Tag Archive for: academia

Penn State Professor Forces Students to Explain Why the Taliban Aren’t Terrorists

My latest in PJ Media:

There are so many ridiculous things being taught in American colleges and universities these days that a professor who defends the Taliban may seem staid and conservative compared to some of his colleagues, but that’s just a sign of how far American academia has fallen. Christopher Cook, a professor in the Department of International Politics at Pennsylvania State University – World Campus, is teaching a class called “Politics of Terrorism,” in which he has given the students an essay assignment: “Explain why the Taliban are not terrorists.” Imagine a professor in 1944 making his students write about how the Nazis really aren’t so bad, and you’ll understand how ridiculous and outrageous Cook’s assignment really is.

Cook’s assignment was not an example of the common pedagogical exercise in which students adopt a point of view that is not their own in order to sharpen their ability to understand and present arguments. He explained his assignment in this way: “In one page* explain why the Taliban is have [sic] not and are still not a terrorist organization. You are not allowed to answer this question in any other way. Any attempt to avoid this prompt as written; or trying to argue otherwise will result in a failing grade. If you have any questions on the pedagogy behind this assignment– please contact me.”

The warnings that students could not argue the opposite view, or avoid the question altogether made clear where Cook was coming from, and he made it even clear in several tweets (after his class assignment became widely known, he deleted his Twitter account). Cook wrote: “Do you think any of my students will see this before Sunday’s deadline? The one where I ask them to tell me why the Taliban are *not* terrorists.” And: “I am going to guess there is a Venn Diagram between the people who struggled understanding why the Taliban were not terrorists for the lat [sic] 20 years and those who think there can be justified violence against the American government.” Does Cook support Antifa? It would be surprising if he didn’t.

Penn State student Kylie Stone told “Fox & Friends”: “I was completely shocked. I had made it through my first four years of college without having anything this insane and, of course, my last semester my teacher basically says ‘you have to agree with me or I’m going to fail you.’ So it was very surprising to me….I have had assignments where they asked me to argue both sides. I love doing that kind of stuff. I think it’s so beneficial to every student to be doing that but that’s not what this assignment was.” That’s obvious. Cook, like the overwhelming majority of professors all over the country today, doesn’t want to teach his students critical thinking skills; he wants to indoctrinate them into Leftist attitudes and dogmas.

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Yet Another Hijab Hate Crime Hoax, This Time in Maryland

My latest in PJ Media:

As every good Leftist knows and very much wants you to admit, America is a racist, hate-filled country in which people of color, Muslims, and other victim classes are routinely subjected to discrimination, harassment, and even violence. The only problem with our culture of “systemic racism,” which Critical Race Theory advocates claim to be working hard to transform for the good, is that it’s not even close to being backed up by reality. Again and again, the hate crimes that are invoked as evidence of the “white supremacist” violence that the government and media tell us so much about turn out to be fake. Just before Christmas, yet another hate crime was unmasked as a hoax; the Critical Race Theory crowd would be embarrassed by all this fakery, if they were capable of embarrassment.

This latest hoax started on Nov. 16 on The Commons at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where, according to UMBC Police Chief Paul Dillon, “a student reported to a Commons staff member that an unknown male attempted to remove her hijab. UMBC Police are investigating, and the Division of Student Affairs is reaching out to students most directly impacted as well as shared governance leaders in our community.”

Dillon asked the UMBC community to come forward if they had any information about this crime, and reminded the racist, redneck yahoos roaming around Baltimore that “UMBC students, faculty, staff members or visitors who choose to violate relevant policies and laws are solely responsible for their actions.” This apparently needed to be said in order to try to quell any riots that might break out over the “hate crime.” Dillon assured UMBC that justice would be done, regardless of the perception of “systemic racism” that had been reinforced by the hate crime itself: “University authorities will make every effort to sanction individuals who violate those policies and laws.”

The intrepid guardian of justice also felt it necessary to make sure everyone understood that UMBC was against hate crimes: “Such incidents are inconsistent with UMBC values, including our community’s respect for diversity and inclusion.” In fact, UMBC was institutionally against such crimes: “Students in need of support can contact i3b – Initiatives for Identity, Inclusion & Belonging.” This campus office, also located in The Commons, declares proudly that “UMBC is one of the most diverse campuses in the nation, and we value the richness that such diversity brings to campus life. The Initiatives for Identity, Inclusion & Belonging creates opportunities for students to build their awareness and knowledge of diverse people, cultures, and belief systems. Through facilitated discussions, informal gatherings, educational engagements, presentations, and campus-wide events, individual students, student organizations, and classes learn the skills to create inclusive, just and mutually respectful communities at UMBC and beyond.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Why Should Academic Departments Have Foreign Policies?

When did academic departments decide they had to declare themselves on the Palestinian-Israeli dispute but on no other foreign policy question? And why are they so eager to express their visceral hatred of the Jewish state? A report on this disturbing phenomenon is here: “Academic departments must steer clear of anti-Israel activism,” by Richard L. Cravatts, Israel Hayom, November 12, 2021:

The obsessive loathing of Israel by large swathes of academia was evident this past spring as Hamas showered Israeli population centers with more than 4,000 rockets and mortars. Instead of denouncing genocidal aggression on the part of Hamas, these woke, virtue-signaling moral narcissists took it upon themselves to condemn – in the loudest and most condemnatory terms — the Jewish state, not the homicidal psychopaths intent on murdering Jews….

There is a difference between an individual expressing an opinion on, say, social media. That opinion is his alone. No pressure has been placed on him to express it. But when academic departments put out what are presented as that department’s — presumably unanimous — opinion, those who may not agree with the majority seldom dare to express their minority opinion in the daggers-drawn atmosphere of current academic life, where dissent is only for the tenured, and even they must be very brave, to express solidarity with, or sympathy for, the embattled Jewish state that has been so demonized in the swamps of academe.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and professor emeritus of English, challenged the propriety of departments authoring statements of support for the Palestinian cause while vilifying and denouncing Israel in the process. Four academic units at Illinois had issued anti-Israel statements in the spring – the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Department of Asian American Studies, and the Department of History – prompting Nelson and 43 of his fellow faculty to write a letter to Chancellor Robert Jones and Provost Andreas Cangellaris.

