|
Contributors
David Horowitz - Columnist
David
Horowitz is a noted author, commentator and columnist. His
is the founder of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture
and his opinions can be found at Front
Page Magazine. [go
to Horowitz index]
 The
Multiple Lies of John Podesta and Friends
The war against the Academic Bill of Rights...
[David Horowitz] 5/24/05
I was surfing
the blogosphere the other day and came across an eye-catching
sentence on a blog called “Folkbum’s
Rambles and Rants,” which describes itself as being “A
Small Squeaky Cog in the Vast Leftwing Conspiracy.” Actually
it was two sentences that caught my eye and they went like
this: “Do we also have to start rounding up the college professors
and putting them in camps David
Horowitz is this
close to being that explicit.”
In the course
of my campaign for academic freedom on college campuses, I’ve
grown used to malicious, mendacious and unprincipled attacks
from leftists in general and Democrats in particular, people
who generally like to preen themselves as “liberals” but haven’t
had a tolerant impulse in years.
For
proposing an Academic Bill of Rights that would defend “intellectual
diversity” and codify students’ academic
freedoms (while still supporting the academic freedom of professors)
I have been called a Maoist, a Stalinist, a McCarthyite, an
Orwellian, a thought-controller, a witch-hunter and a fascist.
Members of a socialist organization at the University of Hawaii actually
held up signs saying “No academic freedom for fascists.”) All
these attacks originate with a left that can’t put together
a coherent thought before launching into a witch-hunt of its
opponents (cherchez
la raciste, la sexiste, l’homophobe.)
If
students are being graded politically and forced to parrot
leftwing clichés to satisfy their professors, the left’s first
defense is to deny the reality. There’s no evidence, except
Horowitz’s word. He made it up. Large memory bases of the Internet
are already stocked, for example, with the Brock-inspired lie
that I
made up the case of a final exam in
a criminology course, which required Colorado students to either
make the case for gay marriage or that the U.S. war in Iraq
was a criminal action. On the other hand, if I or some legislator
sponsoring my Bill puts out a call for student testimonies
of professorial abuses to establish our claims, the left jumps
into the op-ed pages of the principal metropolitan newspaper
in the area (always wide open to them) to cry “witch-hunt!” All
across the country we’ve been attacked by irate professors
claiming we’re turning students into informers!
I don’t these people decrying the Enron employees who came
forward to describe the abuses of their superiors as informers.
But
Folkbum’s suggestion that I am out to put professors into camps
certainly raises the bar a bit. This is the first time I believe
that my modest proposal to hold academics to their own academic
freedom guidelines while extending them to students has been
called “Nazi.” Where could Folkbum have come up with this idea?
As
it happens, the link from my name leads to a site created by
John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, and George
Soros’ current point man at the Center for American Progress.
Podesta’s site, called Think
Progress is one of many that Podesta has launched from
his 501(c)3 cum Political
Action Committee. The link from my name on Folkbum takes
the reader to a page on
the Podesta site which is part of its regular feature “Radical
Right-wing Agenda.”
You
might think about that little piece of information for a moment.
An Academic Bill of Rights, whose principles are drawn entirely
from the academic freedom principles articulated by John Dewey
and Arthur O. Lovejoy for the American Association of University
Professors, is characterized by Podesta and his hirelings as
a “Radical Right-wing Agenda.” How far we have slid in
the intervening years.
Under
Podesta’s “Radical Right-wing Agenda” you will find: “Conservatives
in the Ohio State Senate are considering a bill that would
prohibit public and private college professors from introducing ‘controversial
matter’ into the classroom and shift oversight of college course
content to state governments and courts. Two more blatant lies.
In fact the Ohio Bill would not prohibit
teachers from introducing controversial matter into the classroom, nor would
it shift oversight of curriculum to legislatures. The Podesta
team’s source for this misinformation is the Ohio ACLU website.
The Ohio ACLU is a chief opponent of the Bill along with the
American Association of University Professors, which has simply
turned its back on its own academic freedom tradition, and
with the Ohio office of the Council on American Islamic Relations
(CAIR) an organization with multiple links to terrorists, who
I suppose are opposing the Bill in the hopes of protect Middle
Eastern Professors like Columbia’s Joseph Mossad from scrutiny
for their anti-Semitic behavior.
