Why We Put Up Posters - David Horowitz Freedom Center

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Why We Put Up Posters

By David Horowitz

The reason we put up the posters is because of the one-party state which university campuses like Chicago have become. The campus left is prepared to intimidate and harass people who do not agree with their ideas. As a result of the thirty year purge of conservatives from liberal arts faculties, what remains of the opposition to leftist ideas are students. But students are vulnerable to career threatening reprisals from faculty and harassment from organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine who are notorious for their intimidation. University administrators are intimidated by them and leftwing faculty as well. Why else would a hate group like SJP be recognized as a student group, and given university offices and privileges?

When we put up posters at San Diego State, the head of SJP, a pre-law student named Osama Alkhawaja, led a mob that surrounded a police cruiser transporting the president of San Diego State and held him hostage for two hours. His sin? Refusing to condemn our posters saying that it was a matter of free speech, which it is. Osama and his thuggish friends then called for the resignation of the president. Osama is now a first year law student at the University of Chicago and was featured on our posters here. Our poster described him as “An SJP activist, a BDS activist" and “A Supporter of Hamas Terrorists,” which he is. These posters were torn down by the Chicago administration which obviously doesn’t respect free speech or its own commitment to being open to ideas that offend groups like SJP. On the other hand, it is not only open to demonstrable SJP lies (Israel occupies Palestinian lands/Israel is an apartheid state) but is willing to use student activities’ funds to spread them.

Since only an outside group could inform the Chicago community that SJP is a campus front for Hamas terrorists, and provide the documentation for that charge, and not be subject to career-threatening reprisals, we took on this mission. Since it is our experience that campus papers generally (but not always) are closed to conservative viewpoints, it was logical to turn to a poster campaign to express our views.

Why do we put the posters up in the middle of the night? It’s what we would do in any repressive state, where the posters would be torn down and it’s possible the people who put them up would be subject to some sort of reprisal.  

How do we put up the posters? First of all, we contract with guerrilla artists to design them. Then in some cases, where we are not able to put them up ourselves, we hire people who share our views to put them up. In others, we do it ourselves. The University of Chicago posters were put up by one of us. I would ask for student volunteers who are attending the University of Chicago to put them up if I didn’t think they would be harassed by campus leftists and possibly sanctioned by the university administration if they did. 

If you just think of the University of Chicago as a one-party state, which it is, everything that we have done will seem reasonable. What has happened to our once free, liberal and open universities, which still have a lot of good people in them, is very sad.