[Editor's note: Protected by a bodyguard and twelve armed campus security officers, David Horowitz spoke at the University of Southern California on November 4, 2009. This is a text of his remarks, edited for readability. A video of the speech is available here. To read about the efforts to censor him before the speech and the slander directed at him, click here.]I want to thank the College Republicans for being brave enough to invite me, and I want to thank all of you who are here to actually listen for coming.
It used to be a pleasure for me to speak on a college campus like USC. I can remember the days when I could stroll onto the USC campus and walk over to the statue of Tommy Trojan where College Republicans had erected a platform for a rally to support our troops in Afghanistan after 9/11 at which I was to speak.
Now, however, I can’t set foot on this campus – or any campus – without being accompanied by a personal bodyguard and a battalion of armed campus security police to protect me and my student hosts.
Sheer prudence forces me to visit campuses with these security measures in place because I’ve been demonized by the campus left at virtually every school I’ve visited in the past decade and physically assaulted at several.
USC officials regard the threats against this event seriously enough to have assigned twelve armed officers to watch over the proceedings.
These police are not here to protect you from me. They are here to protect me from you members of the USC Progressive Alliance, Students for Justice in Palestine and the USC Muslim Student Union who have made these threats and incited hatred towards this event and its speaker. These are the tactics favored by fascists – and when I use that word I mean it literally. I don’t use it the way the Left does, as an epithet for anyone they don’t like.
The attacks on this event and those organizing it are part of a national hate campaign that the left has organized against me and others who share my views. It can be tracked on numerous websites over nearly a decade and is evidenced in the common themes of slander and abuse that are directed towards me.
The left’s campaign – really a declaration of war — is in part a response to my opposition to its anti-American, anti-democratic and anti-Semitic agendas. Consequently I accept their attacks as features of this battlefield, signature methods of leftist argument. But the College Republicans on this campus have been caught in this crossfire.
These students pay the same tuition as the political thugs who are on the attack and who are supported by the USC student paper which is under the control of USC administrators, and they do not deserve to be treated this way. Nor should a university administrator lend legitimacy to modes of discourse which violate the published ethical standards of the institution he represents.
In its attack the USC Progressive Alliance put out a flyer containing gross fabrications which are central to its campaign of slander against this event and the students hosting it. The flyer’s headline reads: “Hate Muslims? So Do We.” It pretends to be a document issued by College Republicans. In fact they had nothing to do with it, while the sentiment it expresses is reprehensible to them.
The deception isn’t even original. Two years ago an identical flyer was posted all over the George Washington University campus when I spoke there during an Islamofascism Awareness Week I had organized. This “Hate Muslims? So Do We” poster bore the forged signature of the Young America’s Foundation, which was the group that was sponsoring my speech at George Washington U.
When the president of the University became aware of the poster he was so outraged that he sent emissaries to dorm rooms of the leaders of the Young America’s Foundation at eight in the morning to summon them to his office where he threatened them with expulsion. They explained to him that they had absolutely nothing to do with the offense and didn’t hate Muslims but the president’s threat remained.
That night he convened a campus meeting to deplore the attack. As you know there is a new religion on college campuses based on the idea that there are endangered human species that need to be protected – all of them conveniently championed by the left as groups that are oppressed. In fact the only oppressed and persecuted groups on college campuses are those under attack from the left — campus conservatives, Christians and Jews. That’s the reality, in contrast to the rhetoric.
Read it all at FPM
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