UC Irvine's chancellor is being asked to condemn a conservative writer and his followers for recently plastering the campus with posters accusing faculty, students and student groups of carrying water for Islamic terrorists.
David Horowitz and members of the David Horowitz Freedom Center hung posters at UCI on Oct. 6 that accused members of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) with providing “a campus front for Hamas terrorists and … supporting the Hamas-sponsored, anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign in America.”
Among those singled out for shaming was David Theo Goldberg, director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, whose years of study of racism and multiculturalism has been supported by the Ford, Gates, Mellon, Hearst, MacArthur and Rockefeller foundations as well as the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Los Angeles Jewish Community Foundation.
But, according to the Horowitzstas, Goldberg has called Israelis “Nazis” and accused Jews of murdering Palestinians in snuff films.
Horowitz is no stranger to stirring up controversy at UCI and other universities, including UCLA, UC Berkeley and San Diego State, which were also the recipients of inflammatory posters in recent weeks.
His relationship with UCI dates back at least to May 2008, when the Weekly covered him speaking on campus and saying Muslim student groups across the U.S. were being trained to kill American students. “We're providing technology to people whose ideology is that we are the devil and they have to blow us up,” he said at the time.
Our report noted that Horowitz was by then known for saying things like “black people don't deserve reparations for slavery” before his speaking engagements during Black History Month, which routinely led to student protests or admonishments from administrators that the writer and his followers would then parlay into accusations that their free speech was being denied.
At an appearance on campus in May, Horowitz told a crowd of about 30 that anti-Zionists are “worse than Nazis” and that the UC “only enforces its principles of community against conservative students, not that they ever violate them.”
Also last spring, Horowitz and his cohorts put up inflammatory posters at UCI and other campuses, prompting UCLA Vice Chancellor Jerry Kang to call them “demagoguery” and “focused, personalized intimidation that threatens specific members of [the campus] community.”
The Horowitz campaign's response?
Target Kang in a new round of posters.
That may give UCI Chancellor Howard Gillman pause when he reads a letter just sent to him by Palestine Legal, which along with other human rights groups and students is calling for official admonishment of Horowitz and his pals. Click here to read the letter.
Several UCI students have already condemned Horowitz and his tactics, according to the UCI New University student newspaper, which also got the man of the hour to explain himself: “The goal of our poster campaign is to alert the UCI community to the fact that, by supporting SJP with campus privileges and student funds, it is supporting a propaganda arm for Hamas terrorists whose stated goal is destruction of the Jewish state and extermination of the Jews.”
The day before the posters went up, Horowitz’s online Frontpage Mag ranked UCI No. 6 on a list of “Top Ten Schools Supporting Terrorists.”
Like so:
The University of California Irvine is a notorious base for supporters of terrorists. BDS activists on campus make no secret of their allegiance to Hamas, chanting slogans such as “Intifada, Intifada/long live the Intifada” and “when people are occupied/resistance is justified” and disrupting pro-Israel events. Irvine hosts an annual Israeli Apartheid Week which has been variously called “Anti-Zionism Week” and “Resisting Zionism” by its supporters. Recently, Irvine’s mock “apartheid wall” glorified convicted hijacker Leila Khaled, a member of the murderous terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The wall depicted a map of Israel with the entire nation labeled as “occupied territory.” Speakers invited to Irvine by the campus chapter of the Muslim Student Union included BDS movement founder Omar Barghouti and infamous terrorist-supporting anti-Semite, Amir Abdel Malik Ali, who has openly stated his allegiance to Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. Irvine’s student senate unanimously passed a BDS resolution in 2012, one of the first student governments in the nation to do so. Irvine students even met with a prominent Hamas leader during a secret trip to the Middle East in 2009.
Horowitz says he won't stop applying the pressure until terrorists are gone from UCI.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.