Horowitz displays patriotic ignorance

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  The line of 20 some-odd jubilant faces toting
American flags and salivating at the words of David Horowitz during
yesterday’s “Rally for America” can only be
described as encouraging. Encouraging because it’s nice to
know that in a school of over 33,000 students, only a handful
showed up in support of the unfounded propaganda spouted by
Horowitz.

In fact, most of the crowd was made up of dissenters and
protesters whom Horowitz called “fascists” for
exercising their right to free speech ““ the same right that
probably protected him from being overtaken and carried off the
stage by his highly offended audience.

Among claims that UCLA is a training camp for socialism lacking
intellectual diversity, a rationalization of racially profiling
Arab men at airports as a matter of convenience, denying oppressive
actions by America in the world, claiming he owed a debt to English
and American white Christian males of the 18th century for coming
up with the idea that slavery was an immoral institution, and
stating that terms like “social justice” are code words
for the totalitarian agenda, Horowitz had the nerve to say the war
on terrorism is “not something where you can really argue
over policy.”

Unfortunately for Horowitz, this is America. We can always argue
over policy because the constitution gives us the right to our own
opinions and the freedom to express them. People who disagree with
the war on terrorism do not represent anti-American sentiments.
They remind us the American constitution works. Instead of
coercively silencing questions about government actions, Americans
engage in national debate over the legitimacy and strategy of our
country’s leaders.

But Horowitz seems to think the left’s caution about the
extent and methods used in the war means liberals “hate
America.” Not only is this a sensational conspiracy theory,
it reveals the flaws in the dogmatic nationalism Horowitz and his
supporters advocate.

Perhaps instead of “hating America,” the left is
recalling the late 1960s when the United States, carrying out
President Harry Truman’s commitment to contain communism,
entered a war in Vietnam that wound up robbing America of $70
million a day and claimed a total of 3 million lives on both sides
of the conflict.

Maybe instead of trying to “stab this country in the
back,” the left remembers when a government racially profiled
a minority group in order to carry out its policies, as Horowitz
believes the United States should do with Arabs and Muslims: that
government was headed by Adolf Hitler, and the officers charged
with carrying out the racial profiling were the Gestapo looking for
Jewish people.

Perhaps the left is also thinking of Japanese internment camps,
failed attempts to overthrow rogue regimes in Cuba and Iraq, or
simply acknowledging the fact that we funded Osama bin Laden when
he was fighting the Soviet Union, and gave power to his network by
backing the mujahadeen rebels that later took over Afghanistan in
their fight against the Soviets in the 1980s.

But Horowitz prefers to ignore these facts in favor of a
hyper-patriotic agenda that he is now pushing on college campuses
in an effort to reverse the effects of his own college days when he
was (gasp!) a liberal student demonstrator against Vietnam at UC
Berkeley.

Maybe instead of parading around the nation making provocative
statements and laughing in the face of historical fact, Horowitz
should spend more time at home reading his dictionary. Liberals are
not “fascists.” Last time we checked, that movement
sprang from the minds of conservatives.