Hate mail
You have to admire the ability of the left to project its own phobias, rages, distortions, smears and mendacities on other people. I am responsible for launching a movement for academic freedom on American campuses. Its agendas are pretty transparent. It protects all individuals professors and students alike, left and right, from being persecuted for their political opinions. It seeks to remind professors that they have a responsibility to all their students regardless of their politics not to grade them politically, not to harass them for their political views and to provide them with an education that makes them aware that there are few settled truths and there are many points of view. For doing this I have been regularly attacked by pompous and unscrupulous trolls like Eric Alterman in the following manner:"The Horror of Horowitz: I’ve been hearing about this scam of David Horowitz’s for a couple of years now on various speaking gigs. In order to drum up attention for himself and no doubt, funds for his “Center” he finds some liberal or left-wing professor at a school at which he has been invited by the local conservative student group and seeks to destroy the reputation of said scholar with a series of McCarthyite accusations. If the school is publicly funded, he will often find some troglodyte legislature to conduct an inquiry into the debasement of our children, or some such nonsense. This story appears to confirm my suspicions and increases my hope in the existence of Hell so that Horowitz might now spend a few extra weeks there one day."
Alterman's source (see his link) is Bill Berkowitz, a fringe leftist much enamored of Fidel Castro who has been obsessed with me for years. Berkowitz's indictment begins with this paragraph:"At Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, WANTED posters with a headshot of Professor Abel Alves appeared on campus a few weeks back; a student who took Associate professor David Gibbs' 'What is Politics' class at the University of Arizona claimed that Gibbs 'is an anti-American communist who hates America and is trying to brainwash young people into thinking America sucks'; a political-science professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver in Colorado says she has been the target of death threats and hate e-mail in the wake of the recent debate in the state over an Academic Bill of Rights; a University of Georgia professor is being investigated after allegations he bullied a conservative student. Revenge of the Nerds? Twenty-first century Gipper brigades? No, and No. It's the Horowistas -- a small, hearty and growing band of followers of right wing provocateur David Horowitz and his Students for Academic Freedom."
I have never heard of Professor Gibbs and Oneida Meranto, the professor at Metro State Denver is a fantasist who has been disciplined by her liberal school for breaking federal law in an attempt to punish one of her Republican students. I not only did not encourage students to put up Wanted posters in respect to Professor Alves at Ball State, despite his sins against academic decency, but actually deplored the posting of these flyers publicly. In point of fact the headline of the Muncie Star about this incident was "National Leader Deplores Wanted Posters at BSU." The national leader was me. Don't expect Alterman to apologize should he read this blog or should readers of this blog send emails to his editors at MSNBC and SLATE.
I don't think the students who have suffered under Professor Alves's abuses -- need I point out that political indoctrination of students in the classroom is an abuse? -- should be judged harshly for this, but the fact is I opposed it. I have neither the time, the energy nor the inclination to correct all of the distortions and lies in Berkowitz's attack on me. I will point out that the other case at Ball State concerns Professor Wolfe. Wolfe is a professor of the saxophone who fraudulently represents himself (with the full backing of his school administration) as a qualified expert on matters of war and peace, and who grades his students according to whether they ascribe to his Chomskyite views of the world or not. Reasonable liberals will be appalled by this. Eric Alterman and Bill Berkowitz are neither reasonable nor liberal and will not. Others can find the information about the situation at Ball State here in the section of our website at www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org that deals with the Brett Mock case.
Lowell Ponte gives us a short bio of Coke's source for the intellectually dishonest attack on the ABOR:
Born in New York City, Berkowitz entered the University of Kansas in 1965 and promptly became a leftwing campus radical who took part in at least some activities of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Berkowitz was later on the “Defense Committee” for Randy Gould, a University of Kansas anti-Vietnam War activist indicted by a federal grand jury for suspected links to a series of 1970 bombings in Kansas and Missouri connected to the radical Weather Underground. Berkowitz later reported Gould’s claim that the government “alleged lots of things that weren’t true and lots of things that were irrelevant” about his purported ties to the Weathermen. Gould even named his pet dog after violent anarchist labor organizer Joe Hill. He was convicted of being part of a conspiracy to make, possess and transport explosive devices across state lines (without paying the required federal tax) and beginning in the mid 1970s served less than a year in prison and four more years on probation. Such were the close comrades of Bill Berkowitz.
In 1973 Berkowitz traveled to Communist Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade “to disrupt U.S. blockade efforts.”
Soon thereafter Berkowitz was hired on the west coast to do promotional work the North American Congress on Latin America. How far left are NACLA’s politics? This May 20 in Washington, D.C., they are one of the organizers of the “Hands Off Venezuela and Cuba!” march in defense of Marxists Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.
In 1974, Berkowitz writes, he “joined the United Farm Workers Union boycott team in Oakland, California,” where he lives today. “My assignment was to organize Berkeley and North Oakland residents in support of the UFW’s boycott of grapes and Gallo wines.”
Berkowitz has worked hard to keep his radical past out of the brief biographies tagged to his articles, and with good reason. In a statement that tells volumes about his character, Berkowitz wrote of his UFW organizing: “Our mission was to ‘talk’ with the truckers delivering non-union products, and picket those fruit dealers selling non-union grapes….”
That “talk” he put in quote marks is Berkowitz’s way, in his article for a leftwing union crowd, of winking and telling them that he, of course, wasn’t really trying to share ideas or genuine honest conversation with these truckers. He was trying to manipulate them and milk them for information to help the radical union cause. Exactly the same can be said for his so-called “journalism” from that day until this, which has never deviated from being raw, far-Left propaganda designed to help overthrow capitalism and advance the world socialist revolution.
The closest I could find that Berkowitz has come to criticism of the radical Left is his 2001 article datelined Havana that chided Fidel Castro’s Marxist police state because “the Cuban Revolution has had a rocky relationship with its gay citizens.” Berkowitz hastened to add that gays are now treated well in Cuba, especially since the government has come to rely on tourism for its revenue.
The ugly truth Berkowitz was unwilling to call by name is that Castro routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed gays merely for being homosexuals, a pattern that Hollywood and the liberal media have been loathe to mention. And in the service of tourist dollars, Castro has forced thousands of young Cubans, female and male, adults and children, into prostitution and left his people degraded and diseased in ways far worse than anything under the casino and nightclub-accepting government Castro overthrew.
Berkowitz spent 24 years at the Oakland-based leftwing “public interest research group DataCenter” before becoming a freelance writer and regular columnist at Working Assets and its radical web site WorkingForChange.com.
These are not good people, and they are not intellectually trustworthy. Not a bit. But, of course, one can see that for oneself by simply reading the material I've posted by Horowitz and others explaining and defending the ABOR, and comparing it to the desperate slanders of their opponents, who have no arguments, and therefore, must run them of an assembly line ad hoc.