Right-wing demagogue David Horowitz could not have bought all of the publicity he received when he tried to place an incendiary anti-reparation ad in college newspapers across the country. A controversy was ignited when Horowitz repackaged a column he had written last year, mailed it to 50 campus publications as paid advertising, and waited for the predictable campus uproar over decisions to either accept or reject the drive-by harangue.

More than half of the newspapers, including those at Harvard, Yale and Columbia, rejected the 1,300-word ad titled, "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea - and Racist Too."

When the ad ran in the University of California-Berkley's Daily Californian, protesters stormed the newspaper office and demanded an apology. The editor acceded to the protesters, apologizing for the newspaper being "an inadvertent vehicle for bigotry." Editors at UC-Davis and Arizona State University offered similar apologies.

The decision by the University of Wisconsin's Daily Badger to publish the controversial ad also sparked protests, with students calling for the editor's resignation. But the editor neither resigned nor apologized.

At Brown University in Providence, R.I., the independent Daily Herald also refused to apologize. Student protesters stole many of the papers displaying the ad and replaced them with fliers listing their objections to the attack on reparations.

Through it all, Horowitz, who has been variously denounced as a "racist," a "real live bigot" and as the "White Al Sharpton," watched his publicity stunt work to perfection.

"My Andy Warhol moment has come just as I had hoped it would: on offense, baiting the left," wrote Horowitz, a regular columnist for Salon.com, a well-known magazine on the World Wide Web. "...I couldn't be more pleased by the attention these issues are getting."

Horowitz has tried to cast this as a First Amendment issue of free speech and as yet another example of political correctness gone amuck. It is anything but that. Editors and publishers, whether ensconced on college campuses or in downtown newsrooms,
make decisions every day not to publish ads that would offend the sensibilities of their readers.

Still, it was a mistake not to run the ad.

Rather than playing into the hands of a bigot, it would have been wiser to publish the entire Horowitz tome and have it accompanied by articles that take an opposing view.

And Horowitz provides plenty to oppose.

For example, he asserts: "There is no one group that benefited exclusively from its [slavery's] fruits." However, historian John Hope Franklin correctly notes, "All Whites and no slaves benefited from American slavery. All Blacks had no rights that they could claim as their own. All Whites, including the vast majority who had no slaves, were not only encouraged but authorized to exercise dominion over all slaves, thereby adding strength to the system of control."

On another point, Horowitz says "reparations to African-Americans have already been paid....Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the advent of the Great Society in 1965, trillions of dollars in transfer payments have already been made to African-Americans in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences..."

Even Gregory Kane, a Black conservative, had to take his philosophical brother to task for re-writing history. "It is here that Horowitz left himself open to the charge that his ad was racist," Kane wrote in The Baltimore Sun. "He's guilty of muddling a bit of history as well. Welfare payments didn't start with the Great Society in 1965. They started during the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt as the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. And it isn't only Blacks who receive welfare payments. Plenty of Whites do. To call them 'reparations' for Blacks is just downright silly, and preferential jobs and admissions for Blacks are no more reparations than similar preferences given to veterans."

Horowitz asks, "What about the debt Blacks owe to America?... If not for the dedication of Americans of all ethnicities and colors to a society based on the principle that all men are created equal, Blacks in America would not enjoy the highest standard of living of Blacks anywhere in the world, and indeed one of the highest standards of living of any people in the world. They would not enjoy the greatest freedoms and the most thoroughly protected individual rights anywhere. Where is the gratitude of Black America and its leaders for those gifts?"

Eric Alterman, a contributor for MSNBC, says the notion that African-Americans should be grateful for slavery is "so foolish it barely requires refutation." Nevertheless, Alterman observes, "One might just as appropriately ask Jews show their 'gratitude' to Germany because of all the gifts bestowed on them there, aside from that small matter of the Holocaust. After all, didn't individual Germans intervene to prevent the killing of Jews in that nation? Didn't a few die in the process? Don't the remaining Jews in Germany live pretty well now?"

As we have seen, supporters of reparations should be eager for David Horowitz to express his views. The more he expresses them, the more we see how flawed they are. And no amount of publicity stunts can hide that weakness.