In that letter, the faculty noted that “the statements in question were not issued by individual faculty or groups of faculty. They were subscribed to by departments … [and] have been placed on websites and disseminated through social media and email, which created the impression that the unit was speaking for all or most of the faculty within it. This represents a worrisome development. And it is worrisome irrespective of one’s views on the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”…

These “departmental opinions” are the result of an atmosphere of intellectual intimidation, with those not subscribing to the majority view nonetheless being “spoken for.” Did absolutely every faculty member, for example, in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, agree that Israel is an arch-villain? Or was such an opinion presented by a handful of anti-Israel activists, without the agreement or even, possibly, the knowledge, of all of that department’s members? Did the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies decide, as in the Soviet Union, that “for the good of the Party” no dissent could be allowed and simply rode roughshod over those who dared to even mildly disagree with the kind of hysterical language that is used to blacken Israel’s image? And did the members of that same department not know, or not care, that it is the Palestinians who, as Muslims, allow husbands to “beat” their wives should they be even suspected of “disobedience”? It is the Palestinians who engage in “honor killings” of girls and women by their menfolk, who may then be let off with a short prison sentence, or too often receive no punishment at all. It is Israel that guarantees the legal equality of men and women, and it is the Palestinians who violate that equality at every turn, yet here is the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies standing foursquare with those who mistreat women, while it rages against those who defend their rights.

Academic life is supposed to be dedicated, among other things, to the pursuit of the truth. Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, professors have the great privilege of time – time to investigate matters of interest to them, time to weigh competing claims, time to analyze, to praise and to blame. The May conflict was only a few days old when academic departments issued their summary judgments against Israel. There is a rush to judgment when it comes to Israel. What led these departments to think they had to express the “department’s” opinion, instead of letting individual faculty members have their say, or if they wished, choose to say nothing at all? Why this insensate urge to force a false consensus, through veiled threats of retribution if someone fails to toe the anti-Israel line – threats that too often are successful? Those who disagree with the consensus find it more prudent to simply remain silent, rather than make enemies of fellow members of the department. For non-tenured faculty, it’s obvious why such a choice is made. But even tenured faculty may want to keep their heads down, avoid trouble, concentrate on their own work, and hope that the madness passes.

For academic departments to pronounce with such authority, on things they know so little, or nothing, about, is intolerable. Academics who have no special knowledge of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict presume that their opinions deserve special respect. They should be heeded simply because they are professors, no matter how distant their field may be from what they pontificate about. As an example, let’s look at how four departments at the University of Illinois presented what we were to assume were the collective views of its members.

Let’s start with the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, which denounces Israel in hysterical terms, charging it with the “illegal occupation of Palestinian land”; a “siege, indiscriminate destruction and massacres in Gaza”; “state-sanctioned execution of Palestinian people”; and, echoing the venomous blood libel promoted by Rutgers professor Jasbir Puar, among others, the “deliberate maiming of Palestinian bodies.”

First, there is no “illegal occupation of Palestinian land.” Israel, in a war of self-defense started in May by Gamal Abdel Nasser, won by force of arms both Gaza and Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the West Bank). The victory in the Six-Day War did not create Israel’s claim to these territories, but allowed it to exercise its preexisting claim. Israel has a right, under the Mandate for Palestine, Article 6, to establish “close settlement by Jews on the land.” What land? All the land from the Golan in the north to the Red Sea in the south, and from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean in the west – the land that the League of Nations intended to be part of the future Jewish National Home. Have these professors of urban planning read the Mandate for Palestine? The San Remo Treaty? Article 80 of the U.N. Charter? U.N. Security Council Resolution 242? Don’t be silly.

Israel gave up Gaza in 2005, pulling out all 8,500 Israelis who had been living the Strip. There is no “siege” of Gaza, as the Department of Urban Planning at the University of Illinois insists. Electricity, water, and natural gas are all supplied by Israel to the people of Gaza. There is no attempt to keep out any medicines or food. There is a blockade, but that is on goods that can be used by the terror group Hamas, which has run Gaza since 2007, in attacks on Israel. Thus, the supplies allowed into Gaza of some building materials, such as cement, are limited. For they are deemed to be “dual-use” materials, because they can be used innocuously to build apartments, but can also be used to build such things as emplacements for rocket launchers and terror tunnels.

There are no “indiscriminate destruction and massacres in Gaza.” Israeli pilots pinpoint their targets; there is no carpet bombing. Hamas places its weapons, its rocket launchers, its command-and-control centers, in or next to schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, even mosques. Israel tries very hard to minimize civilian casualties. When a target has been chosen, the Israelis warn inhabitants to leave the building, through various means – telephoning, leafletting, emailing, and use of the “knock-on-the-roof” technique. Ordinarily the Palestinians have between 15 minutes and two hours to leave. There have been no “massacres in Gaza.” In the 11-day conflict this past May, of the 260 Palestinians killed, 225 of them were determined, through the tracking of death notices, to have been Hamas fighters; 25 of them were senior commanders of the terror group. Only a few dozen of those killed could have been civilians. And there were no reports of any “massacres.” The professors in the Department of Urban Planning were simply throwing in Israel’s direction whatever grotesque charges they could fabricate against the Jewish state, counting on some of it to stick.

Similarly, there has been no “state-sanctioned execution of Palestinian people.” The IDF, as British Colonel Richard Kemp has noted, is the “most moral army in the world.” It makes heroic efforts to protect civilian lives through every possible method of warning inhabitants in or near buildings soon to be hit. Israeli pilots have been known to call off their mission if they spot children too near to the target; this happened several times during the May war.

Let’s look at the less extreme statement of the History Department at the same university.

The Executive Committee of the Department of History issued a briefer statement by email that condemned “the state violence that the Israeli government and its security forces have been carrying out in Gaza” and “standing in solidarity with Palestine and support for the struggle for Palestinian liberation” – “liberation” being a euphemism for the Middle East without Israel and free of Jewish sovereignty on Muslim land.

The statement was put out in an email, as if all members of the History Department agreed to its contents. By what right did the “Executive Committee” presume to speak for the whole department? And why does it describe as Israeli “state violence” a war that began on May 10, when Hamas launched hundreds of rockets at civilian areas of Israel, and Israel did what any nation-state would do – it fought back in defense of its people, hitting in response Hamas rockets, rocket launchers, command-and-control centers, fighters, and a network of terror tunnels? What should Israel have done? Simply let those 4,500 rockets that Hamas flung toward Israeli cities such as Ashdod and Ashkelon land without trying to hit back, in self-defense, at Hamas – its weapons depots, its rocket launchers, its fighters – so that it could no longer launch those rockets? Why is this self-defense described as “state violence”? Would America have done differently?

