Islamo Fascism Awareness Week III: Recap
The Terrorism Awareness Project has completed our third Islamo Fascism Awareness Week, October 13-17, with 79 universities across America participating. Several international universities have also reached out to us, including campuses as far as the UK.Our two previous IFA Weeks included demonstrations that involved thousands of college students, and it became evident how deeply embedded pro-Islamist Muslim student groups had become and how influential they were in making sure there was no meaningful dialogue on the War on Terror in our universities. Therefore, the Terrorism Awareness Project decided to focus Islamo Fascism Awareness Week III on how to “Stop the Jihad on Campus.” In particular, we wanted to educate others about danger represented by the growing power of the Muslim Student Association, a group which, as documents captured by the FBI have shown, is part of a network of “front groups” established in this county two decades ago by the Muslim Brotherhood (godfather organization to al Qaeda) to wage a “stealth jihad” of subversion against American institutions paralleling the armed jihad it was waging against American troops abroad.
The Terrorism Awareness Project worked with the Young America’s Foundation, the Leadership Institute, the Ayn Rand Institute, and other groups that would use their campus chapters to help spread the word about Islamo Fascism. In addition, a group called the Florida Security Council donated ten thousand DVDs of the highly praised anti-jihad documentary “Obsession” we could give our student leaders to distribute as part of IFA Week III.
Our project distributed useful education materials to students. Included in our student packets were pamphlets about the “The Muslim Students Association and the Jihad Network” which showed how the MSA, hiding behind the protective coloration of “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” deceptively postured as a religious/cultural organization on campus while promoting a hardcore radical political message based on hatred of Israel and America. This ideology of hate was bolstered by speakers the MSA brought to campus such as Sheikh Khalid Yasin, who claimed that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” and called for death to all homosexuals.
In addition to pamphlets, the Terrorism Awareness Project placed ads in college newspapers across the country directly challenging the MSA and other radical campus groups to sign a petition condemning the “Hadith of Hate” in Muslim holy writ which calls for the murder of Jews. We had one notable success. Working in collaboration with the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, we convinced the provost of the University of Southern California to order the USC branch of the MSA to remove this hadith from its campus-sponsored website. But otherwise all MSA chapters defiantly refused to condemn this call to genocide.
Despite the fact that many students were concentrating on the approaching national elections, Islamo Fascism Awareness Week III had a dramatic impact on the 79 campuses that participated. As in prior IFA events, the Freedom Center’s speakers—Dick Morris, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, and David Horowitz—met with some bruising receptions and experienced the campus bias against free speech that happens not to be politically correct speech.
This was certainly the case with the appearance of the Freedom Center’s Robert Spencer, an established expert on the jihad, at Penn State on October 14. Robert experienced the harassment and intimidation the campus left always uses to silence critics, a reception that contrasted strongly with an earlier appearance by the hate-spewing Sheikh Yasin, who had been greeted with respectful attention from the Penn State community. Members of the MSA disrupted Robert’s talk, shouted that he was a “racist,” and attempted to lead walkouts from the auditorium with one man standing up and screaming, “I’m a terrorist! Arrest me!” As the event came to an end, one of the conservative students who had sponsored Robert’s appearance was threatened by a member of the Muslim Student Association who told him, “You’d better walk a narrow line.”
Some variation of this hostility marked appearances by Daniel Pipes at Washington University, St. Louis; Wafa Sultan’s speech at UC Irvine (Wafa, a former Muslim, is always a special target of the left because she was shocked into secularism by atrocities committed by Islamic extremists); and Nonie Darwish at George Washington University. Angela Davis or Ward Churchill receive $25,000 speakers’ fees without having to worry about security because the conservative students who find their politics abhorrent nonetheless respect their right to express their opinions.
The Freedom Center is designing events for major IFA weeks in the spring and fall which will involve 150 universities and colleges across the country. We are also planning a permanent, year round campaign that will make awareness of the terrorist threat a constant theme of campus political life.