The Dartmouth Speech They Tried To Suppress

Before I had even arrived, I was attacked as a racist, sexist and bigot.

Author’s note: On October 23, I spoke at Dartmouth, at the invitation of College Republicans and Students Supporting Israel. Before I had even arrived, I was attacked as a racist, a sexist and a bigot, and one professor sent out a tweet urging students to disrupt my talk. In fact, nearly 100 Dartmouth radicals had already met and laid out an elaborate plan of disruption and attack, which in the event was made possible but the Dartmouth administrators in charge of “Security and Safety” who encouraged the chaos by refusing to enforce any rules of decorum. The Dartmouth school paper reported the chaos, not the speech. For details, CLICK HERE. What follows is a transcript of my talk.

Good evening. The last time I was here at Dartmouth was 30 years ago when I came with Bill Buckley and some other conservatives who came to protest the persecution of the Dartmouth Review, the conservative student paper which was being persecuted by Dartmouth’s president.

My parents were card-carrying Communists. I was one of the founders of the New Left and edited its largest magazine. After a woman whom I had recruited to keep the books for a school I had created for the Black Panther Party was murdered by the Panthers, I came to the conclusion that I was involved in a very dangerous movement, which was able to seduce people because what it said sounded wonderful, while the reality was quite different.

In those days, when conservatives came to Dartmouth, they didn’t need police protection. It is tragic that a university like this has members of its student body who don’t want to hear what other people have to say. When I was a leftist, I always wanted to hear what the opposition had to say, because I thought it would make me a better radical.

I hope we can keep order tonight. You might learn something. A leaflet has been distributed by the Dartmouth Socialists – which is a total caricature of who I am. For example, the leaflet accuses me of being a sexist and quotes me as saying that women score lower on mathematical aptitude tests than men. What it leaves out is the next part of the sentence, in which I say but women score higher on verbal aptitude tests. I said this in defense of the liberal president of Harvard, Larry Summers, who was driven out because he crossed lines that were unacceptable to the politically correct. That didn’t make it into the leaflet either.

I could go on and on. I am an anti-racist. I marched in my first civil-rights demonstration in 1948, before your parents were born, and have spent my life in politics championing the cause of inner-city blacks who suffer under the boot heel of the Democratic Party. Every major inner city in America is 100 percent controlled by the Democratic Party and has been for 50 to 100 years. Every killing field, every school system that doesn’t teach black kids in the inner cities to read and write, so they’ll never get a shot at the American dream, is 100 percent controlled by the Democratic Party. Every inner city deprivation and injustice that policy can effect, Democrats are 100 percent responsible for.

I’ve written three books on race over the last 20 years, and every one of them holds as a standard Martin Luther King’s statement that people should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Yet this maliciously ignorant slander sheet, which nobody signed – it should have been signed “the Dartmouth Fascist Club” - calls me a racist and says I shouldn’t be allowed to speak anywhere. How totalitarian and stupid is that? You are college kids. A lot of you are actually paying $75,000 a year for an education. How could you not want to hear somebody who has different views from you? How do you learn, if you don’t?

Before this event, I interviewed maybe 15 conservative students from the group that invited me. I asked them how many conservative professors they could name on the faculty here. They said two. So maybe there’s four. This is a disgrace. A liberal professor at Sarah Lawrence just did a study that showed that in New England, the average ratio of administrators who are Democrats to Republicans is 25 to 1. This is a disgrace.

So what is the consequence of this purging of conservatives from Dartmouth’s faculty and administration? Well, Dartmouth has an Office of Pluralism and Leadership, which is an Orwellian lie. There is no pluralism in that office. Last spring, the Office of Pluralism invited a Jew-hating, America-hating, terrorist-supporting, women-despising individual named Linda Sarsour to speak, and to speak as part of Asian Pacific Islanders Heritage Month. Come on. This is a joke, a very bad joke. They paid her $10,000 plus expenses.

The university didn’t give me a dime to come here. They provided security after I demanded it, and that’s all. I’m very grateful for the security people who are here, but, obviously, the administration provided them it because doesn’t want to be embarrassed before the rest of the country should there be violence. There needs to be two sides to a question before you can figure out for yourself which side you’re on, or if you’re actually on a third side. 

