Over a Candle

David Horowitz is at it again. This week he kicks off “Islam-Fascism Awareness Week” on college campuses across the nation. How many campuses? I’m not sure, but I keep seeing numbers like “over 200.” But with mental heavy-weights like Rick Santorum and Ann Coulter, it’s hard to see how this couldn’t be a great event. (Seriously, the W3C needs to adopt sarcasm tags in XHTML.)

I have seen several articles lambasting this effort as intolerant. Is it intolerant? I don’t know. This crowd claims (at least sometimes) to only be attacking radical Muslims, rather than all Muslims. But they don’t do a good job at drawing the distinction. And many of their ardent supporters (who seem to write lots of letters to my local paper) aren’t making any such distinction at all.

But I think there is something more insidious than bigotry going on here. Yes, talking about Islamo-Fascism is sort of like talking about Klan-Christianity, and it is a problem to be addressed. But the real dangerous move here is the obscuring of historical fact.

This crowd is spreading the Bush propaganda that terrorists hate us, they hate freedom, and they are mad-men who will stop at nothing. They continue to sow the seeds of endless war. (Well, not endless, technically. Once we kill off everyone on the planet, the war will end.) By continuing to spread the ignorance of hate, this crowd seeks to make it impossible to actually combat terrorism.

By turning terrorists into Islamo-Fascists who only want to destroy us and everything we stand for, Horowitz helps to create the conditions where the only response available is to fight terrorists. There can be no measured response. There can be no thoughtful approach to the problem. Brute force is all that we are left with. We empty our diplomatic toolbox and leave only a gun with which to do the job.

Horowitz and his mindless proponents will of course argue that I am an apologist for terrorists. That I am blaming the victim. (Even if that were true, I suppose its better than killing the victim, which is what we have done in Iraq by killing the civilians we are supposed to be liberating.) But claiming that there are conditions which give rise to acts of terror is not to justify those acts. It is merely pointing out that our response to terrorism must be thoughtful and subtle, rather than the brute-force and massive-ignorance approach of Horowitz and his ilk.

By all means, let him speak on campuses. He has nothing of intellectual value to share, but let him spread his lies, half-truths, and distortions. Rather than trying to shut him up and turn him into a martyr, expose him for the hate-monger that he is. His words assist in that project.

Sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? Read the rest of this entry »