As for that claim of “standing in solidarity with Palestine , and support or the struggle for Palestinian liberation,” as Richard Cravatts, correctly notes, that is code for the replacement of Israel, “from the river to the sea,” by a Palestinian state. That’s what the History Department’s members – all of them – are made to seemingly endorse. How many of them are happy with that?

Immersed in the ideology of multiculturalism and the intersectionality of oppression, the Department of Asian American Studies condemned “the ongoing 73 years of settler-colonial violence against Palestine and the Palestinian people” and “the exploitation, theft and colonization of land and labor everywhere, including in Palestine. To this, we say no more.”

According to the Department of Asian-American Studies, then, since its very founding in 1948, Israel has been engaged in “settler-colonial violence against Palestine and the Palestinian people.” But there were no “settlers” in 1948, or 1958, or 1968. There was “violence” in 1948, but it was the violence started by five Arab armies that attacked the Jewish state on May 15, 1948, ignoring Israel’s offer of peace, as they tried to snuff out the young life of the nascent state of Israel. Israel was fighting for its survival, as it would have to again do so in the wars of 1967 and 1973. Those people denounced as “settler-colonials” in 1948 consisted of the following: Jews whose families had been living uninterruptedly in the Land of Israel for centuries; Zionist pioneers who had, beginning in about 1900, been making aliyah, buying land from Arab and Turkish landowners and settling on it; Jews who had fled Arab lands where they had lived for centuries, with many more of them –some 850,000 in all – fleeing in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with most of them choosing to settle in Israel; Jews who had managed to escape from Europe just before World War II; Jews who had survived the Nazis and arrived in Israel from DP camps after the war. These were the people, so many of them survivors of terrible ordeals in Europe and in Arab lands, who are now being denounced by this all-knowing “Department of Asian-American Studies” in Illinois as “settler-colonials,” for managing to find refuge in what would become, in 1948, the tiny Jewish state, and then for helping to rebuild that ancient Jewish commonwealth in the Land of Israel.

Another point to consider: the Asian-American Studies Department statement includes this: “the exploitation, theft, and colonization of land and labor everywhere, including in Palestine.” So, we are told, this “exploitation, theft, and colonization” by Jews goes on everywhere, including Palestine. Isn’t this a statement that would not be out of place in Mein Kampf?

The Department of Gender and Women’s Studies signed a statement, “Gender Studies Departments in Solidarity with Palestinian Feminist Collective,” along with some 100 other gender-studies departments. With the characteristic pseudo-intellectual babble that currently dilutes the scholarly relevance of the social sciences and humanities, the “solidarity statement” pretentiously announced that “as gender-studies departments in the United States, we are the proud benefactors of decades of feminist anti-racist, and anti-colonial activism that informs the foundation of our interdiscipline” [sic] and that “‘Palestine is a Feminist Issue.’”…

The Department of Gender and Women’s Studies asserts that “Palestine is a Feminist Issue.” And so it is, but not in the way the good professors in the department seem to think. To repeat what I wrote yesterday on the subject: It is the Palestinians who, as Muslims, allow husbands to “beat” their wives should they be even suspected of “disobedience,” it is the Palestinians who engage in “honor killings” of girls and women by their husbands, fathers, brothers, who may then be let off with a short prison sentence, or too often, receive no punishment at all. It Is the Palestinians who enforce dress codes on “their women,” who value the testimony of females as half that of males; who have girls and women inherit half what a male inherits. Israel, by contrast, guarantees the legal and social equality of men and women, while the Palestinians violate that equality at every turn, yet here is the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies standing foursquare with those who mistreat women, while it inveighs against those who defend their rights.

Three points suggest themselves:

First, let every man and woman speak for himself or herself. Don’t force people into letting their Department speak for them. Not even professors should be made to suffer that.

Second, academics, like cobblers, should stick to their last.

Third, “whereof we do not know, thereof we should not speak.”

Come to think of it, the third point is really just the second one, expressed less succinctly. But it bears repetition.

COLUMN BY

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Hamas-linked CAIR accuses College Democrats of America of ‘Islamophobia’

Democrats supporting Israel’s self-defense against the “Palestinian” jihad? That isn’t allowed. Hamas-linked CAIR is ensuring that the miscreants get back in line, and pronto. Independent thought? Pshaw! That’s only for “right-wingers.”

Muslim advocacy group accuses College Democrats of ‘Islamophobia

by Sean Salai, Washington Times, November 12, 2021:

A Muslim advocacy group is accusing the College Democrats of America of “Islamophobia” for harassing one of their officers on social media over pro-Palestinian comments she made online as a child.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) this week called in a letter for the Democratic Party-affiliated group to open an “independent investigation” with the intent of disciplining or expelling the unnamed members who “repeatedly harassed” Rollins College senior Nourhan Mesbah on social media when she ran successfully for national vice president in August.

The harassment includes the members’ “liking” a social media comment that read in part: “Boot this jihadist out, no room for racist totalitarianism,” CAIR says.

In the letter sent this week to College Democrats President Jalen Miller, CAIR’s national deputy director Edward Mitchell also accuses the CDA members of “weaponizing” an “anti-Muslim” political ad against Ms. Mesbah over the pro-Palestinian comment she said she regretted making online as a 13-year-old.

“Anti-Muslim bigotry is not unique to any particular party, and no party is immune to it,” Mr. Mitchell told The Washington Times on Friday.

“The perception is that only the Republicans have a problem with Muslims, but the truth is that you find Islamaphobia [sic] on the Democratic side, too,” he added.

Ms. Mesbah declined to discuss the incident, which erupted after the ad featuring her childhood comment prompted fellow College Democrats to accuse her of antisemitism and push for her censure.

The letter includes testimony from several Muslim members of the organization, including College Democrats Muslim Caucus Chair Tyrese Rice, who complained on Ms. Mesbah’s behalf about the “bigoted and imbalanced implications of the organization” at both the state and national levels.

“There was a lack of Muslim representation and an underlying stigma against discussion [of] related topics and concepts,” Mr. Rice said about the College Democrats when he first joined them.

Another comment in the letter from an anonymous student says CDA perpetuates a culture of hostility toward “Palestinian liberation” and silences Muslim students who speak up about it.

“By creating a space to allow Muslim members to be called ‘jihadist[s]’ among other names, we have abandoned our progressive ideals,” the student writes.

The College Democrats have not responded to Mr. Mitchell’s letter, and their spokesman did not respond Friday to telephone and email requests for comment.

Reached Friday afternoon, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee declined to comment on the dispute….

