i actually succeeded in six or seven papers but the number of rejections that i get and you know they start out with reasons and then when i refute the reasons they just say, well we are not we are not going to run the ad. anyway. and that is because of the left is very good. get shut down discussion of commonism by yelling mccarthyism all the time. it shuts down discussions of palestinian genocidal intentions. you know i pointed out. israel is not responsible for the palestinians suffering. the palestinians are in the arabs are. now, it is just a reality. [applause] this is what i said on college

campuses. i said this at ucla for example. i said forget who is responsible for a second. hold off who is responsible for the suffering. people have suffered for thousands of years, but never in the history of the world has a people strapped bombs onto its own children, told them to blow up other children and if they are lucky enough to be male, they are going to go to heaven and get 72 virgins. this is a sick, sick culture. so for that i was cold and islamaphobes. i didn't use the word islam but an official resolution at ucla. sponsored, voted, not a single vote in opposition on the student council of an anti-islamaphobia resolution. which says that david horwitz

said that islam is a sick, sick culture in his speech on this campus. i have published the transcript of the speech. it is an absolute lie and there but this campaign is a global campaign that was started by the muslim brotherhood, that is now sponsored by the center for american progress which is the brain trust of the democratic hardy. this is how far this has gone. they put out 130 page report on islamaphobia. i am and islamaphobes for that kind of statement. which is just a naked attempt to suppress free speech by declaring it -- and america is a wonderfully tolerant society so he called somebody a racist, unless they happen to be al sharpton, that puts them out of the respectable discussion. if you call them and islamaphobes, that will do it. this is a movement.

it's gone very far in the u.n.. it's a movement in our country and has the support of the heart of the liberal establishment to shut down free speech of critics of islam. and i say islam because organized islam treats women as second-class citizens. islamic doctrine sanctions the beating of women and wives in particular. are not persons in islam. and terrorists sanctioned in islam. hitler hated the final solutions from the germans because he thought they were too civilized

to accept his plan to eliminate the jewish. ahmadinejad shouts it from the rooftops. we are going to wipe out israel and the united states. name me one, one muslim leader, one muslim government that is condemned that statement. that is the problem we face, and most people are in denial because it is a horrible problem. >> david? what do you think it is going to take to defeat that problem? we are not confronting it right now. we have had 30 years of islamic revolution. >> americans wake up slowly. there are always two-sided impacts of things. there is always a lot of unintended consequences but also good things have to have

sometimes negative consequences. america is probably the happiest country on the face of the year. there is so much to do here. there is so much freedom. there is so much opportunity. so, in 1941, just to give a whole graph of this picture of this problem, in 1941 hitler had overrun all of western europe. only the british were sort of holding out by a thread. the japanese had conquered all of southeast asia, manchuria and gallup did a poll of americans in april of 1941. and the poll asked, should we get involved in this war? and that of course hitler declared american and enemy in terms of a little milder than the ahmadinejad.

80% of americans said no, we should not get involved. and then came pearl harbor, and everything changed. and that i fear, and the reason i put so much effort into this campaign to warn people of the danger here, we cannot even speak about the danger without being -- those of us who have, without being stigmatized and an attempt made to isolate us and shut us down and deny us access to college papers or college campuses, i fear there will be a great atrocity. i just see it. what the israelis just did invites terror. you trade one soldier for 1000 murderers. what it premium that puts on the

next kidnapping and if you go to the mosque web site, hamas says the brigades liberated 1000 freedom fighters. that is the enemy. these are nazis. you don't want to encourage them by appeasing them. if that is the posture of every western government right now including the israelis. let's try to make a deal with them. when i talk to the college students for example at u. penn, that is their attitude. i can't have a dialogue with them if i bring up these unpleasant realities. well, some of us are going to bring up those unpleasant realities over and over until you know we are shut down or americans wake up. thank you. >> we are going to have one last question david and then we are going to proceed to the book signing. thank you. >> thank you. on september 11, 2001, we had a tremendous wake-up call.

