Thursday, March 31, 2005
Ward Churchill, David Horowitz, and Berkeley
From California Patriot Watch - - more on "Academic Freedom" or the strange demands for voices from "the other side". The Patriot and the Berkeley College Republicans are all having a collective hissy fit, because they did not feel that yesterday's forum on Ward Churchill was properly balanced. The forum was narrowly framed to focus on the issue of academic freedom. What did the Patriot expect? Did they seriously want a speaker against the concept of academic freedom? As for balance, I don't remember the Patriot or the Berkeley Conservative Foundation feeling obligated to have David Horowitz or Michelle Malkin share the stage with anybody, even though my student activities fees helped pay for that. Is Ward Churchill supposed to share the stage with somebody calling for his ouster? That's not balance; that's masochism. It's a requirement that's a ludicrous as C-SPAN's recent demand that the Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt be "balanced" with a Holocaust denier. In addition, the forum allowed for balance by providing a question & answer session with no prescreened questions where the Patriot's own Kerry Eskenas had an extended conversation with Churchill herself. Contrast this to Michelle Malkin's recent appearance promoting her pseudohistorical nonsense on the Japanese-American internment during World War II, which was so limited to prescreened questions, that BCR members shouted down actual Japanese-American victims of the internment who had as much right to speak, if not more, than Ms. Eskenas at the Churchill forum. " Read the rest here. |