Aren't jihad terrorists just like the Founding Fathers?

Um, like it was, like...you know?

Brain Surgery 101.

This confused student tries to justify jihadis by comparing them to the founding fathers -- guerillas fighting house-to-house (here she seems to expect Horowitz to agree with her); then she damns them by saying that the founding fathers were religious fanatics who expelled people and created dictatorships -- (here she seems to expect Horowitz to condemn the Puritans).

Her argument seems to be: You can't condemn jihadis because they're just like the founding fathers -- who by the way were fanatical dictators, so please condemn them.

"Gluing up the brain" is a modern on-campus disease. Horowitz runs out of patience with this confused, but nonetheless confident, student, and who can blame him?

Discussion and debate are great ideas but there must be at least two brains involved.

I think DH let her off the hook. He should have taken her thesis apart (its so easy even I can do it). The Founding Fathers were not Puritans (maybe a handful were), they were largely Masonic deists and were fighting to free themselves and the rest of the colonies from a religious and monarchist dictatorship. Also, we don't call terrorists "terrorists" because they don't wear uniforms. (How stupid can you get.) We call them terrorists because they deliberately, and almost exclusively, target civilians in order to force society to "submit". Next time David should set the record straight, though I know it must get frustrating hearing the same stupidity over and over again.

Brain Donor Alert.

Even Jabba The Keffiyeh was a genius in comparison to this space cadet.

My advice to this young lady, is stay in school for about 15/20 years...Try hard to learn something...I know it hurts, but if you apply yourself you will eventually graduate and go on to a job as mosque secretary...It's not hard work, just sweep up, clean rest rooms, wash windows, dust off the gun racks...easy stuff like that...

David was being kind by calling this genius and her idiotic rhetoric "boring", because it was Bullsh*t!

Of course bullshit is all a muslim has to work with since islam was founded by a master of deception ...

I wonder if this benighted girl writes her essays in the same way she speaks. A nightmare for the professor who has to read them.

And this....THIS......is a college student - a member to be of our 'young professionals'? Rot - all of it because I dearly fear for our nation and Western Civilization as it turns out moronic zombies such as this young lady. She might as well be one of the Visigoths who sacked 5th century Rome which ushered in the Dark Ages. May God help us!

OMG that is your brain on leftist idiocy. Jeez what is wrong with these retarded morons. I am amazed and dumbfounded that the crap that is out there.

That was truly sad. If that is caliber student this country's higher education produces then we are in SERIOUS TROUBLE!! Like....kinda......I mean....wow!! My neighbor's five year old speaks better than her!!

What I thought was great too was the way she was looking around asking questions trying to get people to agree with her so she could use it to her advantage. She, evidently by the look on her face, thought she was being so clever and people and David were gonna jump right in and agree!!

Ah the arrogance of youth!! Sorry, I meant to say ignorance but I guess they're interchangeable in this case!!

God Bless America and Israel

Sorry "the caliber student"

I Thank God I finished College and Grad School without this Muslim crap going on. Thank God Jesus.

This young woman has no idea how vapid she is. There is hope for her, but I'd say not much. She's most likely destined to go to her grave never figuring out how the world really works and where truth resides.

She was jut trying to make 'linkage'...The idea that only terrorist fight without uniforms, and the early 'Minute Men', had no uniforms, makes them terrorists also, is a really weak link...To begin with not all un-uniformed, unregulated, fighters caught on the battle field with arms...are necessarily terrorists...but they are illegal combatants...Probably none of the Americans fighting the British during the Revolutionary War were terrorists...they were mostly farmers and wore the uniform of the farmer, they also carried the American flag...These farmers did force the British to change their way of fighting...It's hard for me to understand this, but they they would line up a bunch of guys on one side of a field, and another on the other side and take turns shooting at each other, solders are falling over all over the place, but no one breaks ranks...The farmers realizing how stupid that was, fired from cover, from behind tree's and stumps, and rocks...This confounded the British generals, and gave them a big headache...

