Katha Pollitt: David Horowitz, Feminist?

[from the November 19, 2007 issue]

I couldn't get in to hear David Horowitz give the big, climactic speech for Islamofascism Awareness Week at Columbia. Like an idiot, I had assumed it was a normal public event and I could just walk in; but the nice Young Republican checking IDs at the credentials table told me that all attendees, including journalists, were supposed to have signed up online three days earlier. At that point a real reporter would have figured out how to sneak in, but I slouched meekly away. So I'm relying on the International Herald Tribune when I report that a grand total of 100 people were on hand to hear Horowitz speak. According to the Columbia Spectator, in that speech he claimed that "nooses have been put figuratively on the doors of the College Republicans," that the Week was held in defense of moderate Muslims, that the Iraq War was Jimmy Carter's fault and that the Columbia University women's studies department does not deal with the oppression of women in Muslim countries. Add his audience to the eighty people who, according to my Nation colleague Esther Kaplan, showed up two days earlier to hear Ibn Warraq, Christina Hoff Sommers and Phyllis Chesler (best Chesler snippet from Esther's tape: If the jihadists win, we'll become veiled "sex slaves"), and it's obvious that we should all take public-relations lessons from Horowitz. Once again, through his patented combination of egomania and chutzpah, he managed to get the media all riled up about something few on campus bothered to show up for.