The Wily Filipino

David Horowitz at SFSU.

So David Horowitz -- I used to think of him as "David Horriblewitz," but that would be as ad hominem as the stuff he was calling students -- was invited by the local handful of College Republicans to give a talk here on my campus last week. He spent the first 10 minutes or so complaining about how Michael Moore and Jesse Jackson get invited and paid for out of student money, but folks like him don't.

(It's perhaps a valid complaint, just as -- at least in theory -- there is little to disagree with regarding the Students for Academic Freedom's "Academic Bill of Rights". Again, at least in principle; I'm not sure I agree with the point on "organizational neutrality." But when you start your talk already on the defensive, it seems to undermine the rest of what you have to say.)

Then he spent the next half-hour rambling and railing against... the Soviet Union. I mean, Jesus, the Soviet Union doesn't even exist anymore. You'd be hard-pressed to find members from what passes for the American left calling herself or himself as Marxist! (One person pointed out that that Marx's economic principles barely resembled what was implemented in the USSR, but that was essentially ignored.) Then he spent the next 15 minutes or so with some rather long-winded answers to two questions -- which some members of the audience interpreted as stalling for time -- about Marx and Trotsky.

Probably because people were thinking that Horowitz was on campus simply to deliberately bait the audience, a lot of people stayed away. (A few articles on SFSU have been featured on The Front Page before, especially after a couple of Horowitz's ads in SFSU'S [X]press were rejected for publication.) The folks from Students Against War gave a relatively silent protest at the back of the auditorium -- they were more centrally positioned earlier, but were asked to move because they were "blocking people's view" -- holding up banners ("Horowitz Is A Racist Ideologue" and "U.S. Out Of Iraq Now!"). Even the organization of Palestinian students didn't seem to bother to get a group together. (It was the Spartacus Youth Club folks that ended up getting ejected for no good reason; this was after Horowitz kept hollering for security and threatening to sue the administration if the hecklers weren't thrown out.)

So, not much to write about. Horowitz mentioned Ward Churchill once in the context of "the Left supporting terrorism" (you can read more about this on his website), and later said something to the effect that "Zionism is the only true national liberation movement for one people in the history of the world," and that was about it. Almost every time someone would heckle him, he would either call them "idiots," "brain-dead," or look at the audience and start talking about the McCarthy era or say, "This was exactly what it was like in Weimar Germany!" Talk about Godwin's law...

In an odd way his talk effectively neutralized him at least in my eyes; for all the speaking engagements he seems to have, the man was a terrible speaker, jumping from topic to topic with little coherence.

Posted by the wily filipino at February 7, 2005 02:27 PM