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Hate mail - Friday, October
22, 2004 |
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By David
Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com
You have to
admire the ability of the left to project its own phobias, rages, distortions,
smears and mendacities on other people. I am responsible for launching a
movement for academic freedom on American campuses. Its agendas are pretty
transparent. It protects all individuals professors and students alike, left
and right, from being persecuted for their political opinions. It seeks to
remind professors that they have a responsibility to all their students
regardless of their politics not to grade them politically, not to harass them
for their political views and to provide them with an education that makes them
aware that there are few settled truths and there are many points of view. For
doing this I have been regularly attacked by pompous and
unscrupulous trolls like Eric Alterman in the following manner:
"The
Horror of Horowitz:
I’ve been hearing about this scam of David Horowitz’s for a couple of years now
on various speaking gigs. In order to drum up attention for himself and
no doubt, funds for his “Center” he finds some liberal or left-wing professor
at a school at which he has been invited by the local conservative student
group and seeks to destroy the reputation of said scholar with a series of
McCarthyite accusations. If the school is publicly funded, he will often
find some troglodyte legislature to conduct an inquiry into the debasement of
our children, or some such nonsense. This story appears to confirm my suspicions and
increases my hope in the existence of Hell so that Horowitz might now spend a
few extra weeks there one day."
Alterman's
source (see his link) is Bill Berkowitz, a fringe leftist much enamored
of Fidel Castro who has been obsessed with me for years. Berkowitz's indictment
begins with this paragraph:
"At Ball State University in
Muncie, Indiana, WANTED posters with a headshot of Professor Abel Alves
appeared on campus a few weeks back; a student who took Associate professor
David Gibbs' 'What is Politics' class at the University of Arizona claimed that
Gibbs 'is an anti-American communist who hates America and is trying to
brainwash young people into thinking America sucks'; a political-science
professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver in Colorado says she has been
the target of death threats and hate e-mail in the wake of the recent debate in
the state over an Academic Bill of Rights; a University of Georgia professor is
being investigated after allegations he bullied a conservative student. Revenge
of the Nerds? Twenty-first century Gipper brigades? No, and No. It's the
Horowistas -- a small, hearty and growing band of followers of right wing
provocateur David Horowitz and his Students for Academic Freedom."
I have never heard of Professor Gibbs, and Oneida Meranto,
the professor at Metro State Denver, is a fantasist who has been
disciplined by her liberal school for breaking federal law in an attempt
to punish one of her Republican students. I not only did not
encourage students to put up Wanted posters in respect to Professor Alves at
Ball State, despite his sins against academic decency, but actually deplored
the posting of these flyers publicly. In point of fact the headline
of the Muncie Star about this incident was "National Leader
Deplores Wanted Posters at BSU." The national leader was me. Don't expect
Alterman to apologize should he read this blog or should readers of this blog
send emails to his editors at MSNBC and SLATE.
I don't think the students who have
suffered under Professor Alves's abuses -- need I point out that political
indoctrination of students in the classroom is an abuse? --
should be judged harshly for this, but the fact is I opposed it. I have neither
the time, the energy nor the inclination to correct all of the distortions
and lies in Berkowitz's attack on me. I will point out that the other case
at Ball State concerns Professor Wolfe. Wolfe is a professor of the saxophone
who fraudulently represents himself (with the full backing of his school
administration) as a qualified expert on matters of war and peace, and who
grades his students according to whether they ascribe to his Chomskyite views
of the world or not. Reasonable liberals will be appalled by this. Eric
Alterman and Bill Berkowitz are neither reasonable nor liberal and will not.
Others can find the information about the situation at Ball
State here
in the section of our website at www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org that
deals with the Brett Mock case.