Editor, Daily Nexus,

I am greatly troubled at the comments made in Monday’s paper (“National Event Centers on Issue of Radical Islam,” Daily Nexus, Oct. 22) in regards to the targeting of the UCSB Women’s Studies Dept. by David Horowitz and his Islamo-Fascism campaign.

Particularly disturbing are Horowitz’s comments and the advertisement by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This propaganda makes the unsubstantiated claim that the UCSB Women’s Studies Dept. neglects to teach its students about oppression in the world outside of our small, privileged community, and is therefore silent to the oppression of other women, including Islamic women. This claim ignores how the Women’s Studies Dept., as quoted on its Web site, seeks the empowerment and freedom of all women through its interdisciplinary study of “gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, and ability to deepen understanding of diverse women’s lives, cultures, and histories in the United States and around the globe.” It is not the department’s responsibility to directly solve the problems of women in other countries. Rather, it is the department’s priority to educate its students of the issues surrounding women of all nations.

I wonder if the targeting of the Women’s Studies Dept. within Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is just a strategy. A strategy to give the politically conservative population at UCSB a local target for Horowitz’s fight against the assumed liberal indoctrination of university students in America. See Horowitz’s books, “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left” and “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” for more information.

I am disappointed that Daily Nexus would feel it necessary to print this misrepresentation of Women’s Studies curriculum, faculty, staff and students. It does a great disservice to the program, its students and the university at large.