From Howardistas to Horowistas

"All dictatorships and would-be dictators strategically target key individuals. Job loss or career setbacks are the first kinds of pressure these people are likely to face...The National Socialist German Students' League was set up in 1926. It sought to get independent professors fired and to direct the universities' resources toward Nazi goals rather than toward pure research. By 1933, propaganda Minister Goebbels set in motion one of these purges. 'By the beginning of the academic year 1933-34, 313 full professors had been dismissed...By 1934, some 1600 out of 5000 university teachers had been forced out of their jobs...Very quickly, newly Nazified Education Mininstries made political criteria central not only for appointments but also for teaching and research'. On May 10, 1933, pro-Nazi students also orchestrated a series of book burnings - events designed to look 'spontaneous' but actually directed behind the scenes by Goebbels." The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot - A Citizen's Call to Action, Naomi Klein, 2007

A campaign to enlist university and high school students to spy on their teachers for evidence of alleged left-wing bias was launched last month by the Young Liberals. Endorsed by the federal Liberal Party and operating under the slogan 'Education Not Indoctrination', the Young Liberals claim that students holding what they call 'mainstream views' are not only being subjected to 'leftist propaganda' but even penalised for their 'mainstream views' by their teachers. The Baby Howardistas, therefore, have announced that it is their mission to collect examples of such 'bias' (or worse!) for a proposed Senate inquiry into same.

An idea of where this was all coming from came in a report (Young Libs campaign to out biased dons) in The Australian on 12/3/08: "The National Tertiary Education Union rejected the notion of any widespread systemic bias in Australian universities and said the Young Liberals' campaign had been borrowed from a similar movement in the US, led by conservative intellectual David Horowitz."

David Horowitz is a neocon agitator who started out as a leftist radical in the 60s but later morphed into a Reagan Republican. He specialises in pro-war campus advertising campaigns, and (like the rest of his neocon tribe) has used 9/11 and the Bush/Cheney 'war' on terror as a cover to advance a reactionary, authoritarian agenda through such front groups as the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Students for Academic Freedom and FrontPage Mag.com.

Horowitz has, for example, branded Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against giving Bush a blank check for his 'war' on terror, a "communist [who] actively collaborated with [America's enemies] in their war against America," and campaigned against "the so-called Peace Movement," claiming that "campus leftists hate America more than the terrorists."

More recently he has campaigned around the issue of 'academic freedom', asserting that students need protection from having their religious and political views questioned (or in his own words, "subjected to a 'hostile environment' ") and from discussion of anything he deems "controversial." In other words, under the banner of academic freedom, Horowitz would have students free of free speech.

Last year he organized an 'Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week' (October 22-26) aimed at what he called the two "Big lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat." Its themes were "the Oppression of Women in Islam and the threat posed by the Islamic crusade against the West." In addition to teach-ins, sit-ins and protests, pamphlets with titles such as 'The Islamic Mein Kampf', 'Why Israel is the Victim', 'Jimmy Carter's War Against the Jews', and 'What Every American Needs to Know About Jihad' were distributed on campuses across the US.

Horowitz's rants posted (3/08) on FrontPageMag.com reveal a Zionist ultra, red in tooth and claw: Palestinians are "genocidal/Jew-killers"; "Hamas has to be smashed, defeated, pulverized, driven out of existence"; the "western 'progressive' left' [are] the fifth column allies, abettors and fellow-travellers of Islamic jihad"; "Hamas has turned the entire population of Gaza into a suicide bomb."

A taste of the kind of 'evidence' we can expect to see submitted to the hoped-for Senate inquiry by our very own Howardistas turned Horowistas may be found in a FrontPageMag.com post on 23/10/06, hyperbolically called Hamas High. Its author, one Eric Danis, writes that: "I moved from Andover, Massachusetts to Israel over 5 years ago, so the day-to-day happenings in my hometown are largely off my radar screen. However, Andover High School physics teacher Ron Francis, a former teacher of mine, first caught my attention when I saw an article he wrote in February of 2006. The article was entitled 'Media Bias Against Hamas', and was written in an attempt to support the Palestinian terror group Hamas and to demonize Israel. Francis never once condemned Hamas' terror tactics or its anti-Semitic ideology, and he even discussed the 'silver lining' of Hamas' [electoral] victory. Francis challenged Israel's right to exist in the article by complaining that 'the question of the validity of a Jewish-privilege state is never raised'."

That Francis' tenure at Andover High was not terminated, despite Danis' letters of protest from Israel (mentioned in his 'essay'), is obviously a very sore point for the young Horowista. He petulantly concludes with a shake of the head: "It seems that most people in apathetic Andover do not care...I expect more than silence in the face of hatred from my hometown."

Poor Eric. He should count his blessings. How fortunate for him that, by virtue of the discriminatory and racist Israeli Law of Return, he is at one and the same time a) able to live out his Zionist fantasies in Israel/Palestine; b) as a dedicated Horowista, scorn the indigenous population of same, besieged and starving in the Gaza Ghetto, as perpetrators of genocide; c) smear his former teacher, clearly a man of conscience and courage, for exercising his First Amendment right to free speech, with a view to depriving him of his livelihood as a teacher; and d) retain the luxury of a "hometown" in the US to which he can repair as the whim takes him, quite unlike the Palestinian "Jew-killers" who can only travel if they first dynamite their prison walls and risk getting tortured in an Egyptian dungeon.

The Horowistas... Coming to a school near you?