The author delights in ad hominem attacks against a few of the more deserving speakers without actually touching on the purposes of the event or the speeches actually given. The intellectually curious may find both at the "frontpagemag" site.

The pretention that American foreign policy started the Salafist movement is historically false. The rise came with the Saudi nationalization of their oil resources in the 1970's and their transfer of Western oil revenues into the coffers of organizations and schools around the world that seek to supplant more moderate schools with those of Salafist radicals. See Afghanistan and the current changes in Muslim communities in the Phillipines, Indonesia, [Bali bombing] etc.

The event is a rant against the moral relativism that accepts honor killing of women and enforced use of the burka as the moral equivalent of requesting long skirts be worn to church. The challenge made to the universities is to provide actual classes in the women's studies departments to teach about such abominations rather than sweeping them under the rug as the result of "post-colonialism."

C. C. Lehman

New York, NY

Bush and Company are at best trying to scare us so we will not see just what they really have planned for the US. A Christian nation run by the fundies, corporate interests making more money but keeping the common man poor. If they make us really afraid we will allow anything.

Elizabeth Martin

Coral Springs, FL

The firestorms destroying the homes of Americans are the direct result of the "soft on illegal aliens" policies of the President and of the Senate. Illegal campfires set in the forest routes Illegal aliens use to invade our country spread quickly into raging wildfires as fierce winds drive embers into the brush. If this is not terrorism, we do not know what is.

Tucana Fulano

Big Bear, CA

The AIPAC-inspired, Horowitz-led Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, now invading US campuses, is nothing more than an exercise in agitprop to further inflame hatred of all things Muslim/Arab.

Horowitz and his fellow travelers will be doing their best to ramp up the American appetite to invade another ME country, this time Iran.

They portray the IFAW as some sort of neo-Christian revival to bring back that old-time religion. A religion that so far has managed to ensnare the US in the Iraqi war, with no end in sight.

Horowitz's campus crusade, is that it's for women and how we need to protect them in the ME world, is bunk.

Excuse me David, but we've already managed to liberate enough Muslim women in the ME?

So far, we've managed to "liberate" over 1 million Iraqis from the burden of living.

We've managed to "liberate" another 5 million or so from the burden of calling Iraq a home. And millions more were "liberated" from even owning a home, unless one counts a pile of bombed-out rubble a home.

We've managed to "liberate" millions more of Iraqis from the burden of living in peace and making a living.

So, Davy boy, just how many more ME women do you propose to "liberate," and will it take another G.W. Bush "Shock and Awe" campaign to deliver this liberation?

A "liberation" that is delivered with B-2 bombers and cruise missiles might not appeal to those ME women granted the favors of our liberation.

The song below is copied and pasted from the "National Project to Defend Dissent & Critical Thinking in Academia." The Raging Grannies sang in opposition to an IFAW event at Stanford. (to the tune of "O Tannenbaum"):

O Horowitz O Horowitz
It seems his brain is is on the fritz
O Horowitz O Horowitz
It seems his brain is on the fritz
Distorts and lies 'bout Muslim rules
Thinks that his audience are fools
O Horowitz O Horowitz
It seems his brain is on the fritz

Greg Bacon

Ava, MO

It's very odd to me that Barbara Ehrenreich lumps together Ann Coulter and Christina Hoff Sommers. To accuse Sommers of "attacking feminism" is a bit like saying The Nation> is attacking democracy by criticizing GWB.

John Carroll

Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada

Islamo-Fascism Week?

It is odd that the features of Fascism that have resurfaced from time to time have mostly been found in the Republican party: demonization of political opponents; cries of treason; equation of liberalism with socialism and communism etc. The stab in the back tactic is common enough among Republican operatives and who reminds you more of Joseph Paul Goebbels than Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity? Yet the Muslim radicals are called Islamo-Fascists. For years you couldn't get anyone to take the word Fascist seriously--at least not until Giuliani (he should know about real Fascism!), Bush and Cheney, along with Bill Kristol and Rabbi Podhoretz got into the act.

If any religious group provides a doorway to Fascism, it is not Islam but Christianity: with its thought control through censorship, its use of terrorism with the Inquisition, its demonization of enemies as worthy of burning etc. Christianity, secularized and made immanent instead of transcendant (see Ernst Nolte) can be pure Fascism. It often requires the intermediate state of Integral Nationalism.

Likud Zionism, as integral nationalism, also plays this role. Islam does not.

Norman Ravitch

Savannah, GA