Wingnut Awareness Week [View All]

from In These Times:



Features > November 16, 2007
Wingnut Awareness Week
Neocons beat the war drum on college campuses
By Adam Doster


You know that feeling people get when they drive past a car accident? It’s clear that the wreckage is terrifying, but they can’t bring themselves to look away. That’s how I felt wandering into DePaul University’s Cortelyou Commons on a rainy Chicago night in mid-October to attend “War With Iran?” Organized by the DePaul Conservative Alliance (DCA), this panel presentation kicked off the university’s opening contribution to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (IFAW), a nationwide campaign sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. For some masochistic reason, I had to see this wingnut carnival for myself.

To describe the evening’s panelists as wacky would be an understatement. Amir Abbas Fakhravar is a self-proclaimed “Iranian student dissident leader,” who has been embraced by neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen as an authority on the Iranian regime’s ruthlessness. Their support for him comes in spite of—perhaps because of—his dubious biography and reputation as an opportunist. In fact, Iranian journalists, student activists and former inmates told Mother Jones’ Laura Rozen that Iranian police arrested Fakhravar for a nonpolitical crime and that he took on the identity of a political prisoner once behind bars. When I emailed Ali Moazzami—a former editor at Shargh, a popular liberal newspaper in Iran that the regime shut down in August—for his opinion of Fakhravar, he replied, in all caps, “NOT ANY IMPORTANT GROUP TAKES HIM SERIOUSLY.”

Next to Fakhravar sat Robert Spencer, the founder and director of the website Jihad Watch and the author of six books that blame the teachings and practice of Islam for producing Islamic terrorism.

For those in the audience who came to the panel looking to be offended (I’d guess 60 percent), Spencer did not disappoint. He chastised the left for its inability to hold discussions without “violent intransigence and smears.” He ranted about the obstinately violent nature of Islam. He bullied the first questioner, forcing the student to define neoconservatism on the spot. And he suggested that people protesting his writing were “abetting in the persecution” of Muslims.

When someone asked an insightful question about how best to deal with inflexible ideologues, he ducked it. My favorite quirk was Spencer’s insistence on quoting—four times—a line from Pope Benedict XVI’s 2006 lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany: “To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.” He neglected to share that during this talk the Pope also said: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman.”

Fakhravar was hardly better. He recounted the treatment he was subjected to in Iran, abuses that everyone in the room could agree were heinous. Then he suggested America cannot negotiate constructively with Iranian leaders because the regime has already declared war by killing our soldiers in Iraq. With that, his testimony devolved into propaganda for the current war in Iraq and a future war in Iran. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3420/wingnut_awareness_week/