There were several dozen members of their club lining all the aisles with 'usher' signs, and at least 15 police officers. And Horowitz had two personal body guard types who stood next to him looking solemnly out the whole type, black panther style, as though they were ready to intercept an attacker.
First Ben Carrasco, the dumb head of the republicans (see editorials in above url) lectured everyone about how anyone speaking during Horowitz's talk would be removed and have their identity passed on to the UC authorities. His microphone had a lot of feedback and he couldn't fix it and this was funny.
No one said a word during Horowitz's speech, which was pretty boring. He acted disappointed at the end that no one had attacked him. It was just filled with truisms about how free speech and flow of ideas is good, and how we should fix k-12 education, and also his story about being with the black panthers in Oakland, and he even said he supports reparations for the Tulsa riots - so, if you cry wolf and always use inflammatory language all the time (language in his ad)... why should people keep listening. Because my flyer was about how he refused to debate, and seeks to tightly control the platform, this bothered me. No one was pointing out the things he wasn't saying. He isn't very concise, so I got through about 40 pages of a book.
The interesting part was the question answer session. Dozens of students got in line to ask questions, and they were really bright. They brought up really good points that had been skirted around during the talk. But three people into this, he was interfering with a questioner and wouldn't let him complete his question (about how the first amendment applies to the government and not private newspapers), and so they were talking at the same time for about 10 seconds. The person asking the question wrote this op-ed about BAMN two days ago: http://www.dailycal.org/article.asp?id=4963&ref=news This perturbed Ben Carrasco so much that he shut off the questioner's microphone. Then Horowitz popped a fuse and said like 'I'm not going to argue with you', and sort of stormed off even though there were all sorts of students with questions. That looked really bad - as though he couldn't deal with things as soon as he couldn't control the event.
here is my flyer: ----------------------- Does David Horowitz really want a Free Exchange of Ideas?
David Horowitz and his sponsors make the claim that they wish to 'dialogue' on issues related to his paid anti-reparations advertisement. We find this assertion dubious, because the day after his advertisement came out, we asked both Horowitz and Tim Wise, a prominent speaker affiliated with Association for White Antiracist Education, to hold a public debate at UC Berkeley on issues related to the ad. Such a fair and level platform for expression of ideas would be far superior the one-sided events that are frequently held on campus, and that you are probably about to witness.
In fact, no opinion-editorial or letter to the paper regarding this issue has ever been published here. The average student has probably never even heard an argument in favor of this issue at all. Like it or not, Horowitz is arguing for the politically correct position here.
Tim Wise immediately accepted our offer. Horowitz declined, and he also declined debating other proposed speakers, giving the mysterious reason that he will not debate a white person on this topic. We hope he will offer to explain this. Offering no evidence, he implied that black students on campus would not allow him to. He said that he wants to debate Randall Robinson, who, conveniently, had already said he won't appear with Horowitz. In the end, unsurprisingly, no suitable speaker apparently could be found who could meet all of Horowitz's criteria. Frankly, we are baffled. We, and a number of african americans who we spoke to who aren't in our group said that they can't see why there would be a problem with Horowitz debating someone of his own 'race' on this abstract subject. If it is true that these topics cannot be considered in the abstract, an african american speaker could easily be accused by Horowitz of only being out for her own self interest. On their flyer for this event, sponsors claim that they tried to get students representing other sides to participate in a forum, but they have completely failed to locate anyone on this campus of 40,000 students and staff. Again, this seems dubious in many ways. We conclude that either 1. They didn't try hard enough or 2. The average student finds all of this to be irrelevant. Naturally the students complaining to the Daily Cal about the advertisement don't want to talk with David Horowitz, but who else did they ask the College Democrats? Wake up! We don't exactly recall Al Gore talking about the reparations issue during the last election. Why didn't they contact the Progressive Student Alliance? Could they really locate no one on campus willing to address some of the points in the advertisement?
We find David Horowitz's pompous letter to Chancellor Berdahl to be preposterous because he claims to 'fear for his safety' on this campus, expects people to come burn his books, requires guards to remove opponents from the hall, and tells Berdahl to 'control his students'. Horowitz is engaging in the fantastic sort of imagined 'victimhood' that he is always accusing others of promoting in his articles. Come on! No one has physically threatened him here, and we dare him to show us wrong. Horowitz's writings and web site rantings indicate a delight in his self-image as a hero who others want to oppress and silence. Despite his claims of censorship, he has gotten more coverage in the media lately than many important foreign issues, appearing on Fox News more than once, and having articles in US News and World Report, the Washington Post, USA Today, the SF Chronicle and many others.
The Cal Patriot is a hypocrite in this matter. They also famously engage in this cult of victimhood, and their claim to be oppressed and silenced comes up in nearly every issue, and is an important part of their self-image. However, in this most recent issue, an editor actually calls for "Mid-east protesters and others of their ilk" on campus to be "locked up and expelled" for their own controversial speech. What applies for one, applies for all! Horowitz should stop throwing around words like 'fascist'. One of us has a parent who lived through the nazi era in Germany, and we think it hurts his cause to use the phrase so lightly. Horowitz overuses these words in order to emotionally titillate his followers, and probably sell more books and magazines as a result. But he should use caution before crying wolf. According to his book 'Native Son', Horowitz was involved with some very evil, authoritarian, totalitarian maoist groups when he lived in Berkeley in the early 70s, and perhaps he understands what the inner-workings of the minds of himself and his immediate circle were like then. However, he knows nothing about us. Most liberals and progressives have made none of the mistakes that he has made. To claim otherwise is a tremendous breach of logic - because otherwise one could claim that every conservative is a potential nazi, and every white person would be a slave owner if transported in time back to the 1860s south. It just doesn't follow
If anyone would like to hold a real multi-sided forum on a race issue, or any topic related to the slavery reparations ad, pleae contact the Progressive Student Alliance.
To learn more about these issues online, refer to: http://www.thedebt.net - Randall Robinson's site http://www.frontpagemag.org David Horowitz site