Wingnut Awareness Week

[marmar]

from In These Times:



Features > November 16, 2007
Wingnut Awareness Week
Neocons beat the war drum on college campuses
By Adam Doster


You know that feeling people get when they drive past a car accident? It’s clear that the wreckage is terrifying, but they can’t bring themselves to look away. That’s how I felt wandering into DePaul University’s Cortelyou Commons on a rainy Chicago night in mid-October to attend “War With Iran?” Organized by the DePaul Conservative Alliance (DCA), this panel presentation kicked off the university’s opening contribution to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (IFAW), a nationwide campaign sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. For some masochistic reason, I had to see this wingnut carnival for myself.

To describe the evening’s panelists as wacky would be an understatement. Amir Abbas Fakhravar is a self-proclaimed “Iranian student dissident leader,” who has been embraced by neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen as an authority on the Iranian regime’s ruthlessness. Their support for him comes in spite of—perhaps because of—his dubious biography and reputation as an opportunist. In fact, Iranian journalists, student activists and former inmates told Mother Jones’ Laura Rozen that Iranian police arrested Fakhravar for a nonpolitical crime and that he took on the identity of a political prisoner once behind bars. When I emailed Ali Moazzami—a former editor at Shargh, a popular liberal newspaper in Iran that the regime shut down in August—for his opinion of Fakhravar, he replied, in all caps, “NOT ANY IMPORTANT GROUP TAKES HIM SERIOUSLY.”

Next to Fakhravar sat Robert Spencer, the founder and director of the website Jihad Watch and the author of six books that blame the teachings and practice of Islam for producing Islamic terrorism.

For those in the audience who came to the panel looking to be offended (I’d guess 60 percent), Spencer did not disappoint. He chastised the left for its inability to hold discussions without “violent intransigence and smears.” He ranted about the obstinately violent nature of Islam. He bullied the first questioner, forcing the student to define neoconservatism on the spot. And he suggested that people protesting his writing were “abetting in the persecution” of Muslims.

When someone asked an insightful question about how best to deal with inflexible ideologues, he ducked it. My favorite quirk was Spencer’s insistence on quoting—four times—a line from Pope Benedict XVI’s 2006 lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany: “To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.” He neglected to share that during this talk the Pope also said: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman.”

Fakhravar was hardly better. He recounted the treatment he was subjected to in Iran, abuses that everyone in the room could agree were heinous. Then he suggested America cannot negotiate constructively with Iranian leaders because the regime has already declared war by killing our soldiers in Iraq. With that, his testimony devolved into propaganda for the current war in Iraq and a future war in Iran. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3420/wingnut_awareness_week/

[Cerridwen]

1. I wonder...

Spencer and Fakhravar’s DePaul visit was not an anomalous event. On the same day, students across the country kicked off IFAW, the Horowitz-led effort to confront “two big ideas of the Academic Left.” First, that Bush created the war on terror. And, second, that global warming is a larger risk than Islamic terrorism.

“We think that radical Islamic terrorism is the greatest threat that America and other Western nations are facing,” says Mick Paskiewicz, a DePaul sophomore and vice president of DCA, a student group described as “a non-partisan organization that promotes all flavors of conservatism.”

I wonder how many students will take from these events, the idea that it is their duty and/or right to take on "the greatest threat {facing} America" by attacking Muslims in the US? Because I'm pretty sure, most in the US don't know the difference between "radical Islamic" and Islamic, nor do many care. "They all look alike".

Dangerous stereotypes being planted in the minds of students at these events; combined with the crap on the "news", this could take ugly form.

[CJCRANE]

2. The neocons and their wingnut useful idiots

are only serving to make Wahabbism and sunni fundamentalism much stronger, indirectly through record oil profits and directly through knocking down rival shi'ite countries (Iraq and soon to be Iran). If the wingnuts had any intelligence they would wonder why the Bush-Republicans were so close to the Bin Ladens and Middle Eastern Royalty and why Halliburton had re-located to Dubai.

The promotion of islamophobia is mainly a useful tool of domestic control through fear and drumming up support for warmongering against the villain du jour (don't forget that Iraq was actually a secular country before "shock and awe". It is the neocon invasion and occupation that has turned it into a religious extremist basketcase of a country).

The neocons are treading a fine line with this and it nearly backfired with the Dubai Ports debacle...but lucky for them a compliant media mostly ignores the tsunami of contradictions in their rhetoric and actions.

[Scurrilous]

3. IslamoHorowitzism Awareness Week

<snip>

"Before David Horowitz began warning America about the dangers of communism in the eighties, he spent years fervently celebrating communists during the sixties.

So it's no surprise that before he began warning us all about the dangers of "Islamofascism," he spent years fervently celebrating Islamofascists. Below is a picture of Horowitz from a 1986 Mother Jones profile. As you can see, his t-shirt reads "Support Afghan Freedom Fighters." There's also a sketch of a man holding an assault rifle who looks vaguely like Osama bin Laden.



Currently Horowitz runs the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Look for his angry denunciations of his current dupes and fellow travelers circa 2027."

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2007/11/6182_islamohorowitzi.html