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Madness: UCLA Suspends Professor for Refusing to Assign Grades Based on Skin Color

 

My latest in PJ Media:

This is the state of American academia today: Gordon Klein has taught courses in business law, tax law, and financial analysis at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management for no fewer than forty years. He is a respected academic who has been on CNBC and quoted in the Wall Street Journal for his economic expertise. But now, after being suspended, he has filed suit in California Superior Court against the university regents over his suspension. Klein has a good case: He was suspended from teaching at UCLA for the crime of refusing to discriminate and treat his black students differently from how he treated others.

“I was suspended from my job,” Klein explained, “for refusing to treat my black students as lesser than their non-black peers.” His ordeal began on June 2, 2020, when “a non-black student in my class on tax principles and law emailed me to ask that I grade his black classmates with greater ‘leniency’ than others in the class.”

In a sane society, a “non-black student” who demanded that black students be graded with greater “leniency” than others would be castigated as a racist. But in the Left’s funhouse mirror ethics, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and treating students differently based on race is racial justice.

The student wrote to Klein: “We are writing to express our tremendous concern about the impact that this final exam and project will have on the mental and physical health of our Black classmates.” Klein believes that the student was using an online racial justice form letter: “There was no project in this class, and it was unclear to me who the ‘we’ in this case was. I suspected the student simply used a form letter he found online and neglected to change the subject.”

The letter went on to claim that black students were too traumatized by racism to do well on the final exam: “The unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violent conduct of the [University of California Police Department] have led to fear and anxiety which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community. As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place Black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to traumatic circumstances out of their control.” It concluded: “This is not a joint effort to get finals canceled for non-Black students, but rather an ask that you exercise compassion and leniency with Black students in our major.”

Klein notes that “in a subsequent conversation with a university investigator,” the student who wrote the letter made it clear that he “intended that the requested adjustments apply to Black students and not the class generally.” To strengthen the case, the student invoked the Anderson School of Management’s “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” agenda, which stresses that a “commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion as fundamental to achieving Anderson’s mission.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©rights reserved.

National School Boards Association Asks President Biden to Label Its Critics ‘Domestic Terrorists’

Note that “a person yelling ‘a Nazi salute in protest to masking requirements’ is not a Nazi, as the NSBA is trying to imply. He is calling the school board Nazis. Meanwhile, the fascist clowns of the NSBA would almost certainly object most strenuously to any honest exposition of the motivating ideology behind an actual form of terrorism, that is, Islamic jihad terrorism.

School boards group asks Biden to consider labeling opponents ‘domestic terrorists

by Dave Huber, College Fix, September 30, 2021 (thanks to Henry):

The National School Boards Association has asked President Biden to look into slapping a “domestic terrorist” label on “angry” parents and community members who speak their minds at board meetings.

“America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat,” the group says in its letter to the president. “[As] acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”

The NSBA wants the Gun-Free School Zones Act, the USA PATRIOT Act, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the Violent Interference with Federally Protected Rights statute, and the Conspiracy Against Rights statute all invoked to help prevent alleged threats, Education Week reports.

The Departments of Education, Homeland Security, and Justice are requested to participate in a review, along with the FBI.

On Sept. 22, the NSBA, along with AASA, the School Superintendents Association, issued a joint statement condemning “online and in-person threats, abuse and harassment.” AASA President Daniel Domenech said that while his group respected the right of free speech, “We cannot—and will not—tolerate aggression, intimidation, threats and violence toward superintendents, board members and educators.”

But some of the instances cited by the NSBA in its letter appear to be free speech, to say nothing of “terrorism.” For example, the group cites a person yelling “a Nazi salute in protest to masking requirements,” while another’s actions “prompted [a] board to call a recess because of opposition to critical race theory.”…

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Muslim Student at Washington University Removes 2,977 American Flags Commemorating 9/11 Victims

My latest at PJ Media:

Fadel Alkilani, a student at Washington University in St. Louis, is an enterprising young man who clearly has a bright future ahead. On Saturday, as people all over the world mourned the deaths of 2,977 people in jihad attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., Alkilani busied himself with pulling up 2,977 flags that had been placed on campus in honor of the victims and throwing them away. Among Leftists today, that’s the kind of behavior that leads to rapid career advancement– clearly, Fadel Alkilani is an up-and-coming young man.

The flags were part of the Young America’s Foundation’s “9/11: Never Forget Project”: “YAF activists at high schools and colleges across the country are keeping alive the memory of those lost to radical Islamist terrorists in the world-changing events of September 11, 2001.  The iconic displays made up of 2,977 American flags—one for each innocent life taken—bring schools, communities, and individuals together to pay tribute and continue our promise to ‘never forget.’”

YAF members at Washington University duly placed the 2,977 flags, only to have Alkilani, wearing a mask and his hair in a bun, come pluck the flags up and fill trash bags with them. In a video YAF posted on Twitter, Nathaniel Hope of Washington University’s hearty band of College Republicans confronts Alikani, who justified his action by claiming (falsely) that the flag display was a “violation of school rules.” He maintained that he, on the other hand, had not violated any university rules, telling Hope: “I did not violate any university or legal policy. Now go away.”

Later, Alkilani posted online a “Formal Statement on the Flag Relocation Incident,” in which he sanctimoniously employed that tried-and-true strategy of Leftists everywhere: He claimed victimhood. Instead of apologizing for his callous, thuggish, and fascist act, Alkilani wrote: “Currently, there is a massive harassment campaign propagated primarily by Washington University College Republicans, as well as the national Young American’s Foundation [YAF] regarding an incident that occurred at approximately 6 am on Saturday, September 11, 2021. There is a large amount of misinformation circulating, and I seek to explain both what occurred and why it happened.”

The “misinformation” that he proceeds to clear up is the claim that he was “‘stealing’ the flags. This is due to a WashU College Republicans member, taking a video of me collecting flags in plastic bags. However, I had no intention of removing the flags from the Mudd Field area, and my full protest did not have the chance to be actualized. My planned protest was to place the bags of flags on Mudd field, along with various statistics [including those below] explaining the human cost of 9/11 in the past 20 years. On the sides of the bags, some writing may be visible, but the full statement was not outlined at the time of the video. I did not deface, destroy, damage, nor steal any flags, nor did I interfere with any registered event time. I assert that I did not violate any University Code of Conduct policy, though the conduct process is undergoing. Additionally, I was verbally and physically harassed by numerous WashU students and WUPD officers, whom I plan to report through official channels.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Virginia Public Schools to Focus on Muslims—As Victims—in Teaching About 9/11 On Attacks’ 20th Anniversary

My latest in PJ Media:

On Thursday, the Virginia Department of Education published a video entitled, “Culturally Responsive and Inclusive 9/11 Commemoration,” detailing how Virginia public school teachers should handle the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 jihad terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. The emphasis on that day and thereafter must not be on the ideology of the attackers or the ongoing jihad terror threat; rather, the focus is entirely on acknowledging and eradicating what the video calls “anti-Muslim racism.”

