The self-parodying Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week kicks off

October 23, 2007

It’s a genuinely tough call. One is certainly tempted to ignore David Horowitz’s “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” which kicked off yesterday, because it’s just too absurd to even bother. Or one could marvel at “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” and offer a reminder of just how far gone today’s conservative movement really is.

Let’s go with the latter.

I don’t think Hallmark has started producing greeting cards to mark the occasion quite yet, but far-right activists, led by Horowitz, have created “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” to, well, the name probably says quite a bit about the point of the endeavor. In case there’s any doubt, here’s the basic pitch:

In the face of the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted, the academic left has mobilized to create sympathy for the enemy and to fight anyone who rallies Americans to defend themselves. According to the academic left, anyone who links Islamic radicalism to the war on terror is an “Islamophobe.” According to the academic left, the Islamo-fascists hate us not because we are tolerant and free, but because we are “oppressors.”

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is a national effort to oppose these lies and to rally American students to defend their country.

As Ron Chusid noted, “It’s just getting harder to keep track of all those holidays. I mean, is Sweetest Day, which just occurred, a real holiday, or just an excuse to sell more candies and cards? Now I learn that this is Islamo-Fascism Awarness Week. Is this a real holiday, or just an excuse to sell more right wing paranoia?”

All evidence, again, points to the latter, though I don’t think Horowitz & Co. are “selling” claptrap, so much as they’re peddling it for free, hoping no one notices how nonsensical their materials really are.

As for the folks behind this week’s “festivities,” Josh Marshall offers a helpful primer.

In case you’re not familiar with Horowitz, he’s probably most charitably described as a rather entrepreneurial self-promotion artist, though perhaps more accurately as one of the great buffoons of the modern American soapbox. I should probably say, as a matter of disclosure, that I’ve had a couple run-ins with Horowitz, one in person. And he’s probably one of only two people I met in Washington, or really in any of my dealings with people through TPM or any other professional writing I’ve done, who was just as nasty and whacked in person as anything you see on TV. It’s no act.

Horowitz’s basic MO is finding the silliest opponents he can find, goading them into a shouting match and then working himself into a frenzy about how the “left” is out to get him and then taking the moment of attention to shake the trees for some more right-wing money for his next show. Money, that is, for his Center, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which I only found out today he has recently had renamed in honor of himself.

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week materials claim that the “nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest.” The same materials note that 200 campuses will participate in all of this — and then lists fewer than 100 colleges and universities that are actually featuring IFAW events.

In any case, several far-right blogs are excited about all of this; Rick Santorum has been given something to do; and you, too, can look for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week events in your area.

Frankly, the occasion and accompanying materials are not nearly as offensive as they should be, in part because they’re so hard to take seriously. As Josh noted, the “feature presentations” listed on this page of Horowitz’s “terrorism awareness project” website “are so clownish and ridiculous that you may actually find them entertaining.”

Apparently, it’s what modern conservative thought has come to. What a shame.

One certainly tempted to ignore David Horowitz’s “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” which kicked off yesterday, because it’s just too absurd to even bother. Or one could marvel at “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,”

You should do the congenial thing and offer a list of your own bullet points for his holiday, like about the real nature and size of AQI all along, and their condition now, including an attribution to the military commander who made the statement and the date he made it followed by a few quotes in a parenthetical illustrative of how conservatives have talked about AQI (like the one or two good quotes from the Lieberman/McCain WSJ piece, and the most recent statement by Bush about what a grave threat they are- with the date of the statement).

And that’s just one bullet point.

  • Let’s help spread awareness about Islamofascism, since the conservatives seem to have a hard time doing it on their own.

  • In the face of the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted…

    The only logical response is to mention how America came close to being incinerated many times from 1947 to 1990. With that, maybe this whole charade is intended as a judo throw, luring former Commie symps into admitting how dangerous the Red Menace had been — and at the same time, painting them as Islamofascist fellow-travelers.

  • Sounds like a modern day Beer Hall Putsch.

    I think it’s cute that the Reich Wing has got a made-up-bullshit expression like “Islam-O-Fascism” to go along with the Global War On a Psychological State.