In
fact the Ohio
Bill says this: “Faculty
and instructors shall not infringe the academic freedom and
quality of education of their students by persistently introducing
controversial matter into the classroom or coursework that
has no relation to their subject of study and that serves no
legitimate pedagogical purpose.” (emphasis added) Among
the professors the Bill has in mind are a biology teacher at Penn State and
a Civil Engineering professor at Columbia who
each showed Michael Moore’s anti-Bush diatribe Farenheit911 in
their science courses on the eve of the presidential election
last fall. Or the Spanish language professor at Bowling Green
University who takes out ten minutes of every class for what
he calls “a political parenthesis,” which he uses for rants
against George Bush, the war in Iraq, Republicans in particular
and conservatives in general. Many other insistences of such
political and unprofessional abuses of academic time could
be and have been documented; they are in fact pervasive throughout
the current university system.
But
the Ohio Senate Bill is not even original in making this distinction
between indoctrination and education. It is a distinction that
the universities themselves have made for nearly a hundred
years. In the paragraph in question, the Ohio Senate Bill is
merely repeating, practically word for word, a tenet from the
AAUP’s own 1940 Statement
on the Principles of Tenure and Academic Freedom. It
also word for word one of the principles of academic freedom
stressed by the Faculty Handbooks of Ohio State University,
Bowling Green University and other Ohio public schools. The
point of the Ohio Senate Bill is to hold university administrations
to principles they already claim
to embrace,
and also to take what are now listed merely as “faculty responsibilities” for
academic freedom and make them student
rights.
That
is what has the professors and leftists aroused: That someone
wants to take existing academic freedom rights that would protect
students (and not just professors) seriously.
There is absolutely no language in the Ohio Bill or any of
the academic freedom bills that would give the legislature “oversight” of
course content as the Podesta site claims. Moreover, every
university is free right now to enforce the existing academic
freedom provisions already laid out by the American Association
of University professors and obviate the need for legislation.
In Colorado when
universities agreed to put the protections of the Academic
Bill of Rights in place, the legislation was withdrawn.
The
lies continue: “The language of the bill comes from right-wing
activist David Horowitz’s ‘Academic Bill of Rights’, which
recommends states adopt rules to “restrict
what university professors could say in their classrooms" and
halt liberal ‘pollution’ on campus.” The words in quotation
marks --“restrict what university professors could say in their
classrooms” and halt liberal “pollution” on campus come from
a Democratic Party website. They cannot be found anywhere in
the Ohio Bill or the Academic Bill of Rights or in the tens
of thousands of words written by myself or by other leaders
of the academic freedom movement. They are inventions of the
left along with the idea that the academic freedom movement
is targeting liberals and hopes to “halt liberal” ideas. The
Academic Bill of Rights specifically protects liberals, leftists
and Communists from persecution for their ideas. In fact the
first two tenets of the Academic Bill of Rights forbid the
hiring, firing, promotion or demotion of any professor for
their political views whatever they are.
Having
lied not only about the essence of the Academic Bill of Rights,
but also about its details, Podesta’s site proceeds to the
witch-hunt and character assassination phase (which a perusal
of the site which show is its natural instinct): “Horowitz,
who is the driving force behind the movement for ‘Academic
Freedom’ in Ohio and other states, has a distinguished history
of intellectual defamation, historical inaccuracy and political
bullying.” Three more lies/slanders take your pick.
Intellectually
speaking, the line between criticism and defamation is usually
in the eye the beholder. Are John Podesta and his friends liars
or have I defamed them? I’m sure their view will be very different
from mine. Legally and defamation is a legal term -- I have
never been sued for defamation let alone convicted as, for
example, Democratic presidential aspirant and Podesta friend
Al Sharpton has. So to accuse me of having “a distinguished
history of intellectual defamation” is simply false.
I
also have no record of “historical inaccuracies.” Like every
public figure and writer I have sometimes erred in hastily
made statements, but these instances are few, far between,
do not touch on important matters. Moreover, always (and unlike
my critics), I have promptly corrected any errors that have
been pointed out. All the charges of historical inaccuracy
that have been charged to me by my political enemies are matters
of opinion converted by unscrupulous opponents into issues
of fact. Fifty books on the “lies” of George Bush produced
by “progressives” for the last presidential contest demonstrate
quite clearly that Democrats and others on the left have a
constitutional inability to distinguish between opinions and
facts.