The video is narrated by a hijab-wearing woman, Amaarah DeCuir, who describes herself as “Professorial Lecturer, School of Education, American University & Paragon Education Consulting, President.” One would think that with all her expertise, Ms. DeCuir would know the elementary fact that Islam is not a race, and that there are Muslims, and Islamic jihadis, of all races. And of course she does know that, but she is operating in this video on the basis of the Leftist contention that opposition to jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women really stems from an irrational animus against Muslims as a people, and hence is a “racialized” form of “hatred.”

Yes, it’s toxic nonsense, but that’s the Left for you. In any case, Virginia public schools that implement DeCuir’s recommendations (and since the Virginia Department of Education published her video, it would appear that the department wants that to be all of them) will give students a presentation on the twentieth anniversary of the worst attacks ever on American soil that will portray Muslims as the primary victims of those attacks, and make herculean efforts to deflect attention away from the extremely inconvenient fact that the attacks were perpetrated in the name of Islam and in accord with its teachings.

If you doubt that fact, note that in March 2009, five masterminds of the 9/11 plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin As-Shibh, Walid bin ‘Attash, Mustafa Ahmed AI-Hawsawi, and ‘Ali ‘abd Al-’Aziz ‘Ali – styling themselves as the “9/11 Shura Council” – wrote a lengthy communiqué titled “The Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations.” In it, they called the 9/11 attacks an “act of Jihad,” and explained: “The Jihad in god’s [sic] cause is a great duty in our religion.” They quoted numerous Qur’an verses, including the notorious “Verse of the Sword”: “Then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, and besiege them and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush” (9:5) and another enjoining Muslims to “strike terror into the heart of the enemies of Allah” (8:60).

Attorney and columnist Marina Medvin, who broke the story of this video, notes that the 9/11 Commission Report “mentions ‘Islam’ over 1,000 times and the word ‘Muslim’ over 1,000 times,” for obvious reasons. But Virginia students will learn nothing about any of that. Instead, they’ll be taught about “phobias stemming from 9/11,” “anti-Muslim racism spikes,” and the evils of the fictional “Muslim Ban.” DeCuir offers as an example of “harmful teaching” any “teaching about Islam and/or Muslims” in connection with 9/11, except, evidently, insofar as Muslims were victims of the American response to the attacks.

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Arizona community college must pay $155,000 to professor it forced to apologize for criticizing Islam

A slight pause on American academia’s out-of-control-freight-train rush to submit to Sharia. But the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is still flogging this case in court, hoping to use it to destroy the freedom of speech and criminalize criticism of Islam.

Arizona community college to pay $155K settlement for directing professor to apologize for Islamic terrorism quiz question

by Katlyn Patton, FIRE, April 13, 2021:

Maricopa County Community College District will pay professor Nicholas Damask $155,000 in exchange for his agreement not to sue district personnel, who last year violated his expressive rights in an attempt to quell criticism of his quiz questions on social media. The district also pledged to strengthen its commitment to academic freedom.

Damask, who teaches political science at Scottsdale Community College, came under fire on social media last May after a student complained that quiz questions in Damask’s world politics course were offensive to the student’s religious beliefs. Damask said the college suggested it would require him to meet with an Islamic religious leader to review the content of his course because a student complained that three of Damask’s quiz questions about Islamic terrorism were “in distaste of Islam.”

In response, the college directed Damask to issue an apology — pre-written for him by a communications staff member — and implied that he would be investigated. The college ultimately backed down after an urgent letter from FIRE.

Now, the district is finally paying for SCC’s unconstitutional knee-jerk reaction to online criticism….

lawsuit brought by the Council on American-Islamic Relations remains pending in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. (A district court judge dismissed the lawsuit in August for failure to state a claim, and CAIR appealed.)…

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Deborah Lipstadt’s Distorted Antisemitism Definition

“Many Jews involved with progressive causes are increasingly feeling this tug, if not outright war, between their Jewish and political identities,” wrote antisemitism historian Deborah E. Lipstadt in her 2019 book Antisemitism: Here and Now. President Joe Biden’s decision to resume American aid to the terrorist-sponsoring Palestinian Authority (PA) on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day only highlighted this ongoing conflict for Jewish Biden supporters such as Lipstadt.

Lipstadt in her book strove to give an impartial review of modern antisemitism across the ideological spectrum, but her evident political biases marred otherwise insightful analysis. Particularly her antipathy towards Donald Trump stood out, as she equated this uniquely pro-Israel president with the notoriously anti-Semitic British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. “I don’t know if either of these men is an anti-Semite,” she wrote, but “both have facilitated the spread of antisemitism.”

This Trump-Corbyn “comparison is so flawed as to be absurd,” correctly countered conservative Jewish writer Ben Cohen wrote in a 2019 review of Lipstadt’s book. As he explained:

Trump may be guilty of occasionally encouraging or even enabling anti-Semites in small ways, but Corbyn is an anti-Semite, and one with a public and considered fondness for the world’s most vicious and bloodthirsty haters of Jews.

As Lipstadt’s own book documents for quizzical readers, Corbyn’s scandalous record includes defending viciously anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists and calling Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists “friends.” By contrast, she discussed certain truly troubling Trump statements, including his 2015 comments during the Republican presidential primaries to the Republican Jewish Coalition. “None of this, however,” Cohen accurately assessed of Trump, “places him remotely in the same corner as Corbyn, who is blatantly guilty not only of enabling but of fomenting anti-Semitism as an integral element of his ideological worldview.”

Lipstadt in her book offered a leftist apologia for Corbyn’s antisemitism. “Fundamental to Corbyn’s political weltanschauung is an automatic—critics might call it knee-jerk—sympathy for anyone who is or appears to be oppressed or an underdog.” Thus she concluded:

It is doubtful that Corbyn deliberately seeks out anti-Semites to associate with and to support. But it seems that when he encounters them, their Jew-hatred is irrelevant as long as their other positions—on class, race, capitalism, the role of the state, and Israel/Palestine-are to his liking.

