Rallying for the War At Columbia College

INSIGHT magazine ^ | April 1, 2002 | Stephen Goode

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It was a pro-war rally on an Ivy League campus — surely one of the few, if not the first, to be held at a major American center of higher learning since the 1960s established "Give Peace a Chance" as the mantra of the anti-Vietnam War movement and made pacifism the policy of preference at most colleges and universities.

Organized by the 3-year-old Columbia College Conservative Club (CCCC), "Defeating Terrorism at Home and Abroad" brought together such well-known conservative figures as David Horowitz and Middle East expert Daniel Pipes (see Picture Profile, April 15) with such lesser-known lights as immigration-reform advocate and lobbyist John Brock and history professor Joseph Skelly to talk about how America can win the war against terrorism and why we are thoroughly justified in waging that war.

Between 80 and 100 attended the four-hour event at the Roone Arledge Auditorium at Columbia on March 24, a brisk spring day on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Nonstudents paid $20 to attend; for students it was free. Security was tight at the rally, which was held on a Sunday and on the last day of spring vacation, when large numbers of students weren't likely to be around. Uniformed guards were highly visible. Once inside the building, those attending the conference could leave, but weren't allowed to re-enter if they did. Organizers feared a repeat of the November 1998 meeting of Accuracy in Academia at Columbia when 150 very loud radical protesters shouted at and booed such well-known conservatives as anti-affirmative action advocate Ward Connerly, author Dinesh D'Souza and U.S. News and World Report columnist John Leo, ultimately forcing the conservative watchdog group to leave the campus.

CCCC founder Ron Lewenberg tells Insight that this year's rally planners expected 100 protesters and hoped security would help. But it wasn't needed. Peace advocates weren't present or, if they were, they remained very quiet. This was a very conservative crowd that asked very serious questions about the war effort.

This was Columbia, citadel of sixties radicalism, but the audience broke into spontaneous applause when speaker Horowitz, a master of rhetoric who read his audience accurately, listed several of the foreign-policy, security and moral shortcomings of the Clinton administration — its failure, for example, to follow up on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — and then declared the former president to be "the most wretched human being ever to hold that office."

The four speakers urged vigilance and commitment. "Who is the enemy?" asked Pipes, director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum. "Just as fascism was the enemy in World War II and communism the enemy during the Cold War, so militant Islam is the enemy today," he said.

Militant Islamicists "have turned a religion into an ideology," Pipes explained. Their chief grievances aren't Muslim poverty, as many in the West suppose, or the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, both of which are aggravating, but not final causes. A far deeper grievance for the militant Muslims derives from a problem of identity.

"One thousand years ago, the Muslim world was on top, ahead and above the West. Being a Muslim, therefore, should mean being on the winning team, but that's not what has happened," said Pipes. "Quite the opposite." Hence, the crisis in identity.

Pipes thinks the war against the militant Islamicists can be won. He recommended the United States deal with each Muslim country on an individual basis. Ultimately, he said, "it is a Muslim issue that must be solved within Islam." He urged U.S. support for moderate regimes, which suffer heavily from Muslim extremism. "Our role is to help the moderates with our thumb on the scale."

Horowitz, who spoke on "The Campus Fifth Column," warned that winning the war against terrorism must include winning American campuses away from the left. "This is an intellectual conference" at a major university, where freedom of speech and the free debate of ideas should be taken for granted, he said, opening his talk. "The need for security here today is a disgrace."

Horowitz noted that Columbia was "a freer campus, a far freer campus," when he entered as a freshman in 1955 at the height of the Cold War during the allegedly repressive McCarthy era, "than it is today." How did that come to be? "Sometime in the 1970s, the hate-America left captured America. The coastal elites and the Democratic Party lost their faith in this country."

He declared, "This is a campus ruled by the left," displaying the same passion he brought to anti-Vietnam War speeches he made 40 years ago as one of the most prominent members of the New Left. Chiding the CCCC organizers of the event at which he now was speaking, Horowitz described campus conservatives in general as too polite and cautious and wondered aloud if it wouldn't have been better had the conference been scheduled for a weekday when Columbia was in session — an in-your-face occasion that would have reached more people, raised more dander.

