Paul H. Rosenberg posted an excellent article to the L.A. Independent Media Center which both puncture’s David Horowitz’s hollow martyr pose and makes a strong case against his claims about reparations in the "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks – and Racist Too" ad. Among other choice tidbits, Rosenberg points out:

Of course, Horowitz himself is an old hand at silencing people he disagrees with. In the late 1980s he spearheaded the campaign to shut down the news program "South Africa Now," carried on many PBS stations. His rationale? It was "communist propaganda," because its producers worked with members of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, which included communists in its ranks. (Southern segregationists in the 50s and 60s used the same tactics against Martin Luther King.)

While trying to find a webbed version of FAIR‘s excellent expose of the Boston Globe’s hypocrisy on the David Horowitz saga (they blasted student editors for censoring Horowitz–a feat that is, in fact, impossible, as I have remarked before … and then they themselves refused an ad from an environmental group which criticized Staples), I accidentally stumbled across a great essay of FAIR‘s Women’s Desk back from 1993, Erasing Rape: Media Hype an Attack on Sexual-Assault Research. It’s a skillful refutation of Katie Roiphe’s hatchet job on Mary Koss’s research on acquaintence rape… nothing much new for those of us who have kept track of the research on sexual violence for a while, but definitely a good summary of the criticisms Roiphe (and nearly everyone else who objects to the Koss research) uses, and the reasons why these criticisms are full of it.

Not to pursue my unhealthy obsession with David Horowitz further, but I found a note on IndyMedia about an excellent article on Horowitz and the Myth of the Radical University.

Thanks to conservative author David Horowitz’s recent lecture at the University of Texas, I have new hope for radical political organizing on campus.

Many of us on the faculty with left/progressive values have felt rather isolated on what we all thought was a conservative campus. But it turns out that all this time we’ve been working in a nest of left-wing radicals who have over-run the place, leaving conservatives cowering in silence.

At least that’s Horowitz’s analysis. University faculties around the country, including UT, are skewed far to the left as a result of conservative professors being systematically purged, according to Horowitz, a one-time leftist turned right-winger.

My colleagues and I are hoping Horowitz will help us find where all these radicals are hiding; more company would be nice.

After doing activist work both in a staunchly liberal small liberal arts college in Michigan, and in a big, heavily conservative university in Alabama, I can only say Amen! to someone actually taking the time to point out that, contrary to popular opine, The fact, however, is that the typical American university is dominated by centrist to moderately conservative faculty members and administrators, with steady movement to the right in the past two decades.

Reading Salon.com News: Who’s afraid of the big bad Horowitz? brings back memories of, well, just a few weeks ago, actually. Since I have myself protested an advertisement in our campus newspaper, it strikes me that many of the people writing on this topic seem to have no idea of what the real issue is here (although those who note that David Horowitz is a self-aggrandizing pig making publicity for himself on the backs of young journalists, are not far off).

This is simply not a free press issue. Horowitz was not being censored by some evil cabal of thuggish p.c. mavens, and if the so-called Human Life Alliance’s pamphlet had not been distributed in The Plainsman, they would not have been censored either. Student newspapers are incapable of denying them a forum for their views, since David Horowitz and the HLA are rather rich national figures, and Horowitz is himself a columnist in Salon. The point of a campus newspaper, however, is not to give a voice to well-positioned outsiders who have enough money to buy their way in. The whole point is to give students an open forum.

This doesn’t mean that all political advertisements from outside sources should be banned, since I recognize that student newspapers do need to make money somehow. However, it is extremely hypocritical for Horowitz to pose as some kind of martyr to censorship. Particularly when he and his colleagues are doing it in the pages of a webzine which reaches literally millions more readers than campus newspapers could ever hope to reach.

If Horowitz and the HLA really want to make their voices heard, they ought to write a damn Letter to the Editor like everyone else, or else take their commercial advertisement where it belongs: a commercial newspaper.

This week’s award for most laugh-out-loud insane statement goes to Salon.com’s own David Horowitz for the following nugget of wisdom: The mission of the modern Republican Party is to give power back to the people, in Other people’s money [Salon]. Now, maybe it’s just me, but it seems like a party dedicated to corporate welfare, tax cuts for the ultra-rich, obliterating the past three decades of gains in women’s rights and queer rights, and imposing as sadistic a prison system as possible, is just a tad selective in the people that it is giving power back to.

This anecdote was the best, though:

I remember attending a charter meeting of Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC organization in Washington in 1995 to celebrate the Contract With America. Gingrich was on the podium saying that the contract was just the beginning; that devolving power to the states by ending federal mandates was just one step. Now, he said, we are going to devolve power back to the municipalities, and then to the communities and then to individuals. That is our plan. At this point, somebody in the audience stood up and shouted power to the people. Except for the dinner ties and the elegant setting, I could have sworn I was back in Berkeley in the ’60s again.

What compassion! What conservatism! What utter nonsense!