Click here for the link to Campus Support for Terrorism pamphlet (pdf)
(Edited by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson, 2004)


In the 1930s, the universities were the first German institutions to capitulate to Adolf Hitler. Martin Heidegger, Germany’s greatest 20th century philosopher and the intellectual idol of American academics, hailed the advent of the Third Reich from the rectorship of Freiburg University. Fascism was an idea so messianic in its conception, so elitist in its attitudes, and so anti-capitalist in its social philosophy that intellectuals found it irresistible.

In England in the 1930s, while Germany rearmed and began annexing territory in the heart of Europe, the Oxford Union resolved “not to defend King and country” against the growing fascist threat. The pacificism of the progressive left and the Tory right added up to an appeasement of Hitler that protected him when he was still weak and testing the limits of Western resolve. The consequence was World War II and 70 million deaths before he was stopped.

The lessons of history are not readily learned, and the past, as a result, is slated for an endless revival. The seeds of the contemporary opposition to the War on Terror were sown in the 1960s in the movement to oppose the Communist aggression in Vietnam. Once again the universities and the intellectual culture provided the most dependable support in the West for the totalitarian agendas of the Communist bloc. The withdrawal of American aid to the anti-Communist forces in Cambodia and Vietnam in 1975 (long after American forces had been removed) resulted in the slaughter of two and a half million peasants in Indo-China at the hands of the Communist victors. The blood of these innocents would not have been shed without the aid the Communists received from their supporters and appeasers in the anti-Vietnam movement in the West.

Now the West is engaged in a new war with a totalitarian enemy called radical Islam, which despises Western capitalism and democracies. And once again, totalitarianism finds its most dependable allies on college faculties. This time, the enemy does not offer lofty visions of utopia nor rallying cries of “self-determination,” nor a promise to revenge past national grievances. The jihadists of Radical Islam simply offer unmitigated hatred of the “Great Satan,” the United States. For the academic left, that is enough. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a sufficient logic to cement the alliance.

On university campuses across the U.S., tenured radicals teach their students that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” and that America is “the world’s greatest terrorist state.” The Middle East Studies Association and more than 200 “Peace Studies” programs share the view that America’s terrorist enemies are in fact the voice of the world’s “oppressed,” and that by challenging the United States they are advancing the cause of “social justice.” Nor is the activity of these faculty radicals confined to academic theory. On every major American campus, radical professors are busily organizing anti-American “teach-ins” and demonstrations against the war, and providing their students with academic credit for joining the radical cause.

September 11, 2001, is burned into the nation’s memory as a day of infamy and terror. Yet within weeks of this horror, protests were organized on more than 150 American college campuses opposing, in advance, an American military response. Columbia University Marxist Eric Foner, a past president of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, declared, “I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.” As President Bush vowed to depose the totalitarian theocracy that had given al-Qaeda a military base of operations and bring the terrorists to justice, professors denounced America as “the greatest terrorist state”; lecturers at the City University of New York condemned “American imperialism” as the root cause of the attack; and Brown University academics chanted, “one, two, three, four, we don’t want a racist war!” Thus, before the final death count had been tallied in the worst act of terrorism in American history, the campus Left had already launched a pre-emptive strike against America’s effort to defend itself.

A year and a half later, American forces entered Iraq to enforce UN resolution 1441 against Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship, a sponsor of terror, a deployer of chemical weapons, an aggressor in two recent wars, and an outlaw regime in open defiance of 16 previous UN resolutions and international law. Demonstrations were organized on nearly 1,000 campuses to prevent America and Britain from taking down Saddam’s regime.  At one “antiwar” teach-in at Columbia University, conducted by 30 faculty and attended by 3,000 students, Professor Nicholas De Genova declared: “Peace is subversive, because peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live – a world where the U.S. would have no place. The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus” – a reference to the site in Somalia where an al-Qaeda warlord ambushed and killed 18 American troops, then dragged their bodies through the streets. De Genova continued, “If we really [believe] that this war is criminal...then we have to believe in the victory of the Iraqi people and the defeat of the U.S. war machine.”

This speech was a moment of truth  for the campus antiwar Left, revealing how a significant segment of academia had formed an alliance with terrorists and their enablers. From sponsoring pro-terrorist symposia, to funding and defending pro-terrorist campus organizations, to teaching students that America is an imperialistic oppressor and the terrorists are no threat, America’s universities are playing a significant role in the war on terror. This section of DiscoverTheNetworks explores that role.