Dear friend,
There is a serious attempt to pressure the University of Michigan Press to censor the book Overcoming Zionism by Joel Kovel and to cripple the distribution of Pluto Press in the United States. Now we face a new threat on college campuses: the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (IFAW) October 22-26 being organized by neoconservatives and rightwing Zionist forces.
The purpose of this week is to whip up and rally reactionary elements in academia. Under the guise of protecting freedom, its activities include demands that Muslim student groups sign a loyalty pledge to the war on terror, sit-ins at women's studies departments for alleged inattention to the plight of women in Islamic states, and demands to tighten border controls in the U.S. Speakers being offered to rightwing campus groups for the IFAW include former Senator Rick Santorum, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Ann Coulter, and David Horowitz -- some of the same people who helped to foment the war on Iraq.
As we point out in our Mission Statement: "The suppression of discussion of Zionism occurs within the context of a broader assault on academic freedom and critical thought; it is a concentrated expression of that assault." IFAW is a well-organized campaign to silence dissent on campus and to get people to look at all Muslims as "Islamo-Fascists," creating a dangerous atmosphere for Muslim students who have sustained so much hate and abuse since 9/11. IFAW seeks to solidify the "you're either with us or your against us" call of the Bush administration, to equate any questioning of Zionism with support for terrorism, and to further beat the drums for war on Iran.
The spontaneous response of some may be to stand aside and hope that the IFAW is generally ignored. This would be a serious mistake. To do this is to allow poisonous ideas to go uncontested and to give political reactionaries the initiative to set the very terms of debate.
Accordingly we call on you to help organize counter-demonstrations, to write letters and op-eds, and to defend Muslim students and women's studies centers from attack.
(For more info on IFAW see their website @ TerrorismAwareness.org)