The Brownshirts Are Back — And They’re In Our Universities!
Over at PJ Media, I ask why we must keep repeating the mistakes of history.
It is not news that virtually all American universities are decidedly leftist institutions. Few Americans, however, are aware of how inhospitable they have become to free inquiry and free discourse, and how hostile they are to anyone who stands up for Western values and against the global jihad – as some recent developments illustrate.
What is happening in American universities today has a clear historical parallel.
In his seminal history The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans explains how, in the early days of National Socialist Germany, the universities became centers of Nazi indoctrination in which students collaborated with stormtroopers (brownshirts) to terrorize dissenters:
It was above all the students who drove forward the co-ordination process in the universities. They organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers, staged mass disruptions of their lectures and led detachments of stormtroopers in house-searches and raids.
Let’s take those one by one.
1. “It was above all the students who drove forward the co-ordination process in the universities.”
At Eastern Michigan University last Friday, two showings of the film American Sniperwere scheduled. But during the first, four Muslim students, Ahmed Abbas, Layali Alsadah, Jenna Hamed, and Sabreen Dari, climbed onto the stage and began to denounce the film, which many Islamic supremacists have complained is “Islamophobic” because it depicts Islamic jihad terrorists in a realistic manner. They were briefly arrested, but managed to get the second showing canceled.
Student Body President Desmond Miller offered some airy double talk:
“The conversation we had wanted to make sure student safety was at the forefront. We wanted to make sure whatever happens, students would be safe. The second part of it, which is actually just as important as the first part, was making sure we have a very serious dialogue about the movie and the propaganda associated with this movie.”
Sure, let’s have a “serious dialogue” about the movie while not showing the movie in question.
2. “They organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers…”
There are precious few professors that today’s new brownshirts would care to campaign against, so they turn their fire toward campus speakers. David Horowitz spoke at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last Monday, whereupon Manzoor Cheema, “Co-founder of Muslims for Social Justice,” wrote a letter to the campus newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, saying that it was “distressing” that Horowitz had spoken, and “especially distressing in the wake of Chapel Hill tragedy where three Muslim youth were murdered.”
Did Horowitz applaud or condone the murder of those students? Of course not. Were they even murdered because they were Muslim? No.
But Cheema wasn’t going to let facts get in the way of his defamation; he added:
“Horowitz has supported work of such virulent Islamophobes as Robert Spencer, who was cited 162 times by the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik.”
Do I call for mass murder, or any kind of crime? I do not. Am I any more responsible for this psychopath’s murders than the Beatles are for the murders of Charles Manson? Even less so, for Manson claimed to have gotten his orders to kill from Beatles songs, while Breivik never says that he was inspired to kill by anything I wrote, and he wasn’t.
Cheema, however, doesn’t care to discuss these matters rationally, and doesn’t want his readers to do so, either. He just wants to sling enough mud at Horowitz that such invitations will not be extended again to those who deviate from the politically correct line.
The same day, the Daily Tar Heel ran two other letters denouncing Horowitz, and (of course) none supporting him.
3. “…staged mass disruptions of their lectures…”
Here again, it would be hard to find a professor that today’s Nazi thugs would want to silence, so they do it to campus speakers. Here (and embedded above) is video of me trying to speak at Temple University in April 2012.
Such occurrences are rare, however, because it is rare that a speaker with views that run counter to those of these glassy-eyed, indoctrinated cultists gets invited to speak at a university at all. And if one is invited, then the Leftist/Islamic supremacist machine kicks into gear to suppress the forbidden ideas. When he learned that my colleague Pamela Geller was invited to speak at Brooklyn College, Ibrahim Hooper of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) fired off an email to four Brooklyn College officials, with the subject line “Is Brooklyn College Really Hosting the Nation’s Leading Islamophobe?”
Later, with a sneer of cold command, he followed up with another…
Read the rest here.
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