Now, on to the subject, which is first the war to destroy the Jewish state. When you look at the Middle East and the conflict there, you have to avoid getting into the weeds. In any war there are conflicting claims of atrocities on every side, conflicting claims of who initiated a particular clash and so forth. 

Think of the Second World War. Churchill ordered the fire-bombing of Dresden. How many people have read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut? That’s what it’s about. Dresden was not a military target. The allies fire-bombed Dresden, and it was a holocaust. They killed 100,000 German civilians. Why did they do it? The strategic reason for doing it, according to the people who ordered it, was to demoralize the German working class, because, of course, the economy is a crucial element of military strength. Strong economies win wars.

But you wouldn’t judge the Second World War based on this one incident. You might even say this was just an atrocity and should never have been committed, but you would still judge the Second World War on other grounds. Hitler was the aggressor, he started the war. He invaded Europe. If the Nazis had won, they would have killed off what they called “the mongrel races,” or put them in camps and would have established totalitarian rule over everybody else. It would have been horrible. That’s the way to look at the Second World War.

In looking at the war in the Middle East, there are two key things to focus on. One is the place - the land that is contested - and the other is the people involved and their agendas. Let’s start with the location.

The claim the Palestinians make to justify their terrorism and war is that Israel stole Palestinian land. This is a total lie, and it is very easy to check the facts. How many of you know the origin of the word Palestine? To begin with, it’s not an Arab word. “Palestine” is the name the Romans gave to the area around the Jordan. This was the holy land of the Jews, who are the indigenous people of this area.

The Romans gave it the name “Palestine” after the Philistines, who were the mortal enemies of the Jews. They did so because the Jews had the very bad judgment to revolt against the Roman Empire and were slaughtered. The Romans gave the Jewish homeland the name of the Jews’ enemies, the Philistines, who were not Arabs. The Arabs didn’t arrive in this area by conquest for another 500-600 years. Palestine is not a nation. It is a geographical designation, like “New England.” It refers to the area around the Jordan River. It is not a nation or a nationality.

So why did the Jews get a sliver of land carved out of the Palestine Mandate, which is what they got - actually three slivers of land - in 1948? These slivers were not land that belonged to the Arabs. It was land that had belonged to the Turks, the Ottoman Empire, for 400 years previous to the creation of the State of Israel. Four-hundred years. In other words, American Indians or Native Americans, if you like that term, have a greater claim on the United States than Arabs do on the land on which Israel was created. That’s just a fact. The land was appropriated by the victors in the First World War. When you lose a war, as the Turks did, you pay a price, and the price was the territory from which they created Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan.

In 1922, eighty percent of the Palestine Mandate was set aside to create the state of Transjordan, now known simply as Jordan. When they created Jordan, the British banned Jews from buying land there. So even today you get the death penalty for selling land to a Jew. And Abbas, the so-called moderate Palestinian leader, has said that in a liberated Palestine, there will be no Jews. Hamas, the terrorist army that runs Gaza, has said in so many words that the Jews will be exterminated.

The dictator of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas is referred to as the Palestinian “moderate.” Abbas’s regime just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Munich massacre in which Palestinian terrorists murdered 9 unarmed Jewish athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Abbas, himself a terrorist, was the financier of the massacre. The Palestinian Authority recently sponsored a sermon which praised Hitler as a hero who was sent by Allah to punish the Jews because they are evil. The sermon then went back to praise Nebuchadnezzar who destroyed the first temple of the Jews also because the Jews are evil. 

People who are totalitarians, terrorists and Jew-haters I call Nazis. I think that’s a reasonable description of the Palestinians who have set out to destroy the Jewish state.

[At this point a large and lengthy disruption occurred organized by protesters in the audience with walkouts, shouts, posters etc.]

The George Washington of the Palestinian National Movement is Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was made the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. His mentor Hassan al-Banna was the head of the Muslim Brotherhood and an admirer of Hitler who called on Arabs to “push the Jews into the sea.” Al-Husseini, the George Washington of the Palestinians was an acolyte of Hitler, who conducted pogroms and massacres against the Jews in the ’20s and ’30s. He was just a born Jew-hater. During the Second World War – all of this information is easily available on the Internet, which underscores how there is no excuse for leftist ignorance – Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Berlin during the Second World War and recruited …

(Another major disruption)

He recruited an Arab legion for Hitler, and drew up plans to build an Auschwitz in the Middle East to carry out a Final Solution to his Jewish problem. The only thing that stopped him was that Montgomery defeated Rommel at El Alamein. That’s it.

