Horowitz wants Jews to speak up

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

In her welcome to those who gathered in the Wosk Auditorium of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver on March 25 for the second annual Faigen Family Lecture, Gina Faigen introduced the night’s speaker, David Horowitz, as a man her father, Dr. Morris H. Faigen, has admired for many years “for his writings in defence of Israel and about his political transformation from the radical to the conservative.

“Perhaps hoping that I would undergo a similar transformation,” she continued, “my dad got me a subscription to his magazine, Heterodoxy, when I was a college student in the United States. While it wasn’t a hundred percent successful in that, it definitely helped me to become more aware of the origins and evolution of my own beliefs, and it also gave me a deeper appreciation and commitment to seeking out and ensuring the expression of different viewpoints, especially those more conservative than my own. Maybe it will do the same for some of you.”

Faigen’s brief remarks were followed by a video that started with Horowitz at a podium, asking a Muslim student at a floor microphone – apparently the question and answer period following a Horowitz lecture – if she would condemn Hamas as a terrorist and genocidal organization. “Are you asking me to put myself on a cross?” she counters. “If I say something, I am sure that I will be arrested.” Horowitz rephrases his question, explicitly saying that he is a Jew and that the head of Hezbollah has expressed his wish that all the Jews would gather in Israel, so that he doesn’t have to hunt them down – “for or against it?” asks Horowitz. “For it,” the student responds.

The 10-minute video then offers clips of various Arab leaders and others calling for the death of Jews and the destruction of Israel, as well as providing some information with which to counter the myths spread about Israel, most notably on North American campuses during such events as “Israel Apartheid Week.”

“To combat this evil,” says the narrator, “the David Horowitz Freedom Centre has launched a campaign on American college campuses. Its purpose is to confront the Israel Apartheid Weeks and the hate groups behind it. The centre has created a Palestinian Wall of Lies [walloflies.org] to refute the blatant falsehoods of Israel Apartheid Week and to expose the genocidal agendas of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and of the Muslim Students Association. The hour is late, and we need your help.”

Before Horowitz took to the stage, Vancouver Hebrew Academy co-president David Emanuel thanked the Faigens, as well the Lohn Foundation, which sponsored seats so that students could attend the event, and VHA’s head of school Rabbi Don Pacht and its staff, as VHA presented the lecture. Emanuel expressed concern over media depictions of the shootings in Toulouse as “an arbitrary event perpetrated by an angry, disillusioned young man, that will have us view this event as an act disconnected from any mass ideology or agenda. That notion diverts attention from the real story.” He spoke of a global Jihad, saying there are “two systemic doctrines that provide the unifying objectives for the terrifying individuals waging it: one is the restoration of the caliphate and the other is rabid antisemitism.”

Within this context, Emanuel introduced Horowitz as “one who is clear-minded about what is at stake” and read the stated mission of the Freedom Centre: “to defend the principles of individual freedom, the rule of law, private property and limited government. It further seeks to defend free societies in the war against their enemies and to reestablish academic freedom in American schools.”

“In a way, I know, I’m probably talking to a lot of the converted, but the base is very important,” Horowitz began. “It’s very important in this battle that we’re all facing as Jews that the Jews stand up for themselves first.... My talk is really, I see it’s billed as The War Against Israel, but it’s the people Israel. I’ve never been a Zionist. I was brought up by Marxists, that’s one of the reasons, but I never thought that Israel was a solution to the Jewish problem ... but I’m a Zionist now. You can’t separate Israel from the Jews at this point. It’s so clear that the war against Israel is a war against Jews.”

Horowitz described the issues as he sees them. He acknowledged that Jews had been persecuted by Christians for 2,000 years, but that Christianity had changed and, now, in his opinion, the danger is from “Islamo-Nazis” and Islam itself. Calling himself a “troublemaker” more than once during his talk, Horowitz highlighted two main issues he finds problematic about the organized Jewish community: its refusal to accept that there is no one to talk to regarding peace (i.e. with perhaps a handful of exceptions, there are no moderate Muslims, in his opinion) and that it does nothing to counter the lie that Israel is occupying Arab land.

In addition to explaining why Israel is not an occupier, Horowitz – who said his parents were outwardly law-abiding but hid Soviet agents in their basement – offered his explanation for why people who purport to believe in women’s rights, gay rights and religious tolerance – “the secular left,” specifically – have allied themselves with “the Islamo-Nazis.” He explained it as stemming from Jew-hatred, as an “unholy alliance” that formed over the “Palestinian struggle,” but also argued that, “the left is about one thing and that’s its war against capitalist, individualist, free-enterprise America and the West. That’s what it’s about, all the rest is window dressing.”

After criticizing feminists and women’s studies programs for not advocating for the rights of women who are oppressed and brutalized around the world, Horowitz said the reason for this lack is that “women’s studies and the feminist movement is not about women, it’s about attacking the American system, it’s about attacking individualism, it’s about attacking men ... it’s about whining about victimhood so you don’t take any responsibility for who you are or what you do....”

After tracing the presence of antisemitism in the U.S. public sphere back to the 1967 “New Politics” conference in America and to Stokely Carmichael in particular – who became a radical leader and wrote in 1971 that “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist” – Horowitz said, “It was American black leftists who legitimized Jew-hatred in American.”

After further ruminations on this topic, Horowitz said, “I know this runs against the grain of every Jew in this room, to understand that the social-justice movement is a death-to-Israel movement at this moment in time.” Both Islamists and leftists want governments to have the power, so that they can change the world into what they would like it to be, he continued, and who stands in their way? “Countries like Israel and the United States, which are based on individual rights and private property,” he said. He acknowledged that there are “a lot of well-meaning people on the left who don’t get it, but they’re not going to get it if we’re really polite and, you know, hold ‘Kumbaya’ sessions with Muslim Brotherhood representatives and never mention ... their genocidal intentions.”

Horowitz said Jewish groups never invite him to speak on campus. In a meeting with a dozen student leaders, he asked them why the Jews seemed intimidated by the Muslims. “It was with kind of an agonized cry, this young woman said, ‘Because we’re Jews, because we’re under attack,’” said Horowitz, concluding, “Well, you know, we gotta go down like Jews, we gotta fight.” He offered the generation that created Israel as a role model.

Pacht then spoke briefly, leaving the audience with the following thought: “We live in a day and age where the comment stream on a website forms the opinions about the story far more than the researched article itself ... [but] although we live in a time where, unfortunately, public opinion seems to form fact, it is, in fact, fact that should be forming public opinion. So, we hope that you’ve learned something here tonight. We hope that you’ve been inspired to understand and defend Israel, to defend what truth is and what truth stands for.”

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