  • In the face of the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted

    That pretty much sums up the idiocy of these people. The danger posed by modern terrorists to the United States does not in any way equal danger our Democracy faced during the Civil War, World War II or the Cold War. How anyone could consider Islamic extremists anything more than an irritation is beyond me.

    The real danger of “Islamo-Fascism” is that we allow another incompetent President into office whose core beleif appears to be that the freedoms and liberties enjoyed by the citizens of the United States are its greatest weakness rather than its greatest strength. If we allow that to happen again, then we’ll be getting just what we deserve.

  • Yes, Horowitz is clownish. Yes the Bushies are evilly incompetent. But what is the seed of all this that we should pay attention to? Is the Islamic system incompatible with freedom? And is the combination of an intolerant religion and lots of poor adherents ready to do violence in its name a long-term problem? Like global warming it’s a dynamic that must be addressed with intelligent action but is met mostly with ridicule.

  • “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” huh? I guess I have more questions than anything, and the first one would have to be, what exactly is Islamo-Fascism? You know, so I can be aware of what it actually is.

    What I suspect this is going to be is not an interlude for educating people about Islam, but an excuse for the xenophobes and the Christian fundamentalists to discriminate against, demonize and ostracize anyone who looks Middle Eastern. The most likely to engage in this are those who seem to believe that this is a Christian nation that tolerates the existence of other religions, as long as those religions understand that Christianity – a particular brand of Christianity – is the preferred religion for real Americans.

    I think what we really need is an Understand Your Constitution Week.

  • One bullet point could be about how Condi Rice tried to bury the GAO’s report showing that terrorism around the world increased after 9/11, and ordered that terrorism statistics be recorded and reported in a misleading manner to make people think that Bush had been more effective in combatting terrorism than he had been.

  • Jeebus, if Horowitless actually read through some of the history of the Middle East then he would know that Islamic fundies along the Sunni/Shiite divide have found it much easier to kill each other than non Islamic folks (sort of like what is going on between Xtian Fundies.)

    There is more unity among a herd of cats than there is among a shit pile of fundies (of all stripes.)

  • So when is ChristoFascism Week?

    Seems like we’ve got more people with Bibles than Qurans running around yelling that the secular government of the USA needs to be overthrown.

  • ***…to rally American students to defend their country.***

    Horowitz is a yammering, skulking coyote. This, the latest among many “Horowitz Howls,” is an effort to convince more students to walk away from their colege educations and become martyrs for the right. Apparently, there’s a “rumor” that America’s youth isn’t enthusiastic enough about volunteering to die for a fraudulent, bloodthirsty, profit-based enterprise such as the Iraq Occupation. Besides—we cannot invade Iran if we do not have the fodder to do it with….

  • To Paraphrase John Stuart Mill:

    While not all conservatives are unhinged, most unhinged people are conservative.

  • I wonder how many campus bush-cultists (I mean conservatives) will answer the call to defend the country…

  • I think I’ll start White Privilege Awareness Week and see how well that goes over with the GOP candidates and Fox News.

    Geesh.

    (PS, Could you all fix your comment submission. I have to submit everything twice (first time always generates an error message, the second time it works) and I can’t even type in the browswer without every l e t t e r t y p i n g v e r y s l o w l y.

    I’ve taken to typing out my posts in notepad and just pasting them here because it’s quicker. I can’t be the only one this is happening to.

    Thanks.)

  • So who is the mastermind of this “Islamofascist” movement? The guys holed up in the mountains of Pakistan?

    “According to the academic left, the Islamo-fascists hate us not because we are tolerant and free, but because we are “oppressors.””

    Still waiting for the waves of terrorist attacks by freedom/tolerance-hating Islamofascists to sweep through Canada, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia.

  • David Horowitz was a worthless piece of Stalinist bullshit 40 years ago when he was an editor at Ramparts – back then, I never could figure out what a good guy like Robert Scheer was doing wasting time on him, he was such an obvious con artist. Like most Stalinists, he had no sense of irony, and was too dense to realize how self-parodying he was.

    Finally, everyone else on the left figured him out and he was reduced to the object of ridicule he was born to be. As with all con men who get found out, he had to get a new scam and a dumber bunch of rubes to run it on.