This girl just needs a date...I would volunteer but I'm going to have a headache on that day...

Is she from the Valley? Couldn't tell with the stoner-chick accent. I suggest she knows not a thing of true Islamic teaching.

I find it incorrect to connect the Salem Witch trials with the Founding Fathers.

Guerrilla warfare... The difference is who the reformers were targeting. The British, not for extermination as a race, but for freedom from their rule. This is simple history from Middle and High school education.

Horowitz views on the academic realm seems to be true. It is a cesspool for Communist ideology and leftist indoctrination.

Horrowitz is right: It is boring.

All of history (everywhere) is the record of invasions and often that was accompanied by exterminations of some lately "indigenous people". (Most of North America was wilderness and the "native Americans" were busy killing each other. Otherwise the Pilgrim Jihad would have gone poof.) The propaganda that pretends that the conquest of North America was somehow atypical in history is a bore.

The issue here is human nature: from the Aztecs killing the Toltec, to the Spaniard killing the Aztec, or the Arab Muslim invading Spain: it's a repeating record of "holy wars".

(On page 397 of Will Durant's Our Oriental Heritage he notes: "They (the tribes invading Hinsustan about 1,000 BC) were too primitive to be hypocrites.....They wanted land, and pasture for their cattle.... their word for war...simply meant 'a desire for more cows.")

Jihad is about "a desire for more cows.", the Pilgrims were about "a desire for more cows.", the caring Leftists and the Soviet Empire are/were about "a desire for more cows." All of the "holy wars" of history (in the name of religion or ideology) are rationalizations for "a desire for more cows."

Muslims today feel oppressed because they are not oppressors being paid jizya. What's new? In Israel, Arabs claim are the "indigenous people" because they successfully expelled a prior "indigenous people".....

(With Israel, truly, for one time in history, it appears the "indigenous people" have returned. Maybe it's God Almighty's work and God fliping the bird to Allah.)

Does anyone know history? re the invasions, the removal of some lately "indigenous peoples"?-everywhere. Human nature sucks in its selfishness and its fucking "holy wars" in the name of ideology and religion.

This girl is a disgrace to the 'education' she has received. Even I, as British national, know better than to describe the Founding Fathers of the United States as 'terrorists'. With comments like this, I fear for the future of America - and particularly for those Americans of her generation.

America's founders fought for freedom from tyranny.

Muslim jihadists fight for tyranny and an end to freedoms.

This woman is smart enought to be our First Lady.

If she were not so busy posing, many important differences between the founding fathers and "terrorists" would have come to mind.

The founding fathers were not religious fanatics intent on taking over the world.

The founding fathers did not have a poilcy of attacking "soft targets" i.e. unarmed people, women and children.

The founding fathers believed in things like logic, reason, democracy, free speech, the Western Tradition, etc.

i·con·o·clast –noun

1.a breaker or destroyer of images, esp. those set up for religious veneration.

2.a person who attacks cherished beliefs, traditional institutions, etc., as being based on error or superstition.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/iconoclast?qsrc=2446

The dumbing down of America is in full swing.

Young people have computers, internet and all sorts of information available to them, but they are less educated than say someone their age thirty years ago.

It is truly astounding how upside down thinking has evolved.

A true Idiocracy.

I felt compelled to comment again here and say this: As a college teacher for over a quarter of a century now I know that there are several reasons for the dumbing down of higher education (e.g., an increasingly inane curriculum, horribly written textbooks and way too much reliance on technological gimmicks), but the single greatest reason is that left-wing ideology, which is rooted in emotion, not reason, and full of victim-oriented thinking and an inability to understand that one should not throw out the baby with the bath water, has almost completely taken over the liberal arts and education departments in colleges and universities across America. This rot can be traced back to the 1960s, which unleashed a lot of forces, most of them stupid and self-indulgent, and we are still paying the price for this tragic decade which continues to haunt America and all the West to this day. This young women in this video, born long after the Sixties ended, is a legacy of that sorry decade in American life.

