David Horowitz, conservative commentator, prolific author and founder of the FrontPage Mag web site, spoke out in response to ongoing Israeli Apartheid Week on campus. A full house gathered at the Brooklyn College library auditorium on Thursday evening, under exceptionally heavy security, to hear him.
The speech, delivered one day before the barbaric massacre of five members of the Fogel family on Friday night in Itamar, became tragically prescient..
Describing the Palestinians, Horowitz said: "No people have shown themselves as so morally sick as the Palestinians", adding, "In the history of all mankind, there was never a people who strapped bombs on their bodies and killed innocent people. No other people has sunk so low as the Palestinians, and everyone is afraid to say it."
Describing Islam as a religion possessed by "hate, violence and racism", he said that a resolution to the protracted Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio could is not beyond reach. "If you disarm the Palestinians in the Middle East there will be peace, but if you disarm the Jews, there wil be further death and destruction."
Horowitz's speech, entitled the "Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Myths and Facts", was sponsored and organized by Brooklyn College student Yosef Sobel and Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor in the department of business and economics. "Because the Hillel organization on campus was too afraid to sponsor me, I must thank those who had the courage to do so." said Horowitz. Despite numerous warnings prohibiting verbal disruptions, Muslim student hecklers abounded and Horowitz's remarks were often punctuated by the sounds of acrimonious attacks.
A native New Yorker and a graduate of Columbia University, David Horowitz was once a self proclaimed Marxist and left-wing academic whose political beliefs have now shifted to the right. As one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s, he was also the editor of its most influential magazine, Ramparts. Along with Peter Collier, he is the author of a number of best-selling dynastic biographies on the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, the Fords, and the Roosevelts. With Collier he also wrote "Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the 60s" (1989), a chronicle of their break with the 1960s Left.
His recent books include, "Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left" (2004), "Indoctrination U:The Left's War Against Academic Freedom" (2007) and "Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party" (2007).
Horowitz began by ruefully observing, "When I went to college you didn't need all of this security on campus, but things have changed and that's the reason we now need checkpoints on campuses. Checkpoints are essential to defend against terrorists and and Jew haters."
Adding that he has been verbally and physically assaulted on campuses around the country for his forthright views, he said, "Our campuses are controlled by liberal fascists and it is a movement to suppress the free speech rights of conservatives. He said that the International Socialist Organization, a Marxist organization, is culpable for creating a academic climate of intimidation and hate. "It is they who spread lies about me and work with their Muslim allies towards the mobilization of radical jihad against the West. The Muslim community needs to stand up and defend democracy in this country and that's what we're all waiting for."
Horowitz said, "There was no Palestine since the days of the Roman conquest of the land of Israel, and there certainly was no Palestine in 1946. The war against the Jews started in the form of Pan Arab nationalism and the PLO was created by the KBG. They advised Arafat that the best way to succeed is to play the victim role and say that all they want is their own state and that Israel is occupying Palestine." Saying that the entire region around the Jordan River was created by imperialist powers such as the Ottoman Empire, he emphasized that "Israel was not built on Arab land."
As a "political Zionist", Horowitz said he believes that the Jewish people have a right to exist and have a right to their own state. Equating such terrorist organizations as Hamas, Hizbullah, the Muslim Brotherhood and Mahmoud Ahmadimejad's Islamic Republic of Iran as "Nazis in the Middle East", he said that their objective is "not to create a Palestinian state but rather, to push the Jews into the sea" because they can't live alongside a people of another faith. "In 1922, 80 percent of the land of Israel was ceded to become the state of Transjordan that is now ruled by the Hashemite kingdom, and there are more Palestinians in Jordan than in Israel."
"Democracy is a threat to political Islam, and they believe that everyone who is not a Muslim is an infidel and is deserving of death. The Christian population of Bethlehem once stood at 80 percent and is now 12 percent because of Islamic influence," he said.
On Israeli Apartheid Week on over 55 campuses across North America, Horowitz said, "Muslims have more rights in Israel than they have in any Arab country in the world" and called the notion of Israel as a state that practices apartheid as "disgusting". "If you want to know what real religious and gender apartheid is just look at the entire Muslim Middle East, and not Israel."
"Twelve million ethnic Germans were purged from Poland, but after the State of Israel was established, no one expelled the Arabs, hoping that one day rationality would take hold, but it never did,." he coninued.
He said that such organizations as the Muslim Students Association and the Islamic Society of North America, who are the chief sponsors of Israeli Apartheid Week, are "fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood" and are "hate organizations" who make campuses unwelcome for Jewish students. On campuses around the country, he said, the organizers of Israeli Apartheid Week erect an "apartheid wall" and proffer the idea that "a wall of lies" be built to counter their pervasive myths and distortions of the truth.
Calling the expulsion of close to 10,000 Jews from Gaza in the summer of 2005 as part of the disengagement a "mistake", Horowitz said, "a normal people in a normal state would never have done so, but would have driven out the 1.2 million Arabs because they are possessed by hate, as manifested in their violent destruction of the thriving horticultural industry that the Jewish population had created there, and their incessant rocket assaults on such towns as Sderot."
"How is it that Jews do not get the narrative?" he queried. "The Palestinians are suffering, but it is not by the hand of the Jew, but rather their true oppressors are Hamas and Hizbullah" he said. Calling the Palestinan Authority a "terrorist government", Horowitz said, "When we see hate, we must call it so; we must label the enemy as who they are. The Palestinians don't want peace. How can you negotiate with those who won't recoginze Israel's right to exist? Look what happened to those Arab leaders that have tried to establish peace with Israel. They were assassinated by radical Islamist elements."
"Jihadist murderers" are tantamount to "Nazis and blatant Jew haters", he said, and although they may appear to be perfectly decent, nice people, a great many of them support Osama Bin Ladin and like minded genocidal murderers. "Hitler did not publicly announce his 'final solution' in the fear that the German people were too civilized to accept it, but Ahmadinejad proudly and publicly announces his version of the 'final solution,' and no Islamists condemn him. To the contrary, they cheer him on and embrace his vision."
Yet, "Muslims are treated with kid gloves in America and are a protected species." He said that 8 to 10 times more hate crimes are committed against Jews than against Muslim in America. Pointing to the case of the Holyland Foundation, a purported Islamic charity that was found guility of funding terrorism on the West Bank by their direct contributions to Hamas, Horowitz said that the unindicted co-conspirators in this case were the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and that there has been "no signficant condemnation of this group or others of this ilk". He unabashedly condemned Hamas as a "fanatically religious, Jew hating, America hating, Nazi organization."
During the question and answer period, a male Muslim student drew a parallet between Horowitz and the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, adding that Horowitz was a racist. When asked by Horowitz if the student would condemn Hamas, the student refused to do so. Referring to Horowitz as an "ignorant racist" a female Muslim student who identified herself only as Magdalene said, "He has no proof of anything that he's said here tonight", adding that women in Muslim countries are "not persecuted by the rules of Sharia law but by draconian dictators who serve American political puppets."
According to Lauren Kunis, who sought entry into the auditorium but was denied, "I had wanted to bring my Israeli flag in with me and was told by the Brooklyn College security that I couldn't. I told them that I'd wear the flag around my neck as the Arab members of the audience were wearing keffiyahs around their necks. I was then strongarmed out by an African American security guard. [It} seems like anyone who takes a proud pro-Israel position is considered a troublemaker and an enemy on campuses today."