David Horowitz opened his lecture on terrorism – part of “Islamofascism Awareness Week,” a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center – with a joke. “I hope you checked your pies at the door,” he quipped, recalling the incident in which New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman was pied as he began his lecture in Salomon 101 last spring.
Three uniformed officers at the back and three at the front of the largely empty MacMillan 117 and Horowitz’s own private bodyguard made any pies-to-the-face unlikely.
Horowitz, a Jewish writer and activist who holds adamantly pro-Israel views, said the purpose of his lecture was to counter “liberal orthodoxy” on campus. “You have one of the worst faculties in the United States,” he said. “These people are communists – they are totalitarians.”
The lecture was titled “Helping the Enemy to Win: Support for the Jihad on American Campuses”. “Islam is a fundamentalist religion,” Horowitz said, adding that the Quran left very little room for interpretation when compared to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.