every one of us experienced different emotions that day, different sites they saw. for me the most disturbing was to see americans and in dearborn and paterson new jersey celebrating the destruction of the towers and a crashed into the pentagon and into the field of pennsylvania. the supposed americans celebrated. it was on very briefly on the media and since then, there has been a ban on, a virtual band -- >> that's because they were muslims. >> what do we do about this? >> well we just have to speak up up and tell -- not everybody can do this. some of us are constitutionally more suited to combat. i don't find it pleasant that i cannot go to a college campus without bodyguards and i'm not

the only conservative. you have got to keep speaking up until people wake up. unfortunately, what it usually takes is an atrocity although we have had atrocities. we had major hasan who was screaming, i am a terrorist, i'm a terrorist and was promoted while screaming that from major to captain. even after he had killed 13 of our soldiers, unarmed, the head of the army, casey, said that it was worth it for diversity. it and is it worth it? but the issue is very much -- we have a little pamphlet called islamaphobia which describes it. this campaign is to prevent people, and of course the news media spoken some of them of

course msnbc are raising lunatic leftists. but most of those people are you know, there are just careerists and they are not highly informed and they don't want to offend people. so in the name of not offending muslims, we don't tell the truth. muslims celebrated on 9/11. they will say oh, we are attacking all muslims. no, we are attacking the ones who celebrated bed they wouldn't say who they were. if it was, i don't know, white celebrating a lynching, everybody would say it is why people doing it and they wouldn't conceal the identity. the fact of the matter is in america today, the fbi crime statistics show that jewish are the most persecuted religion. no question about it. eight times, getting this exactly right.

i will appear in media matters as soon as this comes out. [laughter] eight times as many hate crimes against jewish as muslim in this country. a lot of those crimes are committed by muslims. and to me, it is a crime against the jewish students on a campus to have thrown in their face the accusation that israel is an apartheid state when it is the only non-apartheid state in the middle east. and of course the desire to destroy it, because the model is south africa. they want to destroy the jewish state. call it an apartheid state and erasing it. genocide is the agenda of the muslim students association, students for justice in palestine, hamas, hezbollah, iran and now we have in egypt of course. it is not just a jewish.

they are slaughtering christians in egypt because the muslim brotherhood is on the rise. this phony arab spring, yeah there were some good people that went out in the square in cairo, but the revolution in the middle east is a fascist revolution, and it spells enormous trouble and probably wore sooner rather than later. thank you all. [applause] >> for more information about the author, visit for horror which freedom center.org. will kaufman takes a look at woody guthrie throughout the

depression, world war ii, the cold war, the korean korean war, the mccarthy area and the civil rights era. the sing writer -- singer songwriters best known for his song, this land is your land. this is about 45 minutes. >> good evening everyone. thank you for joining us tonight. tonight is a very special event for us. our guest will not only be talking about his new book, "woody guthrie" american radical. he will be given you an audio presentation showing images that represent the life and times of the subject and also performing some of the songs of the guthrie canon. most of us know of woody guthrie as america's unofficial anthem. this land is your land. but few may know the roots of guthrie's activism and the depth of his commitment to social justice. our guest takes a fresh look at the iconic guthrie and the context in which he struggled

oath personally and on a wider political stage. tonight's author is a professor of american literature and culture at the university of central lancashire in england. is the author of the previously published book american culture in the 1970s, and he is as you will soon find out also a professional folk singer and decision. is my pleasure to introduce to you the author of "woody guthrie" american radical, will kaufman. [applause] ♪ ♪ ♪

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day, july 14, 1912 in a place called okemah oklahoma. okemah he said was one of the singing is to square dancing is yelling asked talking, laughing and crying shooting gambling fist fighting gun club and razor carrying of our ranch farm towns because it blossomed into one of our first oil boom towns. they discovered oil in okemah around 1920 when woody was about eight years old. so he saw the population quintuple overnight like 2,210,000. one day it was a sleepy southern hamlet and the next day he woke up and everybody was there and it was filled with these roughneck oil boomers or boom chasers who are making their fortunes hand over fist every day until 1928 when the oil ran out and okemah went from boom to

bust. very quickly was that as an oil town so hundreds of these oil boomers weren't turned out to roam the countryside dessa to. annette keizo came and her children became the microcosm of the fate of towns and communities across the southern plains the following year when the depression kicked in. in 1929 after a series of some pretty incredible family tragedies, the burning down of their family home, the burning to death of his sister and another house fire, the near fatal burning of his father and he had a third house fire and the incarceration and slow death of his mother in the oklahoma state mental asylum. she wasn't crazy. she had the undiagnosed misunderstood hunting tends to seize. huntington's disease. after those tragedies woody went to join his recuperating father and of them to bust place called tampa taxes. he dropped out of high school and became a sign painter, married at his first two

children and then they'll waded through the years and carried the black wizards of dust across the great plains. this was was the worn-out topsoil of over 100,000 square miles of ravaged farmland. in november 1933 the dust. the midwest and came back the following year and buried in the entire midwest again and also as far east as albany and buffalo, new york. it the dust continued to blow for the rest of the decade. the sky would turn black and red with thousands of tons of dust and animal and people choke to death. and the worst, the single worst day that any of the dust bubblers could remember was april 14, 1935, palm sunday. they called it black sunday. that is when the winds of more than 80 miles an hour with a topsoil and the red clay from as far away as nebraska dumped it on the already dying town of

tampa, texas. woody recalled that when the dust cloud hits, it looks like an ocean chomping down on its -- it looks like the red sea was closing in on the israel children he said and religious fundamentalists believe that this was literally the end of the world. this was god's judgment being visited upon the wicked people and his woody recalls, we thought we was done for. thousands of us just packed up and lit out. that year, he wrote the first of many songs about the death of his community and hundreds of others like it across the southern plains. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

