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Conservative writer should acknowledge racist roots

David Horowitz, who leads The David Horowitz Freedom Center, named UH among the top ten schools that support terrorism. | Corbin Ayres/The Cougar

In attempted ideological cleansing, David Horowitz spoke at the University of Houston on Thursday at an event hosted by the UH chapter of the Young America’s Foundation. Dozens of students organized a walkout, including the UH chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

This protest was not random, just as Horowitz’s choice to speak at UH was not. The ideology that spawned Horowitz to speak here is an example of the false rhetoric from a white man on a movement that opposes the systemic effects of his views and actions.

Horowitz and his foundation named UH one of the top schools supporting terrorism. Their website, which is much too long for a domain name, also claims that we promote genocide and praise Adolf Hitler.

Anyone that goes to UH or has even driven through it knows how absurd these claims are. These dubious assertions stem from Horowitz’s views on one student organization called Students for Justice in Palestine.

SJP’s goal is to bring awareness and garner solidarity for the plight of Palestinians. Their on-record events have been peaceful, ranging from providing general public knowledge to holding discussions.

Horowitz, however, has a wish-wash history with political alignment. He was once a Marxist but switched to conservatism. The switch is not the problem; the issue is the radical ideology that comes from a lack of understanding of other people.

He penned a book called “Progressive Racism.” The title alone is an oxymoron but explains why he abandoned progressivism for racism with radical conservatism.

In an excerpt from the book, he says that the American political climate has been “warped by progressives through their rejection of the color-blind standard established by the Constitution and once championed by the civil rights movement and its leader Martin Luther King.”

Being color-blind is not an answer to anything, especially racism, because we as humans see differences. Martin Luther King Jr. was a champion for his people and realized the effects of race. Otherwise, he would not have been compelled to be a leader.

Being color-blind should not be a standard because that perpetuates the racial inequalities that brown people face. That pattern of thought stunts social progress because the rhetoric makes it seem that there is no disparity based on said color.

He said at a conference that “every black person alive in this country owes their freedom to America,” referring to the Civil War and how Union soldiers fought for the freedom of slaves.

This is false and a result of the master narrative in history books. The U.S. didn’t go to war with itself only because of slavery; it did so due to the Confederacy’s decision to succeed because of the South’s economic reliance on slavery.

Slavery was abolished because of the Union’s tactic to destroy the Southern economy, which was built on the backs of slaves as punishment for succeeding.

He also says that “the true DNA of America is liberty, not racism.” America’s DNA is of liberty for white Americans, not anyone else. Slaves were not viewed as people, so the thought of liberty for black slaves was not present in the signing of the declaration.

These are all elementary concepts. The fact that the effects of slavery are still ingrained in America through the prison-industrial complex, unfair housing and racist laws during the Jim Crow era.

If — as a country — we cannot grasp that, then we will not have meaningful progress to heal the past, and every conversation will be rudimentary.

Opinion editor Dana C. Jones is a print journalism junior. He can be reached at [email protected].

16 Comments

  • This column is painfully ignorant. Slavery existed for 1000 years in Africa before a white man ever set foot there and for 3,000 years in every society until the end of the 18th Century when white Christians in Europe and America declared it immoral. America’s birth certificate was a revolutionary statement that as children of one Creator all men were created equal and had an inalienable right to liberty. This idea and 350,000 mainly white lives is what ended slavery in the United States and soon after throughout the western hemisphere. The British had to send gunboats into Africa to free the slaves there, and sadly black slavery still exists in Africa today mainly due to Muslim slavers. The marxist cliches in this article are false and offensive. Also, in my speech – still unreported by the Cougar – I said (and provided documentation to support) that SJP was created by the terrorist organization Hamas, is funded by Hamas, serves exclusively as a Hamas propaganda organization and yet is supported by student activity fees at the University of Houston.

    • You have no clue of what the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or the parties involved in it. Go live in Palestine for couple of year and you’ll understand. Don’t smear and judge without knowing anything like an idiot. You are, supposedly, an educated man.

      • Palestinian miseries are the result of 70 years of unprovoked aggression by Arabs against the Jews, because they are Jews. Palestinians are oppressed by Fatah and Hamas and their genocidal war against Israel. Your comment is the same as blaming the allies in World War II for the suffering of the Germans.

