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EXCLUSIVE! HOW THE FBI SPIED ON EDWARD SAID First look at secret files: How G-Men kept Said under surveillance from 1971. David Price traces years of snooping on US's best known Palestinian Bush says 30,000 dead in Iraq but real number caused by 2003 US attack is AT LEAST 180,000, maybe twice that as Andrew Cockburn digs out the real numbers Is the US Constitution worth saving? Hmmm, maybe ... New York Times takes a year to make up its mind. Cockburn and St Clair on NYT and NSA ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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Weekend
Edition The New David Project: Horowitz Solicits for Campus Hit-JobsBegging for the BrownshirtsBy LILA RAJIVA David Horowitz frequently, I should say incessantly, corresponds with me. Why, I don't know. I am quite sure he doesn't either. But someone on his payroll sends missives out to me regularly, informing me of one or other of Mr. Horowitz's perennial campaigns against anti-Americans and terrorist sympathizers. This time he seems to be raising money for a website to monitor and attack what he calls "campus radicals." I offer readers the letter with my annotations interspersed. Here it is:
LR: Too bad, Mr. Horowitz, there are not merely thousands but tens of thousands of Churchills, un-Churchills, ur-Churchills, and even anti-Churchills. And what they do is called teaching. The horror! Is there an element of indoctrination? Of course. It's always been there, and usually in a much stronger form than anything Ward Churchill has done or is likely to do, given the nature of the university with its umpteen sensibilities in need of assuaging and massaging, not least those of the majority. And that majority are middle-class students, their parents and various donors and funders, one of the most prominent of which is the US defense department, hardly a hotbed of anti-Americanism. As for the "radical academy",
in a UCLA survey of 35,000 professors cited by Robert Hughes
in "Culture of Complaint," only 4.9 percent called
themselves "far left," while 17.8 percent put themselves
down "conservative." All the rest described themselves
as "liberal" or "moderate." Even at Berkeley,
only one person out of thirty in the sociology department calls
him/herself a Marxist. (Hughes, New York, Oxford University Press,
1993, p. 59). One thing I do know about the far left--it's noisy
out of all proportion to its numbers, because by and large it's
a bookish, chatty group. Quite proud to wear its radical label.
And In any case, indoctrination has always gone hand in hand with teaching and scholarship since the founding of Oxford in the 13th century or Notre Dame. Various Christian doctrines duked it out in those days-- one of them, the realists, prevailed at first and indoctrinated medieval students in Europe. Later, the nominalists did the indoctrination. In the nineteenth century, Shelley was kicked out of Oxford for professing he was an atheist at a time when Anglicans ran the show. There were tests of religion in most American universities until quite recently. Yesterday, Protestantism was the doctrine du jour; today it is--contrary to your fantasy--the philosophy of Kant. Yes, Mr. Horowitz, Immanuel Kant not Karl Marx, is the leading spirit of the universities. And with good reason, since his thought distills the ethics of Christianity from the dogma. Which means that young Americans are being radicalized today by nothing more than the enlightenment update of the creed of a seditious Jewish preacher--"do unto others as you would have done unto you." You may remember it.. So, I'll grant you indoctrination. Still, I have yet to hear of anyone being kicked out of college today for disagreeing with any of Ward Churchill's views. In fact, Ward Churchill is busy trying to stop himself from getting kicked out. And the people kicking him out, oddly enough, hold your views. Maybe, then, we do have a clear case of indoctrination.... by you, Mr. Horowitz
LR: Yes, yes, yes! Let's throw all these dangerous radical organizations out: The Ford Foundation, for instance,
for funding "major commitments in the areas of agriculture
and rural development, forest and natural resource management,
reproductive health, livelihoods, human rights, governance, education
and culture, religion cooperation and security and the promotion
of in-country philanthropy" in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. And let's also throw out the sinister MacArthur Foundation, which doles out as much as $500,000 to individuals like Danielle Allen, a Classics professor at University of Chicago, to help her write about Thucydides, Aristotle, and Hobbes. Or what about Pew, which among other things, rescues galleries of impressionistic art? Between abetting Aristotle and Renoir, can the decline and fall of Western Civilization be far away? And then there's George Soros. Well, one can say many things about MoveOn.org, the chiapet funded by Soros, but wild-eyed radical is not one of them..
LR: Cadging money like some hard-up hippie organization? Have you no shame, sir?