How many of you read the “Palestinian Media Watch Bulletin,” which is available on the web? Nobody. Well, if you read this daily report, you would see how alive and well Hitler is in the Palestinian movement today.

[Another disruption and walk-out]

It’s a little unnerving. You cross the country to give a talk and then you have all these guerrillas attacking you. It’s so antithetical to what a college education should be about. You are so privileged, unbelievably privileged, and you’re squandering your opportunity to learn something. This is the most precious time, really of your life, to learn, but you can’t learn if you close your minds.

I don’t remember where I was – interruptions do have an effect. I apologize for losing my place. 

In 1949, when the unprovoked assault by five Arab dictatorships was repelled and the state of Israel created, Egypt annexed the Gaza Strip and Jordan annexed the West Bank. They just disappeared from the map. There was not a single protest out of the Dartmouth Left or the Arab World over this erasure of what today are called the Palestinian homelands. Why? Because there were no Palestinians at the time. The aggressors who set out to destroy the Jewish state at its birth were all Arabs. Arabs speak the same language. They have the same culture. The only difference is that some of them live near the Jordan, which is the region of the Palestine Mandate, a geographical designation.

The Palestinian cause is based on a big lie. Actually many big lies. Why haven’t the Palestinians and their ignorant American friends launched a movement for national self-determination in Jordan? Seventy percent of the Jordanian population is Palestinian – i.e., is composed of Arabs who live around the Jordan. But it’s ruled by a Hashemite minority. There are no protests because the war against the Jews is not about a Palestinian nationalist cause at all. They don’t want self-determination. They want to push the Jews into the sea.

In 1964, the dictator of Egypt and the Soviet KGB persuaded the Arabs around the Jordan to refrain from saying their goal was to push the Jews into the sea, but to declare themselves a Palestinian people seeking self-determination, to win support among the credulous – of whom there are many.

The entire Palestinian cause is based on a series of monstrous lies and is a 70-year unprovoked aggression, inspired by Nazism. No decent person, no moral person, should support it.

[Another disruption, this time by two lesbian activists who stood up and began kissing each other, as though that would shock anyone these days. And more walkouts, including one by a woman who said “We don’t need your help.” The disruptions continued with protesters unfurling signs they had smuggled in saying “Ice Is The Gestapo” and “Trans Rights Are Human Rights.” This disruption, which was allowed – not to say encouraged - by the leftwing Director of Security and Safety from the Dartmouth administration, went on for quite some time.]

[I had been asked by the students to also speak on the topic “Identity Politics Are Racist and Totalitarian,” to which I now turned.]

We use the term “oppressive” in this way:  If it’s hot outside, you say it’s hot. But if you say the heat is oppressive, you get out of it, if you can. That’s oppression. Nobody is leaving America. Nobody is oppressed in America, except maybe kids who chose the wrong parents.

Identity politics is racist and totalitarian. It’s racist because it’s a collectivist idea – people are oppressed because of the group they belong to, which erases the individual. So minorities and women are allegedly oppressed because of their group identity regardless of their individual circumstances and choices. But if blacks, for example, are oppressed in America, why aren’t they leaving? Why do all those Haitians risk their lives to come here, or all those brown people in caravans breaking our laws? To be oppressed? Are they stupid? Apparently that’s what the left thinks of them. They are coming here – and other so-called people of color are not leaving - because they know they have a better life here than they would in any country they come from or might go to. 

Are there bigots in America? Yes. Are there racists? Yes. But an African American in America has more rights, more privileges, more opportunities than in South Africa or any other African country. That’s the reality. There is no country in the world where black people have the privileges and rights that they do in America. You don’t want to be …

[Another series of interruptions from the protesters]

I already know you hate America, so you don’t have to interrupt me to let me know that. The American genius, which is responsible for the fact that we treat minorities who are oppressed in other countries better than they treat themselves, is that we were created by refugees from multiple countries, and multiple ethnic origins from the start. They were all fleeing religious persecution in the countries that they came from, and they were 98 percent Protestant. Protestant sects were at war with each other. They didn’t even agree on what Christianity was about.

But they worked out, over the course of 150 years in this country, a vision in which there would one day be actual pluralism, not the Dartmouth kind, but actual pluralism, in which individuals would be judged by the content of their character and not either the color of their skin or their gender.

