Excerpt:
Editor's note: Protected by a bodyguard and twelve armed campus security officers, David Horowitz spoke at the University of Southern California on November 4, 2009. This is a text of his remarks, edited for readability. A video of the speech is available here. To read about the efforts to censor him before the speech and the slander directed at him, click here.
I want to thank the College Republicans for being brave enough to invite me, and I want to thank all of you who are here to actually listen for coming.
It used to be a pleasure for me to speak on a college campus like USC. I can remember the days when I could stroll onto the USC campus and walk over to the statue of Tommy Trojan where College Republicans had erected a platform for a rally to support our troops in Afghanistan after 9/11 at which I was to speak. Now, however, I can't set foot on this campus – or any campus – without being accompanied by a personal bodyguard and a battalion of armed campus security police to protect me and my student hosts.
Sheer prudence forces me to visit campuses with these security measures in place because I've been demonized by the campus left at virtually every school I've visited in the past decade and physically assaulted at several. USC officials regard the threats against this event seriously enough to have assigned twelve armed officers to watch over the proceedings. These police are not here to protect you from me. They are here to protect me from you members of the USC Progressive Alliance, Students for Justice in Palestine and the USC Muslim Student Union who have made these threats and incited hatred towards this event and its speaker. These are the tactics favored by fascists – and when I use that word I mean it literally. I don't use it the way the Left does, as an epithet for anyone they don't like.