David Horowitz is a controversial American Jewish man. He says so himself.
“I bring a bodyguard” to speaking appearances, he told The Chronicle in a telephone interview last week, “because I’ve been physically attacked on several occasions. There is so much hate directed at me.”
Horowitz, 69, is a conservative writer and activist, founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Web site FrontPage Magazine.
He focuses primarily on college and university campuses. He alleges that many professors are not disinterested pursuers of knowledge but liberals seeking to indoctrinate students.
That was the original topic of his April 30 appearance at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Union, according to A. J. Piwarun (pronounced “pie-wan”), executive director of the UWM Conservative Union, which sponsored the event.
However, Horowitz most recently has been targeting “Islamofascism” and its “jihad network,” which he claims include the Muslim Student Associations that exist at many U.S. campuses, including UWM and UW-Madison.
After hearing about the controversial appearance of Walid Shoebat at UWM this past December (see Dec. 7 Chronicle), Horowitz decided to switch topics, Piwarun said.
Full-page ad
Horowitz’s organization ran a full-page advertisement in the April 28 UWM Post. (Piwarun said the Conservative Union had nothing to do with the advertisement; it publicized the event with flyers only.)
The ad calls the MSA “a radical political group that was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the godfather of al Qaeda and Hamas, to bring the jihad into the heart of American higher education.”
The ad also alleges that at least one MSA chapter — at the University of Southern California — urges Muslims to murder Jews by proclaiming a quotation from a hadith (collection of sayings of and stories about the Muslim prophet Mohamed that are not in the Quran):
“You will fight against the Jews and you will kill them until even a stone would say, ‘Come here, Muslim, there is a Jew hiding himself behind me; kill him.’”
UWM Post editors placed a box near the ad, saying they had offered UWM’s MSA “an opportunity to respond” to the advertisement, but the MSA declined.
Mohamed Elsayed, president of the UWM MSA, wrote in response to questions e-mailed to him by the Chronicle, “MSA did not call for Horowitz’s speech to be cancelled. MSA emphasized that even hate speech is protected by our Constitution.”
However, the MSA and “left wing student organizations” allegedly reacted in other ways. Piwarun said that he and other members of his organization saw such students tearing down the posted flyers advertising Horowitz’s speech.
However, Elsayed wrote in his email, “No flyers were removed by anyone from MSA or anyone affiliated with MSA.”
On the day of the event, Piwarun said, “40 to 60 people surrounded our table” in the UWM Student Union “and began shouting and yelling at us.” He asserted that MSA members began it, but left-wing students joined them; that it went on for “30 to 45 minutes”; and campus security had to be called.
At the event itself, which had stringent security, some 200 people attended, according to Piwarun — 75 to 100, according to Elsayed — and students from MSA and left-wing groups “interrupted 13 times” and “six people were kicked out,” said Piwarun.
Horowitz told The Chronicle that his appearance at UWM “ranks with the worst” he’s ever had. “They made it difficult to continue a sentence to the end.”
However, his critics at the event didn’t just include MSA members. Naomi Lerman is a sophomore, studying “the psychological effects of racism,” and is a member of a small organization for students called Jews for Justice.
She entered the room during Horowitz’s speech, and “he said a few things that made me angry,” Lerman told The Chronicle in a telephone interview. “He was calling people morons, ignorant, all these names when they were challenging him on his information.”
She also contended that he said all MSA members “are involved in terrorist organizations,” whereas “I know some” of the UWM MSA members and “they are extremely wonderful people.”
She also said that during the question session Horowitz was “calling people anti-Semites when they weren’t talking about Judaism.”
So during the question session, Lerman went to the microphone, asked Horowitz if he was a practicing Jew because “I couldn’t believe he could be so racist and use his Jewish identity to perpetuate that.” She also said she walked out of the room before he could answer.
Cartoon stereotype
However, what raised the issue of anti-Semitism was not Horowitz’s remarks.
Before his speech, protesters from the MSA stood outside the hall and handed out a flyer to people going to the event. This flyer, of which The Chronicle has a copy, has a text attacking Horowitz as a “right-wing hate-monger, Israeli apologist and Judeofascist” and at one point calls him “David Whorowitz.”
The flyer also sported a cartoon showing a caricature of Horowitz with a big “Jewish” nose standing in a garbage can, wearing a Nazi-like armband with an H where the swastika would be, and looking in a mirror saying, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most fascist of them all?”
This cartoon deeply offended some people, like Jason Kipp, a junior majoring in architecture, and co-president and co-founder of the UWM Jewish Student Organization.
Kipp on behalf of his organization wrote a letter to the UWM Post protesting the cartoon. “There’s a lot of very upset people,” especially about the cartoon, Kipp told The Chronicle in a telephone interview.
“We don’t have to agree on political ideals, but we should agree that using anti-Semitic cartoons to try to silence political dissidents is not OK,” said Kipp.
Horowitz said he saw the flyer posted on the MSA office bulletin board as he toured the union before his speech. Though he acknowledged he is not a practicing Jew and never belonged to a Zionist organization, he felt this was an anti-Semitic flyer attacking him as a Jew.
“What Jew can feel welcome [on the UWM campus] after seeing that,” he said. He called the MSA “a hate group” and he wondered “how can the university administration allow a hate group on campus to post anti-Semitic posters?”
Horowitz also wrote an article about his UWM experience, posted on the FrontPage Magazine web site.
Lerman also said she was “not happy with the cartoon of Horowitz,” saying it was clearly stereotyped. However, she said, “I understand where people are coming from” in calling Horowitz a “Judeofascist” in response to his calling others “Islamofascists.”
“I don’t usually use the word ‘fascist’ to describe someone,” she said. “Myself, I wouldn’t call him that.”
Elsayed in his e-mail wrote, “The drawing is a caricature of David Horowitz.” In an apparent response to what Horowitz wrote in his article, Elsayed wrote, “In typical demagogic form, Horowitz tries to characterize the very legitimate and very justifiable attack on him as an attack on all Jews! How ludicrous.”
The Chronicle also received an e-mail from Erik Sperling, another member of Jews for Justice, who called Elsayed “my good friend.”
Sperling wrote that he spoke to Elsayed about the cartoon, and Elsayed “strongly insisted that it was in no way meant to be anti-Semitic, and [he] apologized profusely for any confusion.”
Sperling also wrote that he has become friends with many MSA members and “I have never heard any remotely anti-Semitic comment made nor felt any discrimination of any sort” from them.
Naturally, this incident came to the attention of Paula Simon, executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations. In an interview in her office, she criticized the UWM Post ad as “not helpful, unproductive, provocative,” and especially denounced the fact that it did not come from the campus or the students.
“I am particularly concerned about external forces creating a climate on the campus that leads to animosity and fear on the part of any group of students,” including Jewish and Muslim students.
She also criticized the anti-Horowitz cartoon as “anti-Semitic and inappropriate,” and she said she has contacted the UWM administration about it; but she added, “would that cartoon have appeared if not for the event?”
Nevertheless, some good could come from this, she said. “I would love to see the university take a lead in providing program opportunities for students and student organizations to understand the First Amendment,” she said.
Students should understand, for example, that “protected speech is … for the speaker,” not for people in the audience to try to shout speakers down, she said.
The problem “thinking forward,” she said, is “how can we work to create a climate where student groups engage in meaningful dialogue, where the exchange of ideas is encouraged, in settings that are educational and do not become shouting matches and don’t rely on the most extreme spokespersons … to educate people?”
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