David Horowitz

Following in the footsteps of right-wing pundit Frank Gaffney, David Horowitz is accusing CPAC of having connections to radical Islam. Horowitz spoke at a CPAC panel in 2009, where he was introduced by notorious anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller, and the David Horowitz Freedom Center is a CPAC participating organization. But Horowitz, who recently defended Glenn Beck in his linking of the progressive movement to the Muslim Brotherhood and claimed that public school teachers encourage the indoctrination of students into “Jihadist doctrines," has now joined other CPAC detractors like Gaffney to blast the involvement of Suhail Khan. Khan is a board member of the American Conservative Union, which hosts CPAC, and tomorrow is leading a panel on inclusion in the conservative movement.

Gaffney first charged Khan with ties to extremist groups in early January. Now Horowitz and another anti-Muslim activist, Robert Spencer, are joining a coalition of anti-gay Religious Right groups in boycotting the conference.

Rick Scarborough, the head of Vision America, recently placed an ad in The Washington Times attacking CPAC for including the gay conservative group GOProud, and today condemned the gathering for supposedly slighting Religious Right groups (a fear also present at the conference).

The American Family Association’s OneNewsNow, which supports the CPAC boycott, reports:

A full-page ad in The Washington Times -- placed by Vision America -- challenges the direction of CPAC. Vision America president Pastor Rick Scarborough, who initiated the project, notes that the "driving force" in the conservative movement, generally speaking, has been Christians.

"Right now [though], libertarians are trying to force us out -- and I just simply decided that enough is enough," says the longtime Christian activist. "So we're trying to speak out, and we're finding that it's resonating with a lot of folks."

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Islamic influence within CPAC?

Meanwhile, a terrorism expert who is also advocating for a drastic change in the leadership of CPAC believes the event has been compromised by radical Islamic influences. Author and activist David Horowitz says a CPAC board member by the name of Suhail Kahn has not been forthcoming about his ties to extreme Muslim groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood.

"Suhail Kahn is a member of the board of the American Conservative Union. He's moderating a [CPAC] panel," Horowitz explains. "His father created an Islamist mosque in California that held fundraisers for Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number-two [man] in al-Qaeda. This was in the [19]90s."

Terrorism expert Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, comments as well on Kahn.

"Suhail Kahn has also spoken about how Muslims should be eager to die for the Palestinian question, using the same kind of language that suicide bombers have employed," he notes. "This is not really somebody who should be considered moderate or certainly not conservative."

Spencer is calling for changes. "There needs to be a drastic overhaul at the top of CPAC -- and [for] the American Conservative Union that runs it," he says.

The feud between Glenn Beck and William Kristol over Beck’s bizarre and paranoid ranting about the crisis in Egypt has become increasingly bitter. Beck prophesizes an alliance between the political left and an Islamic caliphate that he claims will takes over Europe and the Middle East. Beck believes that progressives and Islamists “stand together” as “one nation” and predicts that the anti-Mubarak uprising will engender a pernicious socialist-Islamist-Chinese union will try to takeover the world. Conservative writer William Kristol responded in his Weekly Standard column that as Beck “lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.”

Beck, in his own signature obsessive way, has struck back at Kristol, earning further criticism from conservative writers including the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin. But not all neoconservatives are defending Kristol, who unlike Beck supports Egypt’s democracy movement. One major backer of Bush’s neoconservative foreign policy is rushing to Beck’s defense. David Horowitz has a long-held belief that an axis between radical Islamists and progressive activists and university professors will attempt to topple the US government (among others), a claim embraced by other right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Cliff Kincaid, and Robert Spencer. Even Gateway Pundit is trying to use Code Pink’s support for the anti-Mubarak protests to tie the group to the Muslim Brotherhood.

On his blog, Horowitz writes that Kristol should immediately apologize to Beck and “should be embarrassed by his own ignorance of the agendas of both American radicals and their jihadist allies.” He continues:

Bill Kristol is entitled to his optimism about democratic revolutions in the Islamic world. Perhaps the elections in Egypt will turn out better than those in Gaza where Hamas now rules a terrorist state; Iraq, which has instituted an Islamic Republic; Lebanon, where Hezbollah now rules a terrorist state; and Afghanistan, which is a kleptocracy wooing the terrorist theocracy in Iran. What he should not be doing as a conservative leader is demonizing Glenn Beck, who has done more to educate Americans about the unholy alliance between the secular left and the Islamic jihadists than anyone else. Kristol needs to apologize to Beck for comparing him — outrageously — to the conspiracist Robert Welch, and should be embarrassed by his own ignorance of the agendas of both American radicals and their jihadist allies. At this point in time, such ignorance is not only inexcusable but dangerous.

Previously, Horowitz even tried to link right-wing boogeyman Bill Ayres to the Muslim Brothers:

We saw the unholy alliance at work in the Hamas inspired campaign to break the Gaza blockade. Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were leaders of the American wing of the Hamas coalition against the blockade and went to Gaza to meet with Hamas shortly before the terrorist Flotilla was intercepted by Israeli forces. The Gaza blockade was jointly instituted by Israel and Egypt – by the Mubarak regime in Egypt. Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood’s army. If the Muslim Brotherhood topples the Mubarak regime, Hamas’s war against the Jews will be immeasureably [sic] strengthened. The radical left in America and internationally is committed to Hamas and its genocidal campaign against the Jews and its general war against the United States. That is why the fate of Egypt in this crisis resonates for all of us.

As part of his ongoing campaign against “liberal bias” on college and university campuses, FrontPageMag.com founder David Horowitz frequently takes aim at Humanities departments and their supposed “indoctrination.” Today, Horowitz sets his sights on Women’s Studies:

A year ago the biggest issue in education after budgets was whether “Intelligent Design” should be taught in the nation’s schools. Opponents called it a form of “creationism” and the press dubbed the ensuing legal battle as the biggest clash between faith and science since the Scopes Monkey Trial. In a stinging rebuke to the religious right, a Pennsylvania judge ruled that “Intelligent Design” had no place in classrooms because it was “a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory,” thus violating the separation of church and state.  

Yet at that very moment professors in American universities were teaching a form of secular creationism as contrary to the findings of modern science as the Biblical claim that the God had made the world in seven days. 

The name of this theory is “social constructionism,” and its churches are Women’s Studies departments situated in universities across the United States.

Discussion of the ways gender roles are constructed by society, according to Horowitz, contravenes biological evidence that men and women are different. Therefore, the argument goes, those who think “Intelligent Design” creationism has “no place in classrooms” ought to think the same about this feminist theory. Of course, there’s a problem with this analogy: the question is whether “Intelligent Design” creationism should be taught in high school science classes as fact, as the judge Horowitz cites made clear.

Horowitz, the author of “Indoctrination U” and “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,” ominously cites the catalog of Kansas State University, where Women’s Studies majors are required to “have demonstrated their familiarity with key Women’s Studies concepts such as the social construction of gender.” Horowitz translates this to mean that “In other words, a student cannot graduate from the Kansas State Women’s Studies program unless they believe in the ideology that makes up its core, and demonstrate that they do believe in it.”

For Horowitz, who lobbies state legislatures pass his bill to limit “controversial matter” in college classrooms, being familiar with ideas is the same as believing them. What does he think about Kansas State’s Center for the Understanding of Origins, which has exposed students to the “Intelligent Design” debate?

Can’t mention matters of “controversy,” under David Horowitz-inspired “Academic Bill of Rights.”