AMADINEJAD AND THE SAUDIS PLAN TO DISRUPT FREE SPEECH ON AMERICAN CAMPUSES STARTING TOMMORROW (Monday)

Phyllis Chesler


We have just been informed that President Amadinejad, who himself enjoyed no disruption when he spoke at Columbia University has said he “supports” the disruption, by American students and faculty, of the handful of panels and lectures at Columbia University and at the more than one hundred other universities where Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week will take place from October 22nd to October 26th, 2007
By the way, the term “Islamo-fascism” was coined by Algerian Muslims and ex-Muslims to characterize the Islamic fanatics who slaughtered 150,000 of their Algerian Muslim brethren in the 1990s—and all in the name of Allah.
I am speaking at Columbia on a panel with my esteemed colleagues Ibn Warraq and Christina Hoff-Sommers on the evening of October 24th. David Horowitz, whose Freedom Center has organized the week-long Teach-In, is speaking there at noon on October 26th.
There will be security, cameras, and perhaps even media. These add-ons have become increasingly necessary in order that those who hold minority anti-fascist viewpoints may nevertheless engage in the joys of academic freedom.
We have also just been informed that Saudi money, (what an everlasting surprise), has apparently funded the various pro-Palestinian, anti-American, and anti-Israeli campus groups to launch a defamation and disruption campaign against us. And, the religious Jewish left has also weighed in with an emailed campaign that opposes our telling the truth about how Muslims are blowing other Muslims up, and persecuting women, intellectuals, and homosexuals.
Apparently, if you don’t blame America first, and Israel soon thereafter; and if you don’t continually apologize for the Christian Crusades and for the West’s past colonialism and imperialism—you do not deserve to speak or, perhaps, to live. This way of thinking represents an utter failure to understand that jihad against infidels and other barbarisms are intrinsic to the Arab Muslim Middle East and were not necessarily caused by Western actions.
As to Columbia: In 2004, my answer to a single question sparked a near-riot and I had to be hustled out for my safety. In 2005, the graduate students at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA—the group that invited Amadinejad), boycotted a student-organized and rather illustrious panel about Israel of which I was a member. Also in 2005, at an all-day conference with enormous security, my words still “provoked” a planned pro-Palestinian “acting up” (or is it “acting out” or “shaking off?”). There is more. You get the picture.
Today, speaking the truth about fascism means that you have to do so under hostile and perhaps even dangerous working conditions. The truth-tellers are defamed as “fascists” and “racists.” Those who silence all free speech other than their own view only themselves as anti-racist liberators.
I will have more to say about this. Stay tuned.