Speaker offers to debate advertisement protesters

A Nov. 29 story in The Chronicle, which reported my speech at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described me as an "arch-conservative." Yet I am a pro-choice moderate on abortion and have a 50-year record of supporting civil rights as Martin Luther King, Jr. understood them. Those who walked out of my speech had closed minds when they came in, and were not there to listen, let alone to learn.

UNC-CH Black Student Movement President Kristi Booker is quoted in The Chronicle explaining the reason she organized the walkout was to protest my past "blatantly racist comments." According to The Chronicle, "Booker called Horowitz's past comments Odivisive and hateful.'" Booker explained, "When you tell me that I come from an unemployable people, when you tell me that I should be thankful for the enslavement of my ancestors, when you tell me that I am amongst a group of low-life gang-bangers, yes, that's hateful speech."

I absolutely agree with Booker that these statements are hateful speech. They are repellent. But I never made a single one of them. Nor can anything I have ever written be reasonably construed in this way. My full views on reparations are on record in a book that I have written called, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Slavery.

That people who have suffered discrimination should themselves launch a campaign of intolerance is a sad commentary on the education they have received (or failed to receive) at institutions like UNC-CH and Duke. What kinds of values are reflected when students answer arguments not with counter-arguments, but with hateful slurs, fabricated statements and "protests" designed to silence debate?

I have yet to see students at UNC-CH or Duke answer the case I made in my famous advertisement. In my UNC-CH speech, I offered to return to North Carolina to debate this issue with those at UNC-CH and Duke who have objected to the propositions put forward in my ad. This would be more appropriate to an institution of higher learning than the present campaign of character assassination and know-nothingism, masquerading as civil rights protest. This offer still stands.

David Horowitz

Los Angeles, Calif.