I fear for the knowledge of some "university" students. I am as amazed as David Horowitz that anyone would even try to make such an argument.

The Revolutionary War mechanism the student is referring to is the "militia."

These were the "well regulated Militia" famously referenced in the Second Amendment.

The American militias were formed mainly in the early to mid 1700s to defend against Indian attacks. Neither uniforms nor weapons were provided -- and early in the Revolutionary war, some militias did not have common uniforms.

However, the militias were "well regulated" and followed the rules of war.

For example, they did not attack civilians. They did not hide in (or fight from within) schools, hospitals, ambulances, civilian housing complexes, etc.

Now, can we think of any modern-day armed bands that do not follow such rules?

Further, during the Revolutionary War, the British executed people, as allowed by the rules of war, for not being properly in uniform. Nathan Hale comes to mind.

The "rules of war" have sharply decayed since WWII.
Terrorism is now practically sanctioned in the sense that the penalties for terrorism are very, very light, if such penalties effectively exist at all. (And I define "terrorism" as non-uniformed combatants attacking civilians.)

(Some parties even define away civilians, saying that entire populations are non-civilian, and hence terrorism, by definition, cannot occur.)

Until very recently, any non-uniformed, armed men attacking civilians and captured by a uniformed army would be rapidly condemned and executed.

Basically, the "rules of war" now seem to apply asymmetrically only to Western powers.

Kinda like being in a contest where only one side has to follows the rules.
Of course, our problem is that we don't even know we are in a contest.

College is not for everyone. This young lady, whose inarticulate, preposterously ignorant and confused presentation is excruciating to watch and listen to, is a poster girl for the virtues of attending trade school. Yes, the left-wing, anti-American, anti-Western, and antisemitic bias of academia is certainly to blame for the muddling of many minds, but there are far too many individuals attending college who do not belong there nonetheless - a sine qua non for success in college is that the left brain be properly developed. This girl's left brain is, I believe, defective. She will leave college with a degree, perhaps, but she will have learned nothing. And she will never be aware that she knows - and has learned - nothing.

While bringing up the Puritan 'theocracy' in Massachusetts, she forgot to mention Maryland, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. That's a lot of territory that offered complete freedom of worship. Facts like that though would not have furthered her tu quoque.

I had to check the location of this speech. The historical understanding and arguments suggest a junior high, perhaps a low performing high school.

Some one needs to point out to this women how her place in hamas society would be. those arms and long flowing hair would be under cover and only allowed in the presences of a male relative. how the left are in league with this facist cult! a marriage made in hell!

Mr. Horowitz...that was a moment of clarity that made me smile just a bit wider.

Hope (and common sense) prevails...

She very clearly says that the US revolutionaries targeted civilians, just like terrorists. Did I miss a story about Ben Franklin staging bombings in Britain targeting civilians? Does she mean being tarred-and-feathered as a collaborator?

This is where the blogs get to shout "LINK?"; this is where DH should have called her a liar and asked her why she is deliberately pursuing such a false equivalency. Does she mean the the US revolutionaries were terrorists and therefore bad, or does she mean that the Hamas and Hizbullahbullah should be looked on as legitimate and worthy of high praise and are just good folks?

She thinks Hamas and Hizbutt are legitimate and worthy of praise like our Founding Fathers? That is the essence of her arrogant spew.

It is important in dealing with liars to get to the heart of their real views. Strip away the BS and what I see is an apologist for terrorists. It would have been nice to have her directly confirm it like the last "For It" murder supporter.

Take it one step farther into reality and ask her: do you support the murder of babies, the blowing up of pizza parlors (cite actual examples), and the glorification of such murderers? Condemn it, or for it? Well, in her comments, this person essentially says "For It".