By contrast, Lipstadt demonized Trump as a bigot, even though President Trump actually denounced white supremacists, anti-Semites, and other extremists on numerous occasions. “Trump was, and still seems to be, unwilling to castigate, much less mildly criticize, actions by the white supremacists, racists, and anti-Semites who voted for him and who continue to support him,” she wrote without substantiation. In this context rang hollow her qualification that “I’m not suggesting, of course, that they represent all of Trump’s supporters.”

Bizarrely, Lipstadt in her anti-Trump screeds overlooked the history of openly racist Democratic presidents such as Woodrow Wilson. “In the United States, for the first time in many decades—perhaps for the first time ever—these haters believe that they have sympathetic allies in the White House.” Trump “has not disabused them of that notion,” she wrote, even though anti-Semites such as the perpetrator of the 2018 mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue repeatedly denounced Trump for being too pro-Jewish.

A vaguely defined “alt-right” loomed large in Lipstadt’s book. She defined Milo Yiannopoulos, a pro-Israel, ex-gay man who once “married” a black man, as among this hateful “movement’s ideologues.” His former employer, the conservative Breitbart News (where this author has written), and its former editor, the Trump adviser Steve Bannon, also drew Lipstadt’s scorn. Without any particular examples, she criticized:

There is no credible evidence that Bannon is himself an anti-Semite, but it is extremely distressing that right-wing Jewish groups that trumpet his support for Israel ignored the racism, anti-immigrant, and white nationalist views promulgated by Breitbart News when he ran it.

Again without citing evidence, Lipstadt fretted that under Trump “alt-right” members “have managed in recent years to establish direct links to people with influence, including those in high-level government positions.” In addition to his pro-Israel record, Trump strengthened federal government efforts against college antisemitism, won increased black support with his economic growth policies, and appointed the first openly gay man to cabinet rank. Yet she counterfactually wrote:

Trump’s anti-Semitic followers believe that his dog whistles give them free rein to openly acknowledge their contempt for racial minorities, Muslims, homosexuals, and Jews. They are convinced, not without reason, that they have had a direct impact on government policy.

Any anti-Trump rant would be incomplete without myths about the violent 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, protests. Trump had rightfully condemned “many sides” here among battling white supremacists and leftist extremists such as Antifa, whose destructiveness has only become clearer in subsequent years. Yet Lipstadt whitewashed the latter by condemning Trump for “moral equivalency between racists and the counterdemonstrators.”

Lipstadt also promoted in her book and subsequently the ubiquitous Charlottesville hoax that Trump had praised racist demonstrators there as “very fine people.” While condemning these racists, he had used these words in general reference to people debating and protesting on both sides in Charlottesville over a Robert E. Lee Confederate war memorial. But Lipstadt scolded Trump for praising “‘very fine people’ marching with the white supremacist protesters.”

Concerning Islamic antisemitism, Lipstadt stood on firmer ground. She recognized that “within sectors of the Muslim community, particularly in Europe, there is endemic antisemitism” and some Muslims “have been raised to hate Jews.” She observed:

Various studies, including one conducted in 2017 by the University of Oslo, have shown that attacks on European Jews, particularly physical assaults, come in the main from radicalized Muslims. Interviews with German Muslims, including well-educated professionals, feature comments about Jews that sound as though they have come directly from the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Brief hints of this antisemitism’s historical basis in Islamic doctrines, which define the subjugated dhimmi status of Jews and other non-Muslims under Islamic rule, appear in Lipstadt’s book. Under various European and Islamic religious discriminations, “Jews were hated because they refused to accept Christianity and, later, Islam.” Jews had “centuries-long second-class treatment in Islamic lands” and even today Muslim-majority states are rife with discrimination against Jews and other religious minorities. In Israel, Islamic rages arise when Jews “return to their ancient homeland, which was for centuries part of the Islamic empire.”

Rather than critically analyze this history, Lipstadt offered more politically correct explanations for Islamic antisemitism. She suggested that European Muslim antisemitism “is part of a larger problem of integration” and referenced not Islamic, but “leftist antisemitism,” when analyzing the notorious Palestinian-American political activist Linda Sarsour. Meanwhile Lipstadt invoked the totalitarian neologism “Islamophobia” amidst her warnings against “demonization of Muslims.”

Lipstadt also insightfully examines economic warfare against Israel in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, a “direct descendant of Marxist antisemitism and anti-Zionism.” A key BDS demand is a “right of return” to Israel of millions of descendants of some 600,000 Arabs who fled what became Israel in its 1948 independence war. This demographic destruction of Israel’s Jewish state, she wrote, or “negation of Jewish nationhood is a form of antisemitism, if not in intent, then certainly in effect.”

Irrespective of practical political effects, Lipstadt noted, BDS aims “to toxify Israel” by presenting it as uniquely evil among the world’s nations. In American academia, this “impact of BDS on Jewish students is quite real. Jewish students running for office in student government have also been uniquely targeted by Israel-bashers.” This demonstrates that a “myopic focus on Israel is anti-Semitic in consequence, if not in intent.”

Lipstadt’s anti-BDS stance makes ironic her acclamation of Biden’s victory days after the November 2020 presidential elections. In Biden she saw a “leader of the country who will unequivocally condemn antisemitism and extremism.” Yet his numerous anti-Israel administration appointees have included BDS supporters.

Such matters must appear secondary to Lipstadt, whose apocalyptic denunciations of Trump during and after the 2020 elections angered many Jews with what they condemned as Holocaust-trivializations. She helped launch on September 29, 2020, a Jewish Democratic Council of America campaign advertisement that compared Trump’s presidency to the 1930s rise of Nazi Germany. She later coauthored a Washington Post editorial that analogized Trump’s “democracy denial” challenges to the election results to “Holocaust denial.” Jewish legal scholar Nathan Lewin castigated this “shameful Holocaust denial” in a “rant with a blatant political bias,

Israeli Jews, 70 percent of whom supported Trump’s reelection in surveys, have greater fear of Biden resuming the Middle East policies of President Barack Obama, whom Lipstadt supported in both the 2008 and 2012 elections. Biden, for example, has already lifted sanctions imposed by Trump on the dangerous, nuclear-proliferating Islamic Republic of Iran. Biden also seems to agree with Lipstadt’s hackneyed analysis in her book that the “current situation in the West Bank is untenable” and the “most reasonable solution would be two states,” Israel and Palestine, with secure borders. By contrast, Israeli Jews have personally experienced how Islam’s “endemic antisemitism” precisely in the Muslim-majority Middle East has only turned Israeli “land for peace” territorial withdrawals into jihadist bases for attacks on Israel.

