Aynte MugshotAmong the vastly exaggerated aspects of “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” or IFAW, which debuted nationally this week, is its scope: It is far less eventful than its choreographer, David Horowitz, led us to believe: More and more of the 100 universities he listed on his website as event sites are declaring their noninvolvement.

The University of Minnesota is one of them: The week-long event is neither found on the calendar of events nor has anyone claiming to organize such an event come forward to admit it. Yale and Princeton, among other reputable institutions, have denied having any knowledge of Horowitz’s Islamophobic project.

But that’s hardly the most outrageous part of IFAW. A stated goal of the week is to protest “the silence of feminists over the oppression of women in Islam.” Horowitz, a born-again conservative pundit, instructs his followers to stage sit-ins outside women’s studies departments. Feminists are unobtrusive in the fight against oppressing Muslim women, Horowitz purports.

Another peculiar target is “the academic left.” Horowitz claims that it “has mobilized to create sympathy for the enemy and to fight anyone who rallies Americans to defend themselves.”

The IFAW literature accuses academics of pushing two phony arguments: “First, that George Bush created the war on terror” and, second, “that global warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat.”

Excuse me, but I fail to make a connection between feminists, academics, global warming and radicals who claim to be Muslims. What I see academics doing is untangling the real war on terror from the terror of war — in Iraq.

As intellectual authorities backed by solid scholarship, academics are also warning the world of the impending catastrophe if global warming isn’t addressed conscientiously. 

For Horowitz, whose clique in IFAW includes pundit outrageous Ann Coulter and former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., those academics are inseparable from his “Islamo-fascists.”

Clearly, the IFAW’s objective is as confused and misguided as its name suggests. Even President Bush, who briefly flirted with “Islamo-fascism,” has retreated from it, realizing that it’s too dicey. There may be Muslim fascists, but there is no Islamic fascism.

Linking “fascism” with Islam as Horowitz does posits that the faith of over 1.5 billion people around the world is intrinsically totalitarian. That abets the real fanatics who claim to defend the faith from flimsy messages like IFAW’s. Fascism doesn’t quite capture what I think Horowitz should try to tackle, which’s the real danger of fanaticism in all religions.

Horowitz appears to hope that any incendiary remark about Islam and Muslims at this juncture will stick.

But I’m afraid it won’t — at least not on college campuses.