So, it is our obligation to point out clearly EXACTLY what such a person is supporting. This has made for some interesting conversations on airplanes and restaurants, and even some very pointed, though polite (on my part) confrontations. I will not be silent when I hear someone "For It". Its nice not to be alone anymore.

I see a brilliant career for her in convenience store night-management...

Well, Unitarianism and Deism are pretty culty to me--since I speak as the resident Puritan theocrat. Then again, we did contribute our "Black Legion" to the war for American independence, to the point where Horace Walpole spoke of "cousin America" eloping with "a Presbyterian parson".

Still, the young lady could have thought of John Adams' dictum that America does not go abroad in search of dragons to slay--counsel that Woodie Wilson would've walked well in.

And the comments on the vapidity of Leftist indoctrination in our schools and colleges made by Wellington and others are well-taken.

And, Sashland, when the Jihadis push us too far, you think we should do some tarring and feathering of imams and mullahs?

That was exactly what I was thinking.
I returned to uni after an absence of thirty years and wondered why most of the young people were not learning a useful trade instead of cluttering up universities and dragging down standards. The standard of teaching had deteriorated to accommodate the level of IQ and also interest: most of the students weren't really interested in studying but had their brains filled with left-wing ideology which permeated every conversation and classroom topic.
They hated me (most of the teachers did too) and I felt foolish being there, as if I was in kindergarten, but I stuck it out, because I needed the degree.
Who were those idiots who decided that "everyone" should go to university? Oh yes, my generation (cringe...)

Founding Fathers:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Muhammad, in In Sahih Bukhari, the most canonical of hadith collections: "Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him."

That girl is a surprisingly self-satisfied ignoramus.

This is what you get when the mainstream institutions adopt idiotic ideas.

You get well adjusted, well spoken, bright, attractive young people who can't think their way out of a wet paper bag, and who can actually be quite dangerous.

One of the most striking aspects of this particular one was the self assured air of superiority with which she expected to demolish Horowitz' position with the goofy stuff about the puritans and the equation between the puritan settlers and the founders of a century later.

By the way, when you have a truly morally depraved philosophy adopted by the cultural institutions, such as mohammedanism, you get what we see in so many mohammedan criminals and what one calls Sudden Jihad Syndrome. Nice, well adjusted, polite, considerate people, sometimes with considerable accomplishments, who then baffle all who know them socially with acts of hideous cruelty and viciousness.

They ARE well adjusted, into a sick social order.

Just as those students ARE well adjusted, into a sick school system.

We have to dismiss the assumption that criminality, or baffling idiocy, are necessarily associated with social maladjustment and obvious deficiencies.

A few simple points Mr. Horowitz should have made.

1) The "Founding Fathers" were not the Puritans. The Puritans pre-dated the Protestant (Theistic Liberal) founders of our Constitution by almost 200 years.

2) Guerrilla warfare is not why Hezbollah and Hamas are "bad." Guerrilla warfare is military strategy. Hezbollah and Hamas are "bad" because of their genocidal Islamic ideology, and indiscriminate targeting of civilians.

3) The founding fathers and their revolutionary armies did not stage their military operations from schools and hospitals, unless of course you consider crossing the frozen Delaware with half starved soldiers to attack a sleeping British base to be a "school" or a "hospital"

4) She is an idiot.

What does she mean by the founding fathers were puritans? They were not puritans. They were Masons, deists, or Christians of different sects with Deistic beliefs. She's also commiting the fallacy of hasty generalization as if all puritans were bad. The question I would of asked her is how many founding fathers were puritans? If she managed to answer this question I would then ask her how do you know these puritan founding fathers were apart of the bad religious zealots? Being an Atheist I've never read anything about them have strong puritan beliefs which would drive them to burn people at the stake or carry out inquisitions. They were men of the enlightenment they fought for freedom and liberty not to enslave everyone under Sharia law. ie. Theocracy. They didn't deliberately use women and children as shields ethier. If this is the best colleges can do children in this country are in deep trouble.