LR: Berkeley, I'm sure, will wear
that moniker like a carnation on its lapel. No question. Why
not? Surely even lefties need one major university to themselves.
After all, look at what's fielded on the other side-- Princeton,
Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins --which only approved the admission
of women to undergraduate studies in 1969, University of Virginia,
University of Chicago--the Chicago boys have given their name
to free-market economics, St. John's College--I love their Great
Books curriculum, but radical it is not. Not that Harvard was a beacon of progressive thought. It started admitting women only after the second world war and did so fully only in 1975. Harvard, note, was founded in 1636. (American Association of University Women). It also had a quota on intellectuals until not too long ago. And in the 1980s, several elite schools discriminated against Asians much as they had done against Jews earlier in the century. So let's judge the radical postures of the colleges to which you refer, not by what goes on in random student publications but by what the people really in power--administration-- have to say about progressive policies, especially the one that's really at the heart of your jihad-- the movement to discipline Israel for its misdeeds through disinvestment. Let's go down the roster. Harvard? President Lawrence Summers was recently hit by his own faculty with a vote of no confidence after he privately wondered about the abilities of women in science and math. (Steven Senne -- AP). Summers dubs the disinvestment campaign against Israel "anti-Semitic." And then there's the well-known flower-child, Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard University Law School, who opposes divestment since Israel "is a functioning democracy that guarantees full equality before the law to all its citizens, regardless of race, ethnicity or religion." Israel's Arab population no doubt will be enchanted to hear this. Dershowitz is also an enthusiast of legalizing torture in the name of the war on terror. Solzhenitsyn, take note. Lawrence Bacow, President of Tufts thinks divestment is "misplaced." University of Pennsylvania President Judith Rodin wrote to the university community that "the University of Pennsylvania will not support divestment from Israel..." As for Columbia, University President Lee Bollinger stated that he would "not lend any support to this proposal [divestment]." Columbia of course is where Middle Eastern studies professor, Joseph Massad, is being hounded by right-wing student zealots intent on finding the inner terrorist in a mild-mannered scholar. Massad was singled out for allegedly telling a Jewish student that if she was going to deny Israeli atrocities, she would have to leave his class (Counterpunch, April 11, 2005, "Smearing Joseph Massad-- Scapegoated at Columbia," Monique Dols). Just two people corroborated the "main elements" of the story, only one of whom was actually registered; in fact, the two graduate teaching assistants there and one undergraduate have no recollection of the incident and one student gave three different versions of her story. Bollinger, it should be underlined, never met with Massad, though he met with his accusers. Yet he told students publicly, "Let's just assume they're (the accusations) true." The investigating committee followed his example and simply assumed Massad's guilt. Bollinger continued mum right through death threats, racist e-mail, and calls from politicians and New York media demanding Massad's firing. The class was finally canceled. That's how radical Columbia is. The trouble with you, Mr. Horowitz, and the rest of the pro-war right is that your propaganda is so incessant, even you seem to have swallowed it. DH:
LR: Yes, indeed, it has. Campus spies, orchestrated character assassinations in the blogsphere, "google smears," such as the two against Professor Juan Cole who runs the widely respected liberal blog, Informed Consent. The smear involves creating a web of links that increases the chance that an infinitely repeated and amplified slander will come to the top of any google search. Some idea of what we can expect from the future activities of your Center for the Study of Popular Culture can be gauged from the past. Here is how you and your pals characterize the American Library Association--"The ALA Library: Terrorist Sanctuary." ("The ALA Library: Terrorist Sanctuary, Paul Walfield, FrontPageMagazine.com May 8, 2003). With equal moderation, you characterize Noam Chomsky's work as "demonic and seditious," list Chomsky with Eric Alterman and Edward Said in an Intellectual Rogue's Gallery," and insinuate that peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was deliberately mowed down by an Israeli bull-dozer during a round of home demolitions, was a terrorist supporter. Yet you have nothing to say about your fellow scribe on the site, Ann Coulter, who suggested that nuking North Korea would be "fun" and that 9/11 hijackers should have flown into the New York Times offices. Let me list some of your other
