Revolution #100, September 9, 2007
Horowitz's Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week: A Nuremburg Rally for the 21st Century
David Horowitz, self-described "battering ram" for the assault on critical thinking in academia, has announced that his student brownshirts will be holding "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" on over 200 campuses across the country during the week of October 22-26. He says it will be the "biggest conservative campus protest ever" and will tell the truth about "the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted."
Their stated purpose is “to confront 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.” They are singling out for attack the Muslim Student Associations around the country. In addition, their student guide for hosting the week recommends organizing “sit-ins in Women’s Studies Departments and campus Women’s Centers to protest their silence about the oppression of women in Islam.”
This call for modern-day Nazi Nuremberg rallies is a serious move to intensify an already dangerous polarization, a view of the future as a choice between Islamic fundamentalism on the one hand and capitalist-imperialist domination with the U.S. at the helm on the other. It is an attempt to intimidate, confuse, and put on the defensive the many students and faculty who are opposed to what the Bush regime is doing here and internationally.
Islamic fundamentalism is not a progressive force for the world. It, or any kind of religious literalism, is a program full of outmoded and oppressive content: vicious patriarchy and bigotry, religious warfare, “honor killings,” and the promotion of unscientific, superstitious ignorance.
But the U.S. is a much more powerful and more dangerous reactionary force. Overall, it is the far greater threat to humanity. It is in no way the "answer" to the genuinely oppressive nature of Islamic fundamentalism.
It must also be said that the idea of people who back up Christian fundamentalist religious fascists in THIS country posing as champions of free thinking would be ludicrous if it weren't so outrageous. And the idea of forces who oppose the right of women to abortion posing as defenders of women's emancipation is just as outrageous.
Every progressive-minded student and teacher should begin preparing now to politically—and ideologically—take on these hypocritical fascists.
Both of these "choices" are complete nightmares for the people, and accepting the framework of choosing between the two is a dangerous dead end. As Bob Avakian, Chairman of the RCP, USA, has written:
"What we see in contention here with Jihad [Islamic fundamentalism] on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade [increasingly globalized western imperialism] on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these ‘outmodeds,’ you end up strengthening both." (From the talk, “Why We’re in the Situation We’re in Today…And What to Do About It: A Thoroughly Rotten System and the Need for Revolution.”)
We will have further analysis on this in coming issues. In the meantime, we encourage readers to check out Bob Avakian's Bringing Forward Another Way, and "Imperialism, Islamic Fundamentalism…and the Need for Another Way," by Sunsara Taylor ( Revolution #91, June 10, 2007: http://revcom.us/a/091/iso-polemic-en.html)
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