There were no geneva convention laws at that time ethier. However, General George Washington did adopt an official Continental Army uniform. Not every American soldier was provided an American uniform. British and French soldiers were outfitted by more established militaries and consequently, Revolutionary War era uniforms from those soldiers do tend to surface a bit more frequently than their American counterparts.

Why are all these Muslim girls getting up and showing just how stupid they are? Whose money are they wasting going to University?
She and the other "dope" will just end up barefoot, burka-bound, pregnant, beaten to a pulp every night for not cooking the food properly, going outside without a Muslim man accompanying them, or letting the child scream when the mouse-of-the-house is trying to relax.

What has happened to the University education complex?
As someone commented "Welcome to the 'dumbing-down' of America".

If this is where our tax dollars are going, to support these leftist, Islamist-breeding, moron-producing zoos, then I would rather put my money where it counts, invested in something precious like "gold", or better yet, "silver"(poor man's gold).

It is said, "Our children are our most precious resource" but as I gazed, slack-jawed, upon the verbal diarrhea in the question periods of David's University lectures of the last few days, I see nothing but an investment in the equivalent of "lead-sinkers".

My brain is telling me that I should forget all of this "garbage-in" of the mind and just go fishing?

I will add that this moron is also a pretty good example of what you can expect from educational methods that emphasize developing self esteem over acquiring actual knowledge or mental skills.

He self esteem absolutely glowed.

On the other hand, she was dumber than a bag of rocks.

http://freethought.mbdojo.com/foundingfathers.html

Buraq
"I wonder if this benighted girl writes her essays in the same way she speaks. A nightmare for the professor who has to read them."

It is very likely that that it was the professor who taught her all this.
In which case she gets an A plus. A good student.

I noticed she is wearing a backpack...backpacks should not be allowed in forums where people are discussing Islam...bad things can come from Muslims wearing backpacks...especially if found among gatherings of people discussing Islam...

Like, right, like?

25 years ago, as we were approaching HS graduation, a bunch of us blue-collar types from NYC who were lucky enough to have gotten great educations from the older generation of teachers, fantasized where we might go to college.
The University of California was considered as an educational nirvana by us, if only there was some way we could get there.
If this idiot is representative of what they are allowing in, and how they are educating them, this country is doomed.

If this is where our tax dollars are going, to support these leftist, Islamist-breeding, moron-producing zoos, then I would rather put my money where it counts, invested in something precious like "gold", or better yet, "silver"(poor man's gold).

Guns and ammo would be a better choice!!

Back in 2005, Brian Williams, the affably dapper, well-educated and intelligent newscaster who inherited the mantle of Tom Brokaw as anchor of NBC Nightly News, purveyed the same equivalency.

At the time, Michelle Malkin nicely dissected it:

Malkin quoted Brian Williams writing on his blog, in which he recounts:

...a robust debate in our afternoon editorial meeting, when several of us raised the point (I’ll leave it to others to decide germaneness) that several U.S. presidents were at minimum revolutionaries, and probably were considered terrorists of their time by the Crown in England.

Michelle adds:

"...Williams repeated the argument in his broadcast banter tonight with NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell...According to this report, Williams told Mitchell:"

“What would it all matter if proven true? Someone brought up today the first several U.S. presidents were certainly revolutionaries and might have been called ‘terrorists’ by the British crown, after all.”

And Michelle astutely wonders:

"In his blog post, it was “several of us” who came up with the morally equivalent notion. According to the above transcription, the “several” was reduced to a lone “someone” by air time. Who brought it up, Brian? Who? Do tell. Is it your own fabulously ill-informed thought? Or can you blame one or two or several low-level staffers?"

