UPDATE ALL HOROWITZ LECTURE VIDEOS ARE POSTED AND WORKING
For those of you who don’t know who David Horowitz is and why his name is significant at Brown, follow the trolley to the land of make-believe where I’ll tell you the story of Mr. Horowitz’s infamy.
Way back, like a million years ago, (on March 13, 2001) David Horowitz ran an ad in The Brown Daily Herald entitled “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea—and Racist Too”. The essay (which ran in other campus publications as well) was a well-reasoned set of ten problems with the idea of reparations. But Brown students, on the whole, disagreed. The campus erupted in irrational, riotous, idiocy as Brown students are prone to do, stole the next day’s press run of the BDH, and promised to do the same day after day until the BDH gave the protestors a free page to advertise and tossed the money they were given for the ad into the trash can. Professors repudiated the ad, and demanded that the BDH do the same; the BDH refused. For that, Professors repudiated the BDH staff (your fellow student’s names were dragged through the mud by your professors).
For a while, life at Brown was pretty tense. But after the event had happened, the Brown Republicans decided to invite Mr. Horowitz to campus. But there was a backlash, and the lily-livered republicans rescinded their invitation. When Ruth became President, though, one of her first acts was to reinvite the uninvited Horowitz to speak. And so he did.
Now, this is the short and sweet version. You can read the long version here. But I only bring it up to draw some parallels. The other day, Horowitz published an incredibly inflammatory advertisement in the BDH that attacked the Muslim Student’s Association. It’s not a group I know much about, so I don’t know whether what he said about them is true. The day after the ad ran, the BDH published a letter to the editor by Anthony Badami (a kid I have a lot of respect for), demanding that the BDH repudiate the ad. And now, I imagine that there will be a rash of letters agreeing with Mr. Badami.
Unfortunately, while Horowitz can be elegant and even convincing, his lecture the other night was terrible. He took a shotgun approach, and because of that, he had no coherent thesis. And, while Horowitz had a lot of truth strewn throughout his lecture, he insisted on throwing in platitudes that did nothing but weaken his already non-existent syllogism. Despite all that, I’m sorry Anthony, we do not live in a fascist society. If Horowitz wants to publish his anecdotal evidence that the Muslim Students Association is part of this Islamofascist conspiracy, you would do better to address his arguments than to demand repudiation by the newspaper that published the article. This is the same thing that happened when the BDH published his reparations piece.
Anyhow, rant aside, for those of you who care to watch the lecture, here it is in full (minus the breaks between me changing the dvd in my camera):
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
A student (who I will assume was the last person taken off the wait list his year) insists that Sarah Palin = Muslim terrorist. Hilariously, this student seems to be completely sober. He’s under the influence of only his brain. RAH RAH BRUNONIA!
Horowitz fights with a Palestinian (I think) girl. Fisticuffs may or may not be exchanged.
Part 4
This was the sarcastic kid. Horowitz takes the bait and looks really stupid. Horowitz proceeds on a rant about the faculty at Brown. “These people are communists…. You have at least sixty communists on your faculty.”
Another kid tries to bait Horowitz. He attempts sarcasm but is even too stupid to be sarcastic (the most simplistic form of humor). The student asks where we can find these Islamofascists. Apparently he wants to play hide-and-seek with them.
Part 5
Horowitz and an English kid go at it. “I’m right. You’re wrong,” Horowitz says. The english kid then stands up and throws a cup of tea in Horowitz’ face and stuffs his mouth full of crumpets. With that, Horowitz bids us farewell.
Only 4 of your videos are viewable, just FYI.