About David Horowitz Freedom Center
OUR MISSION: The DHFC is dedicated to the defense of free societies whose moral, cultural and economic foundations are under attack by enemies both secular and religious, at home and abroad.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center combats the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country as it attempts to defend itself in a time of terror. The leftist offensive is most obvious on our nation’s campuses, where the Freedom Center protects students from indoctrination and intimidation and works to give conservative students a place in the marketplace of ideas from which they are otherwise excluded. Combining forceful analysis and bold activism, the Freedom Center provides strong insight into today’s most pressing issue on its family of websites and in the activist campaigns it wages on campus, in the news media, and in national politics throughout the year.
David Horowitz began the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1988 to establish a conservative presence in Hollywood and show how popular culture had become a political battleground. Over the next 18 years, CSPC attracted 50,000 contributing supporters and established programs such as The Wednesday Morning Club, the Individual Rights Foundation, and Students for Academic Freedom.
FrontPage Magazine, the Center’s online journal of news and political commentary has 1.5 million visitors and over 870,000 unique visitors a month (65 million hits) and is linked to over 2000 other websites. The magazine’s coverage of and commentary about events has been greatly augmented over the last two years by the presence of nine Shillman Fellows in Journalism underwritten by board member Dr. Robert Shillman. FrontPage has recently added a blog called “The Point,” run by Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield, which has tripled web traffic.
DiscoverTheNetworks.org, launched in 2005, is the largest publicly accessible database defining the chief groups and individuals of the Left and their organizational interlocks. It is a full service encyclopedia of the left providing an intellectual diagram of its institutional power in American culture and politics. DTN has had more than 8 million visitors so far this year and is a key resource for students, scholars and members of the media.
Since 2003, the Center has promoted an Academic Bill of Rights to support students’ academic freedom, and free the American university from political indoctrination and renew its commitment to true intellectual diversity. This campaign has had a permanent impact on American higher education.
In 2007, the Center undertook an unprecedented national campaign to create a national “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” Speeches, panels, and informational films were presented on 106 college campuses, along with “sit-ins” to protest the oppression of women in Islam. It was the largest conservative college student demonstration in American history and was a topic of discussion on 700,000 websites, in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Pakistani Star Tribune, the Iran News Agency, in college papers across the country and on half a dozen national TV shows reaching an audience in the millions.
The Center held four other Islamo-Fascism Awareness Weeks in 2008-2009 and has had at least one major campaign on campuses across the country since. The subjects have included the Muslim Students Association’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood; “Wall of Lies” (a rejoinder to pro Palestinians groups’ slander of Israel); and a counter campaign against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
In 2006, the Center’s Board of Directors decided to change the name of the organization to the David Horowitz Freedom Center and should adopt the following formal mission statement: “The Defense of Free Societies.” The Center is currently supported by over 90,000 Americans.
The Freedom Center now includes several other programs, including Jihad Watch, Stop K-12 Indoctrination, and Stop Campus Jew Hatred. Jihad Watch, run by author Robert Spencer, is a watch-dog site that traces the efforts of Islamic radicals in their terror campaign abroad, and their efforts at home to infiltrate and subvert Western institutions and civic life. Stop K-12 Indoctrination is a new campaign developed by the Freedom Center to work with parents and legislators to adopt a Code of Ethics for K-12 Public Schools, in order to end politicized teaching and classroom indoctrination. Stop Campus Jew Hatred is designed to raise student awareness and combat the pro-terrorist propaganda on American campuses. The time has come to end the use of our universities as staging grounds for campaigns of hatred aimed at the Jews and Christians of the Middle East and at America itself.