The seriousness of the present crisis demands everyone's attention, Horowitz said. "This is a war to destroy Jews and destroy the United States. Osama [bin Laden] has put death sentences on every man, woman and child in America."

The much-milder Brock, the conference's third speaker and a dead ringer for Richard Dreyfus in his TV role as professor Max Bickford, examined the connection between terrorism and immigration. Cochairman of the Tri-State Immigration Moratorium (TRIM), a volunteer immigration-reform movement, Brock urged cuts by two-thirds in the present annual immigration rate of about 1 million. He wants to "dry up the sea of illegals. It's a huge sea where terrorists can swim undetected."

Brock spoke of the need to arrive at a new attitude toward immigration. He reviewed what he regards as "myths about immigration" summed up in clichés such as "immigration made America great" and "America was built on immigration," which are used to defend high immigration rates.

The United States was made great by its Founding Fathers and their struggle for independence, Brock observed. As for America being built by immigrants, he pointed out that the immigrant generation at any one time in America never has been larger than 10 percent of the population. Does that mean, he asked, that the other 90 percent were not contributing to American greatness?

The final speaker, Skelly — a rare example of that endangered species, the conservative academic — spoke on "How to Defeat the Terrorist Threat." An assistant professor of history at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale, N.Y., Skelly recommended that our terrorist enemies need to learn that they face "certain destruction" if they threaten this nation with terrorist acts.

He cited the need for the United States to "stop putting pressure on our democratic allies" to negotiate with terrorists. "It is the responsibility of democratic governments to destroy terrorism," the history professor contended.

Skelly noted the criticism — and at times ridicule — President George W. Bush received for his "Axis of Evil" speech in which he termed North Korea, Iraq and Iran dangerous to U.S. interests. But, he wondered, what if Neville Chamberlain, Nazism's appeaser at Munich, had instead used the phrase "Axis of Evil" to define Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy in the mid-1930s, and had asked European nations and the United States to take aggressive action against them. Would World War II have been prevented?

Congratulating the CCCC for organizing the conference, Skelly termed the rally a step toward setting things right at Columbia and on American campuses in general. "We must believe that a free society is superior to an unfree society," he said. "Our job is to win so that the rule of law wins out."

Was the rally a success? Eighty to 100 isn't many compared with Columbia College's thousands of students, but organizers regarded it as a handsome beginning, particularly given the overwhelming preponderance the left has had at Columbia and at other institutions of higher learning for so long.

Besides, the CCCC still is a very new group. It began organizing in 1998 and received official recognition only in late 1999. It now has 45 or so members, CCCC President Nazar Khodorovsky tells Insight, and maintains a discussion group via Yahoo!Groups where the membership is slightly higher. It also actively cooperates with the Columbia Conservative Alumni Association and the Federalist Society chapter at the Columbia University Law School, networking that no doubt bodes well for the club's future.

What the conference lacked in numbers it assuredly made up for in spirit. When at the conclusion of his speech Horowitz told students that they've got to fight for traditional Western and American values, they applauded. When he said, "You are not going to live in the land of the free unless it is also the land of the brave," they gave him a standing ovation.

Stephen Goode is a senior writer for Insight.

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[KC_Conspirator]

Horowitz, who spoke on "The Campus Fifth Column," warned that winning the war against terrorism must include winning American campuses away from the left. "This is an intellectual conference" at a major university, where freedom of speech and the free debate of ideas should be taken for granted, he said, opening his talk. "The need for security here today is a disgrace."

Horowitz noted that Columbia was "a freer campus, a far freer campus," when he entered as a freshman in 1955 at the height of the Cold War during the allegedly repressive McCarthy era, "than it is today." How did that come to be? "Sometime in the 1970s, the hate-America left captured America. The coastal elites and the Democratic Party lost their faith in this country."

You would be hard pressed to find another environment which has such a one sided extreme orthodoxy enforced than the American college campus. Not a church, not the military, not even the biased media.

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