Last night I spoke at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. There were few disruptions during the talk itself, although there was a loud group of louts toward the back, one of whom during the question period told me angrily that he didn’t want to listen to what I was saying. I assured him that no one was forcing him to listen at all, and that he was quite welcome to leave.
The question period was full of the usual self-righteous lecturing by thoroughly propagandized students who have no training in critical thinking and quite obviously feel deeply threatened when their cherished ideas, which rest on such shaky intellectual and evidentiary foundations, are questioned. I see that one of the fundamental weaknesses of the Left, and their Islamic supremacist allies, is that they believe their own propaganda, and don’t even have the conceptual apparatus required to help them recover when its inaccuracy and dishonesty is exposed. Even at their best the questioners were clearly playing “Gotcha,” trying to get me to say something they could use against the Week and the perspective I represent, rather than engaging in real intellectual give-and-take. This too is a function of how thoroughly they have been propagandized, for they have been taught that those who oppose them are morally evil, and can’t even conceptualize the possibility that people of good will might disagree with them and thus should be engaged with ideas, not rants and attempted traps.
I didn’t expect anything else at the beginning of the Week, and of course I have not been greeted with anything like the reception that Nonie Darwish and David Horowitz have received at other universities. In general, the hysteria, the lies about the Week and the intentions of its organizers, and the attempts to silence us all indicate how much the Week is needed, how threatened the Left and its jihadist allies are by our shining this light upon them and pointing out the hypocrisy of their “bigotry” talk, and how vitally important it is that we keep up this kind of pressure.
Here is a report from the Brown newspaper about the event, supplemented with bogeyman photo, although all in all the article is not nearly as bad as it could have been. There are a few inaccuracies and distortions: no mention is made of my explanation of the term “Islamofascism” as having originated by Algerian pro-democracy Muslims fighting against the exponents of political Islam, and being buttressed by the pro-Nazi sentiments of Hasan Al-Banna (founder of the Muslim Brotherhood), Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and others. Instead, we get the impression that it’s something non-Muslims like Horowitz have cooked up.
A Muslim student, Osman Chaudhry, is referred to as saying “that he thought the lecture unfairly cast suspicion on the entire Muslim community,” which suggests that he was reading from his prepared notes from before the talk, not reacting to the talk itself — in which I spoke repeatedly and at some length about the need for peaceful Muslims to confront and resist the jihadists.
The College Republicans President Mark Frank is quoted as saying of me that “where he was very provocative, he largely backed his arguments with solid evidence.”
Largely? Memo to Brown students: wherever you may have thought evidence was lacking for points I made (and I can see how you might have missed some of the evidence I gave while attempting to talk over me), contact me at director@jihadwatch.org, and I will supply it.