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♪ [applause] thank you. woody left his wife and his children and he hit the road early in the summer of 1937. he was about 24 years old. somewhere out there on those choked highways leading westward among the jalopies and the wagons piled high with furniture, there was another oklahoma native named agnes cunningham. years later she was saying in a radical folk group with woody guthrie and pete seeger called the almanac singers. like woody and countless other children of dust bowl the dust bowl she would become radically politicized by her migratory experience. as she recalled it, along with other hundreds of thousands of dirt farmers, we fought to

survive. we battled crop failures, hunger, illness without doctors, goalie washers, hail storms, the death of livestock, fires. now we could have endured all of those normal disasters that there was no way in god's world to escape the sharks teeth of the bankers. and that is what happened. woody remembered the further west you walked, the browner, hotter, stiller and him steer the country gets. i am -- whole swarms of hitchhikers and migratory workers squatted with their little piles of the longings in the shade of the big signboard, out across the flat, hard crust desert or goat kids chasing around in the blistering sun, ladies cooking scrappy meals in city buckets and scouring the place clean withstand. young folks in work pants

copying -- cotton dresses. they gathered around and they would sing too. sometimes they would just stand real quiet and listen. i knew that what they were thinking about. by 1936 the year of roosevelts for the election is same to midwestern american family farm at pretty well blown away with the topsoil. that is the way that joe kline described against woody's by cuffey. human convulsion of epic proportion was in progress. the whole countryside seemed to heave and row as the farms empties in the highways filled. now the country music stations, jimmy rodgers was up there yodeling and singing, the california waters taste just like cherry wine. and woody and half a million migrants from the dust bowl region crawled their way westwards towards those legendary vineyards and orchards of california. they were chasing a dream,

something that would be later on called this stinking is thing i've ever run on two and this was the promises of unscrupulous labor contractors out in california who were aware of the dust bowl crisis and decided to exploit it by flooding the dust bowl region with handbills promising work for every idle hand, hundreds of thousands of hands needed to pick the peaches and the grapes and the apricots in the prince. they didn't need hundreds of thousands of hands. they needed a couple thousand hands in picking -- at particular periods of time. if you can engineer a crisis we have a couple hundred thousand hands chasing a couple thousand jobs. what they would do, these labor contractors would give you the address of someone who may give you a job out in california and you would have to give this person five or 10 bucks just to get the address, not knowing whether the job was there or not. so woody was incensed by this and then following promises like

this and a dream of work arriving at the california border the migrants were stopped cold. los angeles police department panicked. they set up these highly illegal, highly unconstitutional roadblocks on the major points of entry into the state of california. they called it the bum blockade and they got the los angeles times and william randolph hearst in the chambers of commerce and this huge anti-migrants flocked. now, before this trip to the states, it never been to california. can i share a secret with you? i had seen it on a map. and i'm pretty sure that los angeles is about as far west as you can get. what was the l.a.p.d. doing setting up in a legal roadblock hundreds of miles to the ease stopping other americans from coming into the state of california as though it were a foreign country? and where does their jurisdiction and? long island? i just don't get it. anyway was unconstitutional. they didn't care about it.

what they were doing was stopping and turning back anybody who looked like a non-employable. that is the word they used. how could you prove you weren't unemployable? you would reach into your pocket and pull out 50 bucks and if you could show 50 bucks at the old do remi to the border guard you might make it into the golden state of california where you'd assured to get a less than warm welcome anyway. so woody took a look at that situation and he said kind of a musical postcard to the folks back home thinking of pulling up stakes and coming out to california. maybe they had better think again. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

