Get ready for for this one: word has it that Columbia alumnus/right-wing writer David Horowitz plans to make an on-campus appearance sometime between October 22nd and 26th to spearhead "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week," an event put on through the Terrorism Awareness Project. As a special treat, Horowitz plans to bring conservative talk show host Sean Hannity (who did this this little number a year ago) along with him to give us a speech all about Islamofascism. Details have been floating around here for awhile now, where a long list of speakers during the nationwide event include Rick Santorum (UPenn, Penn State, Temple) and Ann Coulter (Tulane, USC).

In a Monday blog post, Horowitz denounced the ISO's Thursday evening event "Using Racism to Sell War: The West vs. Islam?" calling the event a message from "leftwing flak-catchers for America's enemies." In his next post, Horowitz refers to the Muslim Students Association as "a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas and is funded by the Saudis and is part of the Islamo-fascist jihad," generally speaking.

Brace yourselves?

The College Democrats, who collaborated with several anti-war groups (Students for Justice in the Middle East, the Working Families Party, Lucha, World Can't Wait, and the ISO) on sending people down to DC last week, are done with all this left wing solidarity: Dems President Mike Nadler just sent an e-mail announcing that his group would pull out of the coalition's next event, a walkout planned for February 15 (the anniversary of the massive walkouts in 2003). David Judd of the ISO had this to say:

"The Dems have decided to not participate as a club in the walkout and rally, though individual members will do so. they have left because of ideological differences which could not be reconciled despite much effort to do so. the remaining members of the coalition are disappointed with this decision and continue to hope that the Democrats will reconsider. the walkout and rally will continue, and the Columbia Coalition Against the War believes that it will be very successful. a broad spectrum of groups and individuals are still participating in planning, student strikes are moving forward on a national level with endorsements by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, the latter delivered at Columbia yesterday, and we are all very excited to take concrete action against the war on the 15th."

Both sides are staying mum to avoid a public shit show, but one person less personally invested gave Bwog the backstory. In a nutshell, the groups parted ways over how to request that Columbia study divestment from certain defense contractors to protest the war. Representatives of the Coalition groups compromised on only three companies (Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin, which constitute $4.3 out of Columbia's $836 million in public holdings) for the duration of the war, but the Dems said no. The Coalition reps declined to say definitively what they would recommend to their groups, which the Dems took as a sign of bad faith, finally pulling out of the deal altogether.

Is this how it's like in the real world?

Full announcement from Dems Board after the jump.

What is your course here [Limited War and Low Intensity Conflict] about?

The course here is a double headed oxymoron by title, which I love, I think it's part of what draws students to it. Really it's a course that revisits the classic works, some of the seminal works on what we've come to regard as limited war, others would call it wars of national liberation, revolutionary war, insurgency, counterinsurgency, terrorism, counterterrorism, small wars.

Small wars. What exactly is a small war?

Well, we've spent 15 lessons in this course exploring that question. What does limited war mean? Kind of to cut to the chase, it depends on your point of view and perspective. At least as classical literature lays out, it has at least two different schools of thought. With the Western perspective, we cover it all, but we're admittedly leaning towards the First World, advanced industrial nation state perspective, we have tended to define wars as small vs. total.

The West has, for a long number of years, been challenged with the idea of not only waging limited wars but winning them, finishing them well and legitimately. I mean, kind of case in point, Iraq, Afghanistan, the global war on terrorism. So that's an important question to at least return to, if not begin with: is there actually such a thing as a small war, or is it just a matter of perspective?