(MSA) Muslem Student Association precursor to Next Holocaust

My Encounter With the Enemy in Milwaukee

By David HorowitzFrontPageMagazine.com 5/2/2008

While waiting to speak at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee last night, I was given a tour of the Student Union, the venue for my talk. The Union building also houses the offices of student clubs, funded by mandatory student fees. On the bulletin board outside the office of the Muslim Students’ Association a flyer was posted, which was part of a campaign against my appearance. It was titled “Getting to Know David Horowitz,” and featured a section headed “Who is David Whorowitz?” At the top of the page was an anti-Semitic caricature of a Jew in the classic style familiar from the Nazi posters of the 1930s, which have become ubiquitous in the Arab world. The Jew in the caricature was standing in a garbage can with the cover on his head, dressed in a Nazi uniform, with an armband marked “H” for “Horowitz,” and the caption read “Horowitz Awareness Week.” This is the central of the tropes of the Muslim Students’ Association campaign on college campuses across the country: Jews are Nazis. “Bring your white sheets and brown shirts and COME ON DOWN! Flaming crosses and Stars of David will be supplied to those who arrive early.”

On the side of the garbage one can read a series of slanders about me that have been given currency by radical professors and the secular left on college campuses: “Muzzling Academics, Blacklisting, Hate Mongering, Race Baiting, Spying…” The flyer describes me as an “Israeli apologist and Judeofascist, and claims that I ran an ad in the university newspaper “alleging that a UWM student group, the Muslim Students’ Association, is an extremist organization engaged in violent jihad.”

What the ad stated was that the Muslim Students’ Association was created by the Muslim Brotherhood and is part of its jihad network. The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood is: “God is our objective, the Quran is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader, jihad is our way and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.” There are more than 150 affiliated chapters of the Muslim Students’ Association on college campuses across the country, all funded by student activities fees and by outside sources that are not disclosed. At the University of Pennsylvania, the Muslim Students’ Association boasts a $50,000 annual budget. Of this total $20,000 comes from student fees. By contrast, College Democrats and College Republicans at the University of Pennsylvania receive no student funding.

This spring, as part of our efforts to make students aware of the dangers of the jihad that has been declared against the West, we submitted a “Declaration Against Genocide” to 100 chapters of the Muslim Students’ Association on campuses across the country, including the chapter at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. The Declaration asks its signers to condemn the terrorist organizations Hizbollah and Hamas, and to repudiate a call to genocide that has been attributed to the prophet Mohammed. The request to condemn Hamas is particularly difficult for members of the Muslim Students Association since Hamas is also an organization created by the Muslim Brotherhood. Equally difficult, no doubt, is the call to genocide that has been attributed to the Prophet. This call is posted verbatim on the university website of the Muslim Students’ Association at the University of Southern California: “The Prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time [of judgment] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!”

We gave the 100 chapters of the Muslim Students’ Association to whom we submitted the Declaration more than a month to respond to our request, but not a single one out of the hundred we approached did so. We then drew up an ad which described the MSA as group that “postures as just another campus religious and cultural organization, and gets special privileges for being that, but is in fact “a radical political group that was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the godfather of Al-Qaeda and Hamas, to bring the jihad into the heart of American higher education.”
We based our characterization on a study we made of 18 campus chapters of the MSA which regularly sponsored anti-American and anti-Semitic speakers from such prominent points of the network as the Council on Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) – all created by the Muslim Brotherhood. We published the study in a footnoted pamphlet called “The Muslim Students Association and the Jihad Network,” and submitted the ad to the student newspapers on 17 campuses. Of the 17 papers we contacted, 7 rejected it on the grounds ranging from the claim that it was “unnecessarily offensive” (Columbia) to “encourages discrimination” (Michigan State). Three papers didn’t respond. Of the 7 that published the ad, three – the Daily Nexus at UC Santa Barbara, the Daily Collegian at Penn State and the Post at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee were immediately attacked as “Islamophobic” and “racist” and having caused Muslims to fear for their safety.
This attack on a free press was abetted by leftwing faculty members such as Michael Berube at Penn State. In the Penn State ad we referred to the fact (checked by the editors) that the Penn State MSA had invited an imam to campus who blamed the United States for the attack on the World Trade Center and called for gays to be killed. Berube is a member of the national council of the American Association of University Professors, but instead of decrying the attempts to abridge freedom of the press on the campus, or the expressing dismay at the imam’s remarks, he attacked David Horowitz as a campus provocateur.

In the anti-Semitic poster distributed by the Wisconsin MSA I am seen to be asking “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most fascist of them all?” In other words, the Jew is a Nazi. But in mounting a nationwide campaign against a campus free press, obstructing speakers and slandering everyone who disagrees with them as religious bigots and racists, the Muslim Students’ Association would win any such competition.
Before I even arrived at the University of Wisconsin, members of the MSA had torn down 2,000 flyers posted to advertise my event, and surrounded students distributing our pamphlet at a table while screaming “cancel the speech.” Their efforts at intimidation had so alarmed campus security that university officials ordered metal detectors and a security force of a more than dozen burly officers and staffers for the event. I didn’t count how many individuals had to be ejected during my remarks but there were many. Ironically, the standard complaint of the Muslim Students’ Association is that my ad “endangered” safety of Muslim students and should have been suppressed for that reason. In fact the conservative students who organized my event and were the chief opponents of the MSA, were mainly dressed in suits and ties and were exceptionally polite. They did not shout back or rant, as the MSA students and their progressive supporters did, nor had they torn down posters or ever obstructed speakers for MSA events.

In a week I will be headed to UC Irvine to confront another branch of the jihad network. The Muslim Students Union at Irvine is an affiliate of the Muslim Students’ Association and an open supporter of terrorist religious party Hamas, who wear Hamas armbands at campus events. The MSU has hosted the radical cleric Imam Muhammad al-Asi, who told his UCI audience: “We have a psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to co-exist equally and brotherly with other human beings. You can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you cannot take the ghetto out of the Jew.”

In 2006, the MSU held a week of events called “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” a reference to the alleged treatment of Palestinians by the Israelis (who in fact have more rights and privileges and are treated better than Muslim Arabs in any Arab country in the Middle East. At a recent UCI graduation the MSU demanded and won the right to wear green sashes over their graduation gowns with the word “shahada” or “martyr” to honor suicide bombers who kill Jews. This year the MSU is hosting Norman Finkelstein and other Hizbollah and Hamas supporters to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the creation of Israel or what the MSU and the MSA call “the Nakba” – the catastrophe. On the anniversary of the creation of the Jewish state, the MSA is holding “Nakba” commemorations at other campuses across the country, including UC Santa Barbara where I will be speaking as well.

The immediate agenda of the Muslim Association is the destruction of the Jewish state – “death to Israel” – in the words of Hamas and Hizbollah leaders. But its larger agenda is the destruction of America and its democratic republic, in order to replace it with a totalitarian Islamic state. My speeches at UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara will be called “Campus Support for the Next Holocaust,” a provocative title perhaps, but unfortunately an accurate one too.