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woody made it into the state of california and it was there he encountered a first time the word okey. this was a slur. it was an insult being used to describe all the migrants from the southern plains whether in fact they were from oklahoma or not. i mean those who were in the know might discriminate between okey and archean texas and things like that. but a sickly the formula went like this. if you are poor, white, homeless, unemployed and in california at that time, you were an okey no matter where you came from. and if you are poor, black homeless unemployed in california at that time, and from oklahoma, you weren't an okey. okies were a particular white underclass and they were the target for highly orchestrated campaign of statewide sino

phobia. it was an atmosphere which in you into a movie theater in bakersfield or somewhere in the san joaquin valley you might be met with a sign outside the said blacks and -- outside. so it is in that atmosphere that woody began circulating around the migrant camps around 1938 and this is where he began to run to the radicals who have the sense of the bigger picture as they sought and again, as joe kline describes it in woody's ladder feet, these old radicals around the campfire they mutter half coherently about the capitalists and the rich and then they reach into their pockets and pull out a battered old red card that prove they had been members of the wildest, will he is most violent, joyous and completely disorganized gang of reds ever to strike fear into the hearts of the american bush

was it. industrial workers of the world. iww. i don't know why we use the past tense. that is my membership card. a lot of people think they were wiped out in the great red scare of 1919, 1920. we weren't wiped out. we just went underground to wait for the invention of the internet. iww.org and you can pay by direct debit. their humor, their cynicism, with her anger but particularly with the songs they sang out of their little red songbook to fan the flames of discontent. of all the songs in a book the ones that woody would have loved the most are probably the 26 parodies priceless fully funny written by joe hill, swedish born immigrant to the united states which became a martyr to the cause of american labor with his execution on a very dubious murder charge in the state of utah in 1915.

students of american history will be aware of the stirring telegram he sends to his colleagues the night before his execution. he said don't waste time mourning for me, organize. i think fewer people will be aware that in the same telegram he said, could you do a favor when this is all over? can you promise you'll get my body across the state line? i don't want to be caught dead in utah. [laughter] the year before his death, joe hill wrote this. no matter how good is never read more than once by the song is learned by heart is repeated over and over. that is the first lesson he told woody guthrie from beyond the grave as it were. the second is this, he said take a few cold commonsense facts, put it into a song and then dress it up in a code of humor to take the dryness off of them. i think a lot of people would think of joe hill's reworking of the old salvation army hymn in

sweet in suite by-and-by as a case in.. joe hill ticket and turned it into what became the anthem to american labor in the first half of the 20th century, the preacher in this and the slave. there are people who think that is the reason why joe hill was executed for writing that song and you know, the preacher in the slave. do you all know that? it is kind of important. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

a very influential song and american labor history. [applause] woody got himself a job posting and singing on a progressive radio station in los angeles. they couldn't have been any earlier than 1937 but as i said he also began to circulate around the migrant camps. some of the show places were set up by the government and the farm security administration and these are great places to be. they were democratically run, self-governing. they were well provided for. they were clean and sanitary. the only problem was there wasn't nearly enough to cope with the magnitude of the dustbowl crisis in california. the majority of camps that woody would have visited were just basically slums. they called them who are phil, anywhere across -- across the country they were. who were bill was named by the

president over who's watched the depression was ushered in. these are places where you had families of eight or 10 getting by on $3 a week to train them picking cotton in the san joaquin valley. back's president roosevelt actually declared, if i went to work in a factory, the first thing i would do would be to join the union. which sounded pretty good coming from the oval office. i don't think any president had gone so far to endorse the rights of labor to organize. but even with that kind of backing, the reality for the radical migrants attempting to organize in the california fields, they were crushed time and time again because the food crop growers hated unions. correction, they hated unions owned by working people. they were happy to form their own union. what is a chamber of commerce by the union? the fruit crop growers have their own union. they call themselves the associated farmers whose declared aim was to stamp out

all un-american activity among farm labor because if you are a worker forming a union, you are un-american. here are three of the associated farmers in kern county california engaged in the un-american activity of their choice which is book earning. they are burning a copy of john steinbeck's "the grapes of wrath" as in it is published in 1939. you see they don't come out so good and that. you know so that is kind of extreme. and when they weren't put earning they were hiring local thugs and goons and giving them ax handles, baseball bats, knuckle busters, billy clubs and maybe a tin badge to make them feel authentic sending them out to scatter picket lines, to bust up unions, meetings to burn down and burn out entire migrant camps and of course to assassinate union organizers. this is with the great l.a.p.d. and "the los angeles times" and

hearst. woody took a look at that situation wrote about a drawing partly in "the grapes of wrath." how many of you have read "the grapes of wrath" or seen the film? you remember preacher casey? the ex-preacher who becomes a union organizer and subsequently and consequently murdered by the vigilantes in the higher of the associated farmers. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

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♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [applause] >> there's something interesting happening about now. woody is beginning to listen to the radio really critically. all the migrants are gathered around the one radio in the camp. for instance he is hearing the great big hit of the year in 1938.