David Horowitz Was an Inspiration

David Horowitz, who died at 86 on April 29, was ahead of his time. For decades, he warned anyone who would listen about the Left’s destructive ideology and its networks of influence. Long before October 7, 2023, he was calling out terrorism supporters among professors and students on American campuses. At my alma mater, Brooklyn College, Horowitz’s Freedom Center changed the course of my career.

In 2017, the Freedom Center had listed Brooklyn College, where I was then enrolled, among the Top 10 College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment in the United States. We deserved the designation. Radical leftist students mocked others who marched for Holocaust Remembrance Day. The college’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, whose president admitted to hating “the Jews,” set up “checkpoints” on campus for students to pass through, in an effort to mimic what Palestinians in the West Bank purportedly endure. One Zionist Muslim student told me that her professor wanted to brainwash her into hating Israel. Protesters regularly chanted in support of the Intifada.

While attending Brooklyn College, I served as a fellow for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, working to expose anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias in the student newspaper. It was through my reporting on a new initiative by the Freedom Center—hanging unauthorized posters on campus that named alleged terror supporters—that I first connected with Horowitz.

Many professors denounced the posters as “bigoted” and “Islamophobic,” and the college administration condemned them as well. As an impressionable student, I initially accepted their criticisms without question. But I reached out to Horowitz to hear his side. He changed my perspective.

He understood the climate at Brooklyn College better than I did. He knew the key players—professors and students leading anti-Israel efforts—and grasped their motivations. He warned me that the college’s president, Michelle Anderson, was sympathetic to the anti-Israel cause. How did he know that? I asked. He replied with a question: Why hadn’t she condemned the chants for “Intifada”?

I didn’t believe him at the time. But by the time I graduated, I had come to see that David Horowitz was onto something. I texted him to say so—and I’m grateful I had the chance. There was never a shortage of people telling him he was wrong.

Horowitz’s instinct about Anderson was verified on, of all days, Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2019. I had joined some Jewish students marching around the quad with American and Israeli flags. Other students yelled at us, some in Arabic. One said “F–k the Jews.” As I looked up at the president’s office in Boylan Hall, I saw Anderson drinking champagne on her balcony. The contrast between the slurs we were hearing and the college president’s indulgence was impossible to ignore.

I went up to Anderson’s office and found myself in the center of a lavish event. The president’s staff tried to shoo me away, but Anderson knew me as one of the campus’s most insistent Jewish activists. We had met a few months earlier to discuss anti-Semitism at the college, during which she pledged to address Jewish students’ concerns. She didn’t keep those promises. I told her of the students who had screamed in Arabic at us. She looked uncomfortable—but not about the anti-Semitism. She was around donors, she pleaded. 

Horowitz’s question about her came to mind. Why had she not condemned the “Intifada” chants as anti-Semitic, I asked—a terrorist campaign that killed hundreds of Jews in Israel?

“Because people interpret [those chants] very differently,” Anderson said. I was floored.

“If I chanted for [the] 9/11 [attacks], would you condemn those chants?”

“I don’t know,” she responded.

There was nothing else to discuss. If a college president in New York City was unsure whether to condemn endorsements of a terror attack that had happened right here, then it was no surprise that she would say nothing about terror attacks on Israel.

The college’s press office maintains that “President Anderson has always been a strong advocate against anti-Semitism and all forms of hate and any suggestion that she made comments stating otherwise is false.” It also notes that the Anti-Defamation League recently gave “Brooklyn College an A grade for fostering a welcoming and inclusive environment for Jewish students.”

David Horowitz will be remembered by me and many other students and former students for his moral clarity and conviction. He inspired many of us. He was fearless in his pursuit of what was right and in the face of every intimidation. He will be missed.

Photo By Brian Brainerd/The Denver Post via Getty Images