    Voila! David Horowitz, reformed leftist, true believer in America and America’s God (of course, he always has been a true believer in the real American God: the famous deity Get Yours), supporter of all wars and Chief Song Leader of the Right for having demonstrated knowledge of all the verses to the “Horst Wessel Lied”

    Sig Heil! There is no God but Uncle Joe Stalin and his sons Adolf and Mao, and David truly loves all of them for showing him the way to run the rubes.

  • Actually, Horowitz most reminds me of the famous American Communist who arrived in front of the White House on June 22, 1941, ready to demonstrate against Roosevelt the War Monger, when he was told of the German attack on Heaven (aka the Soviet Union), turned his signs around and wrote “Second Front Now!” and began his demonstration.

  • Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week materials claim that the “nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest.”

    And then they’ll all march off to the nearest Army recruiting center. Right?

    Still you have to love the irony of the Whorewits’ timing. His Brown-shirts against Brown People Week kicked off on the same day a jury kicked BushCo prosecutors in the nads.

  • Perhaps we could help the Republicans celebrate by exchanging gifts of packets of Kool-Aid.

  • Christopher Hitchens on the use of the term Islamo-fascism:
    ———————————————————————————————————————
    The term Islamofascism was first used in 1990 in Britain’s Independent newspaper by Scottish writer Malise Ruthven, who was writing about the way in which traditional Arab dictatorships used religious appeals in order to stay in power. I didn’t know about this when I employed the term “fascism with an Islamic face” to describe the attack on civil society on Sept. 11, 2001, and to ridicule those who presented the attack as some kind of liberation theology in action. “Fascism with an Islamic face” is meant to summon a dual echo of both Alexander Dubcek and Susan Sontag (if I do say so myself), and in any case, it can’t be used for everyday polemical purposes, so the question remains: Does Bin Ladenism or Salafism or whatever we agree to call it have anything in common with fascism?

    I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. (“Death to the intellect! Long live death!” as Gen. Francisco Franco’s sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined “humiliations” and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual “deviance”—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

    Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals. It has been very interesting to observe lately the way in which al-Qaida has been striving to counterfeit and recycle the propaganda of the anti-globalist and green movements. (See my column on Osama Bin Laden’s Sept. 11 statement.)

    There isn’t a perfect congruence. Historically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure. There isn’t much of a corporate structure in the Muslim world, where the conditions often approximate more nearly to feudalism than capitalism, but Bin Laden’s own business conglomerate is, among other things, a rogue multinational corporation with some links to finance-capital. As to the nation-state, al-Qaida’s demand is that countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia be dissolved into one great revived caliphate, but doesn’t this have points of resemblance with the mad scheme of a “Greater Germany” or with Mussolini’s fantasy of a revived Roman empire?

    Technically, no form of Islam preaches racial superiority or proposes a master race. But in practice, Islamic fanatics operate a fascistic concept of the “pure” and the “exclusive” over the unclean and the kufar or profane. In the propaganda against Hinduism and India, for example, there can be seen something very like bigotry. In the attitude to Jews, it is clear that an inferior or unclean race is being talked about (which is why many Muslim extremists like the grand mufti of Jerusalem gravitated to Hitler’s side). In the attempted destruction of the Hazara people of Afghanistan, who are ethnically Persian as well as religiously Shiite, there was also a strong suggestion of “cleansing.” And, of course, Bin Laden has threatened force against U.N. peacekeepers who might dare interrupt the race-murder campaign against African Muslims that is being carried out by his pious Sudanese friends in Darfur.

    This makes it permissible, it seems to me, to mention the two phenomena in the same breath and to suggest that they constitute comparable threats to civilization and civilized values. There is one final point of comparison, one that is in some ways encouraging. Both these totalitarian systems of thought evidently suffer from a death wish. It is surely not an accident that both of them stress suicidal tactics and sacrificial ends, just as both of them would obviously rather see the destruction of their own societies than any compromise with infidels or any dilution of the joys of absolute doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus, while we have a duty to oppose and destroy these and any similar totalitarian movements, we can also be fairly sure that they will play an unconscious part in arranging for their own destruction, as well.
    ——————————————————————————————————————–
    http://www.slate.com/id/2176389