“Fight the good fight,” Lipstadt penned in autographed book copies she distributed to a November 19, 2019, audience at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, including this author. Yet many would agree with the book reviewer Cohen that her analysis is unfortunately “deeply unsatisfactory” in places, such as her book endnotes, where she uncritically relies upon Southern Poverty Law Center leftist smear merchants. “Although she is by no means blind to left-wing anti-Semitism, her eyesight must be adjudged impaired—as indeed it also is on the subject of Islamist anti-Semitism,” Cohen wrote in 2019 in words only more valid today.

COLUMN BY

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

KENTUCKY: Berea College Hosting Event Describing ‘White Citizenship’ and ‘Trumpism’ as Terrorism

Meanwhile, it is a 100% certainty, not 99%, but 100%, that Berea College administrators and professors would recoil in horror at the prospect of hosting an event focusing on the threat of jihad violence and Sharia oppression. In the extraordinarily unlikely off-chance that such an event were scheduled, it would be inundated with charges of “Islamophobia” and “racism” to the extent that most students would not attend, for fear of the social stigma attached to going. But this? Demonizing and smearing half the American electorate? That’s just fine. And of course it plays right into the agenda of the political and media elites, who have embarked upon a clear initiative to defame all supporters of the former president as “extremists,” as they did previously with foes of jihad terror and Sharia injustice, and destroy them accordingly. The U.S. is entering an extremely dark period, but it has been a long time in the offing.

“Kentucky college hosting event describing ‘white citizenship’ and ‘Trumpism’ as terrorism,”

by Sam Dorman, Fox News, March 12, 2021:

A Kentucky college is scheduled to host an event critical of Donald Trump and associating the former president and “white citizenship” with terrorism.

A flyer obtained by Young America’s Foundation (YAF) describes the event as a way to “resituate Trumpism and white citizenship as forms of white terrorism enacted against the majority of people living within the borders of the U.S. and beyond.”

Titled “White citizenship as terrorism: Make America Great Again, Again,” the event is set to take place on March 17 via Zoom, according to a page on Berea College’s website. The Women’s and Non-Gender Non-Conforming Center is sponsoring the session with the Law, Ethics, and Society at the college.

YAF said it obtained the flyer through its Campus Bias Tip Line. It features images of protesters carrying tiki torches at the racially charged Charlottesville, Virginia, protests at the beginning of Trump’s presidency.

The flyer also takes a critical approach to the “Make America Great Again” slogan. “Despite calls for multiculturalism and color-blindness, segments of white America mourn their so-called loss of privilege, consistently begging to return to the nostalgic past in which their esteemed value as white citizens went unquestioned,” it reads.

“Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ appears to follow suit by offering a seemingly benign promise to return America to a previously ‘great’ past. But the offer to ‘Make America Great Again, Again,’ requires we refocus on how the last four years of daily tweets and administrative actions redefine whiteness. If terrorism is defined as the use of violence and threats to create a state of fear towards particular communities and identities, then this is what ‘Trumpism’ is at its core.”

Berea defended the event in a statement to Fox News Thursday.

“To some, the provocative title of the event implies that Berea is not a welcoming place for individuals with differing political views,” a statement from the college read….

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Georgetown Professor — Islamic Slavery is Freedom?

“Slavery cannot be intrinsically evil in Islamic law,” Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown stated during a July 20, 2020 webinar. This disturbing assessment came during a 2019-2020 series of presentations on his 2019 bookSlavery & Islam, whose theses have hardly improved upon this Muslim convert’s past scandalous comments on slavery.

On February 7, 2017, Brown had caused furor while presenting a paper on slavery and Islam at the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Thereby he noted the traditional Islamic doctrine expressed in Quran 33:21 that Islam’s prophet Muhammad is an “excellent pattern” of behavior. Therefore this example sanctified the slavery practiced by him and his companions, including sex slavery, a doctrine that had justified slavery throughout Islamic history.

Once public, such views completely negated Brown’s disclaimer at the presentation’s beginning. “I always make some hyperbolic statement that really makes sense in the context,” he noted, such that he would face accusations of “calling for slavery.” Given such concern over criticism, he expelled this author from the presentation before it started.

Brown’s elaboration of his views during his subsequent book tour has been hardly more reassuring, for slavery is “simply a fact of life in the Quran” and perhaps even “part of the DNA of Islam.” “Every area of Islamic law is permeated by slavery,” something that “sharia, without exception until the 20th-century, validated.” Muslim scholars have even speculated about a “time when the laws of slavery will actually be needed again,” such as in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-like world, he has noted.

For centuries, “Muslims were neck-deep in the trade of slaves,” Brown has observed. As others have estimated, this trade included 17 million black Africans, more than the 12 million taken to the Western Hemisphere in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Ghanaian historian John Azumah has noted, while the transatlantic trade enslaved mostly men for labor, Muslim slavers favored seizing women for use as sex slave concubines.

In this regard, Brown has unsettlingly reprised his 2017 comments on sex slavery. Thus any norm that sex be consensual “is fairly unusual in world history.” This corresponds to Islamic doctrine’s proprietary understanding of female sexuality, which, he has noted, denies any recognition of rape in marriage.

Slavery in Islam is faith-based, Brown has explained. Under sharia the “only way that someone can lose their freedom is if they are a non-Muslim who lives outside the Muslim state and is then captured by Muslims.” Slavery therefore “is a reduction in legal status that is caused by unbelief,” whose “vestigial effect” can remain even for an enslaved convert to Islam or a child born into slavery.

Yet Brown has argued that Islam is “obsessed with emancipation.” Islamic doctrine’s numerous biases towards freeing slaves, such as a means to expiate sin, means that Islam “does not have an equal in any religious or philosophical tradition” from the premodern world. “The Quran and Sunna are unprecedently adamant about emancipation.”

However this emancipation should not help a slave return to unbelief in Islam. “Freedom is not the most important thing in Islamic law,” Brown has noted, although Muslim scholars have historically argued that “slavery is intrinsically harmful.” Rather, true freedom comes from submission to Islam, an “emancipatory force.” Seventh-century Arab Muslim conquerors, for example, before subjugating the Persians, announced that they would be free only as “slaves of God alone.”

Correspondingly, Brown has described Islamic civilization as a “vacuum cleaner, just sucking in people.” Muslim scholars have historically advocated enslavement of non-Muslims as a means of introducing them to Islam. Then “Muslims are always manumitting slaves, which means they need new slaves,” in an “emancipation turbine.”

