By Azadeh Ensha in the Huffington Post via Yahoo!:
The far right is taking its favorite catchphrase on tour. Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is coming to a campus near you.
Oh boy!
According to FrontPage magazine’s David Horowitz, the event was designed to “confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the ‘war on terror’ and that global warming is a greater danger to Americans than global jihad and Islamic supremacism.” The week’s events will include “awareness” speeches by Michael Ledeen, Rick Santorum, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter as well as Horowitz himself. With such a fair and balanced list, Islamo-Fascism Week will be the perfect environment to proselytize anti-Islamic propaganda to the under 30 crowd.
Of course, Robert Spencer and yours truly will also be on hand to rattle the bars of academia. I’ll be at Cal Tech, San Luis Obispo on Weds, Oct 24 and maybe Stanford sometime during the week.
The official poster of Islamo-Fascism week shows a photo of a teenage girl being stoned to death in Iran (disclosure: my country of birth) and will also feature speeches from Iranians who were victims of persecution. As an Iranian-American, I appreciate that they’re spreading the word about human rights abuses in my native country. Unfortunately, I think their goal has less to do with spreading awareness than it does with fostering fear, suspicion and bigotry.
Islamo-Fascism Awareness week is about telling you that Islam is evil and that Muslims are out to get you. When in fact, some crazy and violent people have hijacked the religion of billions of peaceful people.
This old saw — and the concomitant absence of supporting evidence. In fact, the speakers for the week hold differing opinions on the question of whether Islam is itself intrinsically violent (me) or whether it has indeed been “hijacked” — an ironical use of the word if there ever was one.
As part of the festivities, the event will feature a series of one-sided films including Islam: What the West Needs to Know, which extols the worldview of good (Christianity) versus evil (Islam). According to FrontPage, the movie is designed to reveal the “violent, expansionary ideology of the so called ‘religion of peace’ that seeks the destruction or subjugation of other faiths, cultures, and systems of government.”
Something like that. Order yours today!