On David Horowitz's cluelessness.

Today, Andrew Sullivan posted a reader e-mail defending David Horowitz against Andrew's nomination of him for the "Malkin award." It was an outgrowth of Horowitz's "Islamofascism awareness week," something organized on many campuses across the country, including my own (UW-Madison), where Horowitz came to speak. I stayed out of the whole mess--didn't go to the talk--because I found the main players on both sides unbearable. I'm broadly sympathetic to worries about what Islam inspires people to do, and a lot of the liberal response I saw seemed to go along the lines of "how dare Horowitz criticize a religion." Those things would make me sorely tempted to defend him, but unfortunately he's a clueless boob.

His main thing seems to be complaining about supposed liberal indoctrination, which, in my two and a quarter years in college, I've come to see as premised on a ridiculously offensive view of college students. I've had professors get opinionated in the classroom, and as a rule it adds greatly to the quality of the class, because it gives students something to think about and as a rule they are prefectly capable of thinking critically about it. Horowitz seems to assume we are incapable of doing that.

The version of his "Islamofascism awareness" website I saw declared it would not just raise awareness about one form of Islam, but also "two great liberal lies" (or some such). One was that George Bush had started the War on Terror, the second was the global warming is a bigger threat that radical Islam. I don't know what either of them even mean. I don't know of any liberal going around saying "George Bush started the war on terror," I think Horowitz may have in mind the claim that a "war on terror" is a bad way of conceptualizing the problem, which is not the same as Horowitz' caricature. As for global warming, it's a very different kind of threat than terrorism, so I don't know how you even compare them, and again I don't know which liberals are making that comparison.

As for the stuff at Andrew's blog, I can only say that as someone actually on a campus where this debate happened, the Horowitz quote that set it off was totally out of touch with reality. Horowitz apparently thinks that everyone opposed to his stupidity is supporting Islamic theocrats. This is a paranoid fantasy in no way justified by the mild stupidity displayed by some of his opponents.

A I can figure is that having spent all his life as an ideologue--first left-wing, then right-wing, Horowitz is incapable of understanding that there might be anything going on on college campuses other than ideological warfare. Let's stop paying attention to him, please.