More GW
Following up on Rob’s post below, it looks like GW’s administration is going after the innocent student group in this affair, the YAF.
Bridgette Behling the assistant director of the Student Activities Center at GWU, wrote an email to one of the conservative students urging them to disavow hate speech that may originate from any future Foundation events: “due to the inflammatory nature of today’s events [falsified posters], as a good faith effort on behalf of YAF, it is important that YAF drafts a statement which states that you will not allow hate speech to be a part of any of YAF’s events, literature, written or verbal communication planned for Islamofacism Week. This statement should also include your plan for preventing these things from happening as well as the consequences for these things happening. It is important that we have this document should any further incidents occur as we move forward.”
By this specious reasoning, anything emanating from Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week could be labeled hate speech. Indeed it already has by the Craptacular Seven. One of the seven, Maxine Nwigwe, said, “I feel like it is plain human decency to be anti-racist, anti-bigotry… As soon as I heard about this week, I was outraged.” Another of of the seven Brian Tierney said, “We don’t believe that this kind of racist hate speech should come to campus unopposed.”
By labelling legitimate ideas that they disagree with as “hate speech” they are already half way to shutting down the free exchange of ideas.
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, started by conservative activist and author David Horowitz, is not racist at all. It is, in fact, a nation-wide program to remind us all that we are at war with a totalitarian enemy seeking to kill us at any opportunity.
One of the reasons for the program is that a large segment of the left (especially on campus) denies there is any threat at all. George Soros, financier of the contemporary progressive left and ostensible owner of the Democratic party, considers the war on terrorism a “false metaphor” and as I pointed out here Matt Stoller, a leading light of the progressive blogosphere feels the same way saying, “The war on terror just doesn’t exist any more than a child’s imaginary friend exists.”
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The notion of the war on terrorism as a “false metaphor”or the Isalmo-Fascist enemy as a “myth,” is a regurgitation of the old Marxist trope of “false consciousness.” Communists believed that the proletariat existed in a deluded sense of reality of how the world worked, imposed on them by the capitalists. In other words if the lumpen proles only saw the world in same dialectical material sense that the communists did, the unwashed masses would agree with them and rise up and create paradise. They didn’t create paradise, they gave us over 100 million people murdered, and a really bad Warren Beatty movie.
This Marxist stain is still evident on the left, remember Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? Frank’s argument was that middle class Kansans were stupid for voting against their economic interests and voting for Republicans on values issues. That is, the slack jawed yokels in Kansas are morons or were brainwashed because they did not vote according to the left’s prescriptions.
Indeed, it is the same with the Craptacular Seven. At the foot of their provocateur poster it reads “PS Seriously, do a Google video search for ‘The Power of Nightmares.’ ” The Power of Nightmares is an anti-American propaganda film that argues that the the threat of radical Islam is a myth foisted upon the American public by sinister neocons, (read Jews).
Rob’s observation that this group has zero interest in free speech is spot on. In what can only be described as an Orwellian move, the Craptacular Seven have asked Horowitz to take part in a forum and field questions. Kokesh said, “We’re only asking for dialogue and awareness.”
Sorry no sale. If dialogue and awareness were all that interested them, they would not have perpetrated a fraud designed to frame a conservative group, and whip up a false frenzy against them.