The
Podesta site gives the following absurd examples of my alleged
intellectual defamations and historical inaccuracies:
1. “He
has freely compared American liberals to Islamic terrorists”
The
statement is a lie. I have never compared actual liberals to
Islamic terrorists. The reference link is to the Amazon site
where my book Unholy
Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left is sold.
Even the title gives the game away. It’s about Radical Islam
and the American left.
Is Podesta suggesting that American liberals are actually leftists?
The gravamen of my book is that the American left has formed
a de facto alliance
with Islamic Radicals and that through its influence in the
Democratic Party it was able to dramatically affect the last
election, in particular by turning supporters of the Iraq War
like John Kerry into opponents. My book specifically praises
American liberals and Democrats like Bill Clinton, Joe Lieberman
and Dick Gephardt for resisting the pressures of the left (in
the main) and supporting a noble and necessary war. So much
for this slander.
2. “Slandered
the Democratic Party and John Kerry for criticizing the war
in Iraq”
The
source for this charge is a column decorously titled, “Is David
Horowitz A Lunatic” (no defamation involved here!) by the Washington
Bureau chief of The
Nation magazine, a publication that supported Stalin, Mao,
Ho, Fidel, Alger Hiss, and the Rosenberg Spies, and has sympathized
with every American enemy, finding “root causes” to explain
their attacks when its editors could not openly embrace their
agendas and opposing every American war since 1945, while supporting
every Democratic candidate for president including and especially
John Kerry. In other words, this is a case of the Podesta site
slandering itself. I have, by the way, responded to and refuted
the claims made in this Nation column here.
3. "and
made a habit out
of accusing his detractors of racism."
The
Podesta site’s source for this charge is MediaMatters, a site
created and run by the self-confessed liar, Soros-protégé and
Podesta ally, David Brock. MediaMatters is entirely dedicated
to the slander of Republicans and conservatives and has no
other evident purpose. The Media Matters list of instances
where I am alleged to have called detractors of mine “racists” begins
with Al Franken and includes six other individuals and organizations
(among them, “The Democratic Party”). Five of these, including
the Democratic Party, have never been my “detractors” as such,
so it is yet another lie to imply that I indiscriminately apply
the term “racist” to my detractors in all but two of the seven
cases adduced. The fact is that I apply the term “racist” to
racists, and to detractors like Al Franken, who refer to me
casually as a “racist” without a shred of evidence and simply
because they are
arrogant and ignorant and know they can get away with it. My
account of the Franken caper can be found here.
(Just for the record: I called the Democratic Party racist
for supporting race-preference laws and running corrupt and
failing school systems in America’s inner cities whose trapped
students are mainly Hispanic and black).
The
Podesta site article is barely 200 words long but it contains
several more lies, which I will not bother going into (it has
already taken me almost ten times the space here to set the
record straight). Unfortunately, this is what the political
argument has become in America,
and in this Democrats and so-called liberals are primarily
responsible.
Sure
I’m an aggressive and partisan conservative. But I constructed
the academic freedom campaign very carefully to avoid precisely
what has happened. I vetted the Academic Bill of Rights in
advance with prominent leftists and got their approval for
the text. I framed the academic freedom campaign in terms which
were entirely liberal and viewpoint neutral, protecting people
in the academic community on all sides of the political spectrum.
What I didn’t do was to protect radical ideologues and political
activists whose agendas involved abusing the universities and
their students for political ends. They were and are in fact
the targets of this campaign whose purpose is to restore educational
values to our educational institutions.
But
the ideologues and the activists are very powerful. They intimidate
university administrators (witness the Larry Summers affair
at Harvard); they dominate and have the support of the faculty
unions, the education lobby (AAUP, AFT, NEA) and the leftist
networks of the Democratic Party, which they now also control.
John Podesta’s Soros-funded operation both exemplifies that
control and implements it. This is why a perfectly liberal
document like the Academic Bill of Rights and its sponsors
are being pilloried across the country as “fascists” by people
who call themselves “liberals” and claim to abhor slander. tOR
This
opinion piece first appeared at FrontPageMagazine.com reprinted
by permission of David Horowitz. Copyright 2005
§
|
