You may recall the left-wing attempt to to smear GWU’s Young America’s Foundation ahead of the upcoming Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which is sponsored by David Horowitz and features events at campuses across the country. Seven students with no affiliation to YAF or IFAW posted phony anti-Muslim fliers and falsely claimed that the events would promote hatred of Muslims. Well, Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is here and liberal students and university staff across the country are doing what they do best–protesting. Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch sums up the liberals’ reaction the best: “the campus Left is placing itself squarely on the side of those who want to implement the institutionalized oppression of women and religious minorities sanctioned by Islamic Sharia law, who deny the freedom of conscience, and want to impose upon the world a supremacist and totalitarian code.” Protesters at schools such as Berkeley are launching a campaign called “Peace Not Prejudice.” But just how “peaceful” are these protesters? Let’s take a look… The Berkeley protesters created posters that slam College Republicans and say they must “expose and defeat” Islamo-Fascisim Awareness Week. The conservative Berkeley students’ blog California Patriot says this is “disturbing, because the event is specifically for ‘Awareness’. It’s not a promotion of anything but education and is happening in order to bring in new perspectives, so ‘defeating’ awareness sounds like suppression of expression to me.” And according to Gateway Pundit, Nonie Darwish, an Arab-American who has denounced radical Islam, was constantly interrupted while speaking to Berkeley students. Robert Spencer describes his visit to DePaul University, where he spoke on a panel with an Iranian freedom fighter. He notes that the protesters “restricted their chanting about racism–an absurd charge to hurl in any discussion of Islam and jihad, but particularly inappropriate to shout at a former inmate of the mullah’ prison cells–to before and after the event.” He also notes that he had difficulty speaking during the panel. Classy, DePaul. NRO’s Phi Beta Cons reported yesterday that Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency released a statement encouraging students to protest and “disrupt” David Horowitz’s speech at Columbia University this Friday. Phyllis Chesler will also attend a Columbia panel with the threat of disruption, and notes: “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.'” And to think that Ahmadinejad had a relatively peaceful visit to the same university. Keep checking Incorrect U for coverage of events and the left’s (non-peaceful) reactions. And of course, liberal bloggers are pooh-poohing the threat from radical Islam and launching ad hominem attacks on Horowitz, but we can’t find a substantive critique that doesn’t tar the whole event, and even its name, as racist. For more on that, read Christopher Hitchens’s Slate column, which outlines the history of the term “Islamofascism,” and deftly defends its current usage.