Now obviously, America wasn’t created perfect. I have to say this because the left is so historically ignorant it exercises its self-righteousness on the past. How many people here, for example, think the Constitution declares black people to be three-fifths of a human being? How many of you have heard it? You could have heard it from Cory Booker, Al Gore and other Democratic leaders. It’s a lie. 

[Another disruption from the audience.]

[Female in the audience: I’m sorry.  Can we get back to Palestine?  That was kind of like …

[Horowitz:  No, I was invited here to talk about two subjects. One was Palestine and the other was identity politics.  I’ll be as brief as I can because I need to conclude this talk and take questions.]

The words, “white,” “black,” “female” and “male” do not appear in the Constitution.  The Three-Fifths Compromise was not about black people. It was about unfree people – slaves. There were about 500,000 blacks in America who were free. 

(Another audience disruption)

This is so depressing.  These people are just here to obstruct and disrupt. That they do so freely is an indictment of this university, it’s faculty and administration. They do not defend what an education should be – intellectually diverse, and respectfully engaged with divergent views. In an educational setting, you listen, and then if you have questions or if you have an argument, there’s a question period when you can do that.

The Three-Fifths Compromise was a compromise on how to count people on this continent for the purposes of assigning congressional seats. As you know, every seat in the House of Representatives has to have an equal number of constituents, and the slave owners wanted slaves to be counted as a whole person, so they would have more power. It was the anti-slavers who wanted unfree people not to be counted at all – to be counted as zero. They only wanted free people – black or white – to vote. That’s what the Three-Fifths Compromise was about.

Here’s the truth about the founding of this country: black slaves in America were all enslaved originally by black Africans. White Europeans did not go into Africa and throw nets over Kunta Kinte. They went to slave auctions in Ghana and Benin, where black slave owners sold their brethren to the Europeans. 

The United States of America was created in in 1787, but our birth certificate was a revolutionary document written in 1776, which said that all people are created equal and everyone has a God-given right to liberty. Within little over one generation – at a cost of 350,000 mainly white lives, including a white president who signed – and was murdered because he signed - the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks were freed. I have been attacked as a white supremacist by the leftists responsible for the lies in the leaflet distributed about me. But it is an unarguable truth. And for many it is the difference between appreciating what a great gift this country is and wanting to destroy it. Another uncomfortable truth for the identity politics crowd is that the freedoms they enjoy as women, as blacks, and other so-called oppressed groups, were the creation not only of whites, but of white Christian males. 

The hatred of those groups and the hatred of America that this university and others are teaching is incredibly dangerous, ignorant and self-defeating. 

I’ve been attacked by so-called liberals for failing to condemn the Founders for not freeing all the slaves in 1787. Why didn’t they? Because they had just barely defeated the most powerful empire in the world. The British burned the White House in 1812. If the Northern Free States had gone to the mat to abolish slavery at the Constitutional Convention, the South would have seceded and aligned with the British and crushed the North. And slavery would have gone on. That’s the reality. But the left is too busy being righteous and closed-minded to recognize that.

Identity politics is a form of cultural Marxism and denial. In 2016, Hillary Clinton ran a presidential campaign and won a popular majority on the transparently ridiculous idea that there is a war against women, along with a glass ceiling preventing one from becoming president. This is a woman whose entire political career was built on the shoulders of her husband. Without Bill Clinton, she would be nothing. As a United States Senator, she created no legislation worthy of the name. As Secretary of State, she killed Qaddafi and turned Libya into a terrorist state. That’s her achievements.

She ran on the baloney claim that there exists a wage gender gap, so that women get paid 22 cents less on the dollar than men, simply because they are women. Hillary is aware – although you probably aren’t – that in 1963, the mostly male Congress passed the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act. In other words, for 55 years it’s been illegal to pay women less than men because they are women. Nonetheless, the Democratic Party ran on that lie. I can even prove to you it’s a lie in one sentence. If it were true that women were paid 22 cents less on the dollar for the same work, the same skills and job experience as men, smart employers would fire all their male employees, hire women and increase their profits 22 percent or something close to that.

Identity politics is totalitarian. It erases individuals and judges them by their groups – and glues up the brain in the process. This is the world we live in now, with these kinds of lies, based on visceral hatred for men, for white people, for Christians and for this country.