  • i have a theory about David Horowitz. the only reason he got involved in left politics is because he heard that “hippie chicks” were easy lays. and when he saw all the liberal college professors getting laid and he couldn’t get any because he was such a foul-breathed, greasy, pimple-faced fat slob, he retaliated by pontificating against the scourge of commie academia.
    …this is sort of like the rumor that Osama bin Laden became a radical Islamist because he got rejected by western women.
    so maybe David Horowitz and Osama bin Laden have a lot in common.
    PS I have the same posting problem as Deborah had

  • The same materials note that 200 campuses will participate in all of this — and then lists fewer than 100 colleges and universities that are actually featuring IFAW events. — CB

    That’s because to dimwits like that, anything above 10 is “many”. And anyway… Apparently, some of those listed colleges… First time they heard they were hosting the rallies was from those “materials” and are now asking to, please, be removed from the list, as it’s BS.

  • If you had read Horowitz’ autobiographical book Radical Son you would know that David Horowitz was raised as a red diaper baby. His parents were both Communist Party members and his own Leftist activism goes back to the mid 1950’s, well before there were such a thing as “hippie chicks”.

    In the book Horowitz also explains in great detail why he became disillisioned with the Left and how he eventually became a conservative.

    I would highly recommend Radical Son to you and others who ignorantly defame Horowitz.

  • Who cares what made him what he is he still is spreading hatred and fear in a ridiculous manner and all with the threat of violence. They are monsters because they behead and suppress women. Christians have a long history of such activity but now are more civilized. He is condemning a whole group for the beliefs of the fringe fanatics. He wants all of the Islam belief to come forward and proclaim they are not terrorists. Who died and made him King. There are no terrorists over hear dong anything but we are over there doing all kinds of shit.

    We declared war based on the actions of 19 people who for all we know were put there by members of our own nation since the government will not investigate or let others investigate the events of 9/11. Based on our own false flag history it is a definite possibility yet the government keeps it hidden in secrecy. If there is nothing to hide then why hide everything with such fervor? It wasn’t Islamofascists that sent anthrax to congress…to the only two members who were going to block the Patriot Act and to the only on air newsman planning to out Bush/Cheney for trying to lie us into attacking Iraq. It came from an American lab which mysteriously burned down when the investigation of its activities began.

    The fascism is all around Horowitz right here in America wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross not a koran. What if it were true…would Horowitz demand all conservatives come forward and declare their innocence.

    The guy is a rabble rouser looking for a lynch mob to lead. Declaring fascism awareness week was not good enough he has to add a particular religion to it involving an area of the world and a group of people where cautious diplomatic deliberation is needed at this most crucial period in world history. He wants to add oil to the fire with his emotional fear mongering. He doesn’t have the sense not to scream fire in a crowded movie theater

    Screw “Radical Son” if he gets a dime from it. Now he just preys upon fear and hatred.

  • Don’t be too hard on Horowitz. After all, he is simply following the teachings of Joseph Goebels. :/

  • In 1938, the Nazis had the most advanced and powerful military on Earth while the military in the US was still had Calvary on horseback. After Pearl harbor, however, we quickly upgraded or military to an even footing with them.

    The enemies we face now are generally low tech with no standing army. They’re dangerous, certainly, but lack the military might of the Nazis, the Imperial Japanese or the Soviet Union. In fact, the overall casualties inflicted by Islamic Terrorists is a small fraction of the other enemies America has faced in the past.

    The US has many times the destructive capacity the terrorists could ever dream of. At worst, the Terrorists could vaporize a few cities or unleash a virus which might kill tens of millions more. The US, with its thousands of Nuclear weapons, could wipe the Middle East off the face of Earth. (If Bin Louden and his ilk had that kind of power, there still wouldn’t still be an United States)

    Unlike WWII or the Cold War, there is no equal parity between the two sides in terms of military capacity.

  • Jon F.
    I took your advice and read “Radical Son” and I stand corrected; David Horowitz is a giant among men. I should not have “defamed” him. Please call off the thought police. I also took your advice and visited your favorite website “thereligionofpeace”. I am with you my brother, let me join you in defaming the religion of a billion sub-humans.

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