accomplishments: To match this legislation, you promote campus spy-squads of young Republicans called Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), who demand the firing of liberal and radical professors by dragging unsupported student charges up to state legislative hearings while whipping up lynch-mob hysteria in the conservative blogs and media. The result is that professors like Oneida J. Meranto of Metropolitan State College of Denver, have had to tape their lectures to prove their innocence. Ms. Meranto, a 55 -year-old Native American and a single woman who was battling cancer at the time, also received death threats, had her photo posted on Frontpage Magazine, and was not given even such minimal protection as a changed email address or a lecture room close to her office although she was completely exonerated of the charges made against her, all of which had to do with exchanges with students outside, not inside, the classroom. (A Liberal Professor Fights a Label," Jennifer Jacobson, The Chronicle of Higher Education,11/26/04) Your legal arm, the Individual Rights Foundation, represents police officers and college professors who see themselves as victims of affirmative action. Your Wednesday Morning Club draws speakers like Newt Gingrich, George Will and William Kristol to a schmooze you host every month. The Matt Drudge Defense Fund raised $50,000 for the conservative blogger's defense against a libel suit and provided him with two pro bono lawyers. ("David Horowitz's Long March," Scott Sherman, July 3, 2000). DH:
LR: Kulturkampf! I wondered when you were going to get to that. Maybe Ward Churchill wasn't so wrong with that German comparison after all. Mr. Horowitz, in this country, people have a constitutional protected right to their opinions, especially, political ones. It's called Free Speech. It's one of the things about America the whole world loves. Except you. In waging kulturkampf in academia, you play bad cop to Lynn Cheney's not-so-bad- cop. Lynn, wife of Dick, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Daddy Bush, a Kant specialist as well as bodice-ripping novelist, heads the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), which created a post-9/11 hit-list of suspect professors in need of big brother's zealous eye. During the Eichmann fracas, it was members of ACTA's "Governors' Project"--the governors of Colorado and New York--who bayed most fiercely for Ward Churchill's blood. DH:
LR: What is an Islamic radical, Mr. Horowitz? Is that someone who believes their religion is the verifiable truth (like, say, a fundamentalist Christian or Jew ) or is it someone who wishes the whole world to be converted to their religion (like, say, Bill Graham) or someone who actually wants to go to war for their religion (like, say, Pat Robertson and Ann Coulter)? I believe that Robertson and Graham are friends of the president. Would you consider them Christian radicals? Doesn't that also make President Bush a Christian radical? So, unless you have proof that Ward Churchill is a terrorist, stop smearing him. I won't even call it McCarthyism because McCarthy did unearth a few communists. You, on the other hand, have not exposed one solitary terrorist. DH:
LR: If Ford foundation supporting left-wing causes is undeniable proof of anti-Americanism, then I have undeniable proof that American universities are knee-deep in killing fields around the world since at any given moment hundreds of research projects at institutions from Princeton and Berkeley to Cal Tech and Vanderbilt are being funded by the defense dept.. DH:
LR: Why ever not, Mr. Horowitz?
The Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation has given you more than
$3.5 million since 1988 and roughly a third of your center's
annual budget of approximately $3 million, comes from the Olin,
Bradley and Scaife foundations. DH:
LR: The major media? Or the drum-major media? Cheerleaders for non-existent WMD, enablers of Fallujah and Abu Ghraib. They let out barely a squeak about the passage of the Patriot Act and its successors. But they roar about the radicalism of the academy. On March 29, 2005, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post highlighted a new study that found 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative ("College Faculties A Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds," Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, March 29, 2005). The study showed up in the Post just after the Churchill affair broke out and as a nationwide campaign for a Student Bill of Rights had started making headway. How opportune. The bill, (SB24) aims for diversity of opinion at universities. A laudable goal but surely one that should extend to other institutions in the country. Why not, for instance, a quota for left-anarchists on the board of Viacom, at least two Maoists on the editorial board of the Washington Post or equal time for the Christian Peacemaker team at the next meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? DH:
LR: Will do, Mr. Horowitz, as long as we also get an ad about a namesake of yours, the pro-Israeli activist group that calls itself the David Project. Its website lists the following members:
The ADL and AIPAC are two of the most powerful lobbies in the US and they routinely disrupt or influence legislation by orchestrating "astroturf" campaigns against pro-Palestinian initiatives as well as against any investigation of Israeli activities in the US. CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) intimidates print or TV journalists who dare contradict the official line on Israel. The David Project also produced the documentary that was used to smear Joseph Massad as a terrorist sympathizer. David Project? Goliath seems more accurate. Lila Rajiva is a free-lance journalist and author of "The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American media," (Monthly Review Press). She can be reached at: lrajiva@hotmail.com
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann  Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair          Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.                 |