The student who confronted Horowitz didn't pop out of a vacuum. The sociopolitical culture that surrounds her on all sides is saturated with a wealth of givens and axioms that at best are indirectly conducive to such an equivalency, if they do not at times, at worst, directly inform it.

While Leftism is of course a major sinner in this regard (and one need not even mention in this regard Michael Moore's equivalence of Zarqawi with the American Minutemen), this general worldview has seeped into the hearts and minds of the mainstream, including most Centrists and most of those on the Right. Most Conservatives in the West may not put the equivalency so baldly, and may try to squirm out of it, but they have come to adhere to most of the axioms of the PC MC paradigm which logically tend to lead to such an equivalency in one way or another, even if ultimately its coherency cannot be sustained.

One element where David might have had a better argument was that the Islamists actually aim at civilians, whereas the Founders fought with Redcoats (a professional army).

Another major difference is that Muslim terrorists manifest a profoundly pathological fanaticism in their frequent indulgence in suicide-bombing in order to mass-murder. In history, only the Japanese Kamikaze and the Japanese military's penchant for fighting to the bitter end came close to this degree of fanaticism -- but the Muslims are worse, because their fanaticism extends to the general population, from which for the thousands of suicide-bombings in the past quarter century (only metastasizing post-911), the jihad has found willing recruits, among men, women and children.

Furthermore, this psychotic fanaticism is frequently aimed at fellow Muslims. A cursory examination of the situation in Iraq since our invasion of it and continuing into the present reveals the chasm that separates them from us: If our country were invaded by a foreign occupying power, Americans (or any other Westerner) would not go around mass-murdering our own fellow citizens -- including gatherings of women and children at public celebrations, at funerals, at hospitals, at houses of worship; much less would we adopt the grotesquely eschatological tactic of suicide attacks.

...there are several reasons for the dumbing down of higher education ...but the single greatest reason is that left-wing ideology...

This may be so in certain respects, but with respect to the Problem of the Problem -- that is, the problem of the continuing Western denial of the problem Islam -- we see that most Conservatives and Centrists basically follow the same platitudes as do the Leftists. So, obviously, something broader and deeper is going on than mere Leftism.

I have discussed this at length in my latest essay:

PC MC: Neither Left nor Right, but Ambidextrous

Wellington,

Thanks for reading my essay. I agree with you about that popularly denigrated term, elitism, and with most of your response, with two closely related exceptions:

"...had modern Leftism not existed in the first place, the conservative side of the spectrum would not have been tainted by its idiocies at all."

1. Conservatives have not been unwilling victims of some amorphous process outside their control: they too are to blame for swallowing, and regurgitating, PC MC.

2. While Leftism in its purer forms is comprised of idiocies, PC MC is an interesting fusion of laudable virtues and idiocies -- which is precisely why it has been so successful in its ability to possess the hearts and minds of people on virtually all points along the political spectrum, as well as of people in many different socioeconomic classes and professions & walks of life.

Perhaps among an evil people beholden to an evil culture, the broad mainstream success of a system need not necessitate that it have good elements; this we see in Islam. But as the West is (with the usual provisos about human imperfection aside) of beneficent stock and career, it is highly unlikely that a movement, or a system, or a paradigm shift, or a worldview could attain broad mainstream success throughout the West, as PC MC has over the past 60-odd years -- from Australia to Canada, Sweden to Spain, North America to England --, if it were mostly bad, or mostly idiotic.

The trick will be to disentangle the good from the idiotic, for they have been tightly woven together; and the weaving is psychological, intellectual and cultural.

This girl is another receptacle of higher nonsence.Trying to show off her intellectual skills and not having a clue.

This young ladies comments were irrational and poorly thought out. The evidence of this is in her inability to articulate her point clearly or concisely. She should put aside her attempt at activism and focus upon her studies. I'm not quite sure what made her think that she could present such an erroneous argument to the likes of DH. DH was quite gracious with his reply, considering he could have torn her argument to shreds.

FOR HIS GLORY!!