      • Palestinians are good at a couple of things I can think of…

        1) Propaganda: Making Israel look like the bad actor while Palestinians glorify mass murderers.
        2) Victimization: Always playing the victim card while glorifying terrorists who slit Israelis babies throats and blowing up Israeli restaurants.
        3) Stupidity: Electing officials who steal international aid from their own people and instead of directing their anger at their elected officials displacing the blame onto Israel.
        4) Stupidity Squared: Electing Hamas and then playing the victim when Hamas threatens and kills anyone who disagrees with their fascistic leadership.

        I’m sure I’m forgetting a dozen other things Palestinians are good at but being in a rush I hope I’ll be excused.

          • Good point. Here are some additional advancements our Leftist loving Palestinians have brought the western world.

            1) Plane hijackings (thank you Yasir Arafat)
            2) Suicide bests (thank you Yasir Arafat)
            3) Using cars and trucks to mow down people in places like Jerusalem, Paris, NYC, Brussels, and to a theater near you soon.

            No doubt I’ve forgotten many other perverted and disgusting acts and activities promulgated by the Palestinians. But meanwhile even though Jews make up .02% of the world’s population they have won 23% of all Nobel Prizes. It’s little wonder the Left has embraced the Palestinians just as they did the socialists, the Marxists and Che, etc.

  • The following was written by an ex-Muslim.

    “So, the question now is that who is the real enemy of the Arab world?

    The Arab world wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of innocent lives fighting Israel, which they considered is their sworn enemy, an enemy whose existence they never recognized. The Arab world has many enemies and Israel should have been at the bottom of the list.

    The real enemies of the Arab world are corruption, lack of good education, lack of good health care, lack of freedom, lack of respect for the human lives and finally, the Arab world had many dictators who used the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people. These dictators’ atrocities against their own people are far worse than all the full-scale Arab-Israeli wars.

    In the past, we have talked about why some Israeli soldiers attack and mistreat Palestinians. Also, we saw Israeli planes and tanks attack various Arab countries. But, do these attacks match the current atrocities being committed by some Arab states against their own people. In Syria, the atrocities are beyond anybody’s imaginations? And, isn’t the Iraqis are the ones who are destroying their own country? Wasn’t it Tunisia’s dictator who was able to steal 13 billion dollars from the poor Tunisians? And how can a child starve in Yemen if their land is the most fertile land in the world? Why would Iraqi brains leave Iraq in a country that makes 110 billion dollars from oil export? Why do the Lebanese fail to govern one of the tiniest countries in the world?

    And what made the Arab states start sinking into chaos? Their backward-looking and barbaric religion.”

    • Arafat,

      The sad fact is that the Arab world wants to blame others for their failures and miseries. They can never take responsibility for their own actions. As for Israel, they cannot accept a non-Muslim country on land they consider part of their caliphate. The fact that it is Jewish especially angers them. But it’s just another entity to blame for their own sad situation. Blame Israel. Blame the US. Blame the West.

  • It seems to me that an effort at ideological cleansing was the disruption by SJP. If someone has a different point of view about Israel, SJP’s mission is to shut it down by disruption and intimidation. That is what they do, and SJP has done it across the country on one campus after another. I witnessed it personally last May at UC Irvine where they disrupted a pro-Israel presentation. SJP should be banned from every campus in the country. They are nothing but a bunch of brown shirts masquerading as human rights activists. Their efforts have helped spawn a resurgence of anti-Jewish feeling on our college campuses.

    I have watched Horowitz speak and he is no racist. He merely says that the black community has nothing to show for the support they have given to liberal Democrat policies that have only bankrupted cities.

    I would advise students who are undecided about issues like these to watch which side engages in disruption and efforts to silence the other side. That will tell you which side is right and which side is wrong.

  • No. Buzz off, you crazy racist. If you can’t deal with reasoned debate you don’t belong at a university.

  • Dozens of students showed up to an event to walk out of it, right? Would it send the same signal if they had just stayed home? I got the signal that about 30-something students suddenly had the urge to urinate.

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