us so hard a few years ago," says 
Bruce Robbins, a professor of English and an organizer of a recent 
initiative to end Columbia's investment in companies that do business 
with the Israeli military. "But our academic freedom has not been 
extremely well defended in the past, so we've been shown to be rather 
vulnerable in that way."

At Wednesday night's Oppression Panel, some eighty students and assorted 
gadflies had the chance to see a self-satisfied panel of Ibn Warraq (Why 
I Am Not a Muslim), Phyllis Chesler (The Death of Feminism; The 
New-Anti-Semitism) and the American Enterprise Institute's Christina 
Hoff Sommers (Who Stole Feminism?) apply Horowitz's patented PC-bashing 
technique. "I encourage [conservatives] to use the language that the 
left has deployed so effectively in behalf of its own agendas," he wrote 
in 2003. "Radical professors have created a 'hostile learning 
environment' for conservative students. There is a lack of 'intellectual 
diversity' on college faculties and in academic classrooms. The 
conservative viewpoint is 'under-represented.'"

Thus we had Warraq telling us that it was Edward Said, by means of his 
book Orientalism, who "encouraged Islamic fundamentalism" by teaching 
"an entire generation the art of self-pity." It was Said--not, say, 
Campus Watch, with its hit list of faculty labeled as apologists for 
suicide bombings and militant Islam--who created a "climate of fear in 
academia" and whose "aggressive tone" was tantamount to "academic 
terrorism." We had Chesler declaiming perversely that the right to free 
speech "belongs also to those of us who are pro-American and pro-Israel, 
and not only to those who demonize the West." College campuses, she 
said, have been "Stalinized," "Palestinized." And we had Becky Dunnan, 
class of '08, spokesperson for the Columbia University College 
Republicans, sponsors of the event, gamely tell a reporter, "We really 
have to take back academic freedom for the minority viewpoint on 
campus--and that's the conservative view."

Of course, as Elizabeth Castelli, chair of Barnard's religion 
department, said to me before the festivities, Islamofascim Awareness 
Week is "not about academic freedom at all." She calls Islamofascism a 
"made-up term" designed to "close off debate, impose a particular 
position and set of arguments, and invite the harassment of individuals 
who hold alternative positions. It casts the world situation in a 
clash-of-civilizations mode--and places any critic in the position of 
being anti-Western, or even treasonous."

That these self-annointed opponents of Islamofascism claim to speak on 
behalf of women, gay people and Jews only deepens the Horowitzian irony. 
Chesler, bravely surmounting the constraints on her speech (the chief 
one being, as far as I could tell, that Barnard's women's studies 
department had declined to co-sponsor the panel), sounded an alarm 
against an "epidemic of homosexual pederasty in the Muslim world," 
called for a Jewish right of return to "Judenrein" Arab states and 
warned that if the jihadists win, they'll impose a Muslim caliphate on 
the United States and we will all become veiled "sex slaves." This, she 
said, would be "the end of civilization as we know it." Is it mere 
coincidence that her words echo exactly the phrase that conservative 
evangelical deployers of the term "Islamofascism," such as Family 
Research Council founder Gary Bauer, have used to characterize the 
threat of gay marriage? Homosexuality, as Castelli points out, has 
become both a marker of the destruction of our way of life and, in our 
battle against Islamofascism, a stand-in for Western civilization itself.

It would all be a lot funnier if it weren't for the fact that Horowitz's 
campus experiment is serving the cause of a larger ideological campaign 
to expand the "war on terror." "Islamofascism," notes David Judd, 
Columbia class of '08, "[is] a term of demonization invented so we can 
justify attacking almost any country in the Middle East." Texas pastor 
John Hagee deployed the term "Islamofascism" in July when he brought 
some 4,000 members of his new Christian Zionist organization to 
Washington to lobby hundreds of members of Congress for militant support 
for Israel--and military action against Iran. Former Arkansas Governor 
Mike Huckabee pulled the phrase out just last week in the Republican 
presidential debate, where he called Islamofascism "the greatest threat 
this country's ever faced." "We've got an enemy that wants to kill every 
last one of us," he went on. "We cannot be soft. We must be strong." And 
in an e-mail alert to his followers last week, Bauer declared 
"Islamofascism" a core "values issue."

Even inside the elite precincts of Columbia's campus, the term seems to 
have stirred up some bellicosity. Judd, a member of Columbia Coalition 
Against the War, points out that in the weeks leading up to Horowitz's 
"awareness week," messages of hate cropped up in graffiti on campus--a 
swastika in one location; "towel head" in another--and a noose appeared 
on the office door of an African-American professor. Mahira Chishty, a 
graduate student in the School of Social Work and a practicing Muslim, 
says she's felt unsafe in recent days. "There have been insinuations in 
my direction that I can say are the result of the divisive climate on 
campus," she says. "One student came right up to me and said, 'Happy 
Islamofascism Week!' For a split second I thought, 'OK, I should go back 
to my room now.'"

Chishty and Judd have helped to organize a Friday morning protest of 
Islamofascism Awareness Week, and the Columbia University College 
Democrats planned an alternative forum to educate students more fully 
about Islam, set for Friday at noon--the exact time when Horowitz was 
scheduled to speak.

But is it up to students themselves to counter Horowitz and Co.'s 
attacks on academic freedom? Robbins doesn't think so. "What we need 
when untenured faculty are targeted by conservative activists or public 
officials," he says, "is for the administration to back people up."