Brown has correctly described how Christians led the revolutionary movement against a once universal acceptance of slavery to create the “abolitionist consensus that is held worldwide today.” “Muslims talking about the issue of slavery and abolition of slavery doesn’t happen until they encounter essentially Western abolitionism,” a development true of the Westerners themselves. In his assessment, Christians had in the process to “desacralize scripture” in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament with its numerous references to forms of servitude.

Jewish rabbis and scholars would beg to differ with Brown, for as McGill University Professor David Aberbach has written, “Judaism is intrinsically an abolitionist religion.” “In Jewish belief, every human life matters.” Contrary to superficial readings, Rabbi Dov Linzer has noted, the “Torah only accepts slavery as a deeply entrenched societal institution.”

The late Jewish sage Rabbi Jonathan Sacks delved into this deeper understanding of the Torah’s position of slavery. God’s intends “slavery is to be abolished, but it is a fundamental principle of God’s relationship with us that he does not force us to change faster than we are able to do so of our own free will.” Nonetheless, in the “Torah’s value system the exercise of power by one person over another, without their consent, is a fundamental assault against human dignity.”

This analysis requires that non-Jews such as Brown properly understand Jewish scripture. “Jews have always read the Torah through a rabbinic interpretive lens and not simply on the plain meaning of its words,” the website My Jewish Learning has observed. Thus Jews cannot “read every mitzvah as an ideal” that allows for no further development, Linzer has cautioned.

Accordingly, in various stipulations the “Torah indeed sees slavery as a problematic phenomenon,” Shmuel Rabinowitz, rabbi of Jerusalem’s Western Wall and holy sites has noted. “Although it sanctions the institution of slavery, biblical law begins the process toward abolition,” University of Waterloo Professor James A. Diamond has observed. “Rules limiting slavery challenged the way society was built and prompted Jews to question an institution perhaps so natural it was invisible,” Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner has confirmed.

The Torah’s restrictive regulation of slavery indeed manifested a Jewish “light to the Gentiles” in the ancient slave-holding world. As the Chabad-Lubavitch organization has noted:

At a time when Romans had literally thousands of slaves per citizen, even the wealthiest Jews held very modest numbers of servants. And those servants, the Talmud tells us, were treated better by their masters than foreign kings would treat their own subjects.

Particularly the Bible’s Exodus narrative of Jews escaping bondage in Egypt imprints upon Jewish consciousness emancipation’s value. Diamond has noted that the Passover “commemorates the exodus, anchoring the relationship between God and Israel as Liberator and slave.” As Sacks commented, “Jews were the people commanded never to forget the bitter taste of slavery so that they would never take freedom for granted.”

Tellingly, Brown has noted that Islamic tradition rejects the Torah’s narrative of a gracious God emancipating Jews in ancient Egypt and equates them with Muhammad’s early Muslim followers in pagan Mecca. “The Muslims in Mecca are like the Jews in Egypt, but they are not slaves, they are oppressed.” Thus the Israelite exodus “is not a story of emancipation, it’s a story of victory over oppression,” symbolizing Islam’s triumph.

The contrast between beliefs held by Muslims such as Brown and the Judeo-Christian tradition clearly indicates why Muslims have struggled to reject slavery. Confronted with this moral evil, Muslim reformers have argued that slavery is an artifact of jihadist doctrines inapplicable in modernity, or that rulers have discretionary power to prohibit human bondage. Nonetheless, Brown has recalled that jihadists going to Muslims’ defense during Bosnia’s 1990s sectarian carnage had asked Saudi clerics about taking slaves, only to hear warnings that this would create bad publicity.

These Islamic realities reflect Brown’s moral relativism. Although the Ottoman Empire’s slave trade “was undeniably brutal,” he has argued that slavery and other often onerous labor relations such as indentured servitude have widely varied across human history. Following therefore his dubious claim that slavery is not really objectively definable, any slavery-induced “disgust is a cultural construct” and “just custom; it’s just urf.” By analogy, he has noted that China’s brutal dog meat trade horrifies many non-Chinese, although increasing domestic opposition to dog meat consumption undermines his cultural relativism arguments.

Despite grappling with slavery’s moral problems for Islam’s legitimacy, Brown has failed to find a solution. In recent years Islamic State jihadists in their mercifully brief caliphate have “really caused a crisis for young Muslims” by piously invoking Islamic canons to justify the enslavement of Mesopotamia’s non-Muslims. But as the foregoing analysis has proven, he is wrong to claim in Islam’s tu quoque defense that slavery’s abolition “is not indigenous to any religion or any philosophy.”

Contrary to traditional Islamic understandings of an aloof, arbitrary Allah, the biblical God’s natural law ultimately revealed slavery’s injustice to Jews, Christians, and the wider world. Church historian John B. Carpenter has noted as much in the relationship of America’s famed escaped slave and 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglas to the Jew Jesus Christ:

Christianity’s commitment to freedom was so pronounced that Frederick Douglass, who decried the hypocrisy of slave-holding religion vividly, did not convert to Islam and become “Frederick X,” but professed, “I love the religion of our blessed Savior.”

While Brown’s exculpation for slavery in Islamic doctrine is unconvincing, he has nonetheless provided valuable insight into this previously “taboo subject.” As Azumah has written, a “critical approach is reserved for the Christian past but forbidden for the Muslim past.” However inadvertently and awkwardly, Brown has helped uncover Islam’s dark slavery legacy.

COLUMN BY

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column and video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Where Things Stand by Hugh Fitzgerald

More than 14 years have passed since Americans have had their attention forcefully fixed on the reality of Islamic terrorism. Until September 11, 2001, with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, most people in America — and in Europe — could be forgiven for assuming that they would not become the targets of Arab – and Muslim – terror attacks. That was something for Israelis to worry about. And if they had not been guilty of what the Arabs saw as “occupation of Arab lands” (for decades the mantra justifying terrorist attacks on Israel), why should they be targeted?

That comforting assumption evanesced in the face of more attacks by Muslims on targets all over Europe: in Amsterdam, Theo van Gogh was killed for the crime of making Submission, a movie about Muslim women. In 2004 in Madrid, at Atocha Station, in the same year, Muslim bombs claimed Spanish victims, though Spain’s government had taken a largely pro-Arab line; in London, in 2005, innocents on both busses and the Underground were the victims of Muslim attacks, apparently because British troops were in Iraq and Afghanistan. In France, there have been murderous attacks on French Jews, not Israelis, including the attack on the Hyper Cacher, a kosher market. And there have been attacks on cartoonists, of various nationalities, who dared to mock Muhammad – the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris was massacred, and in Denmark attempts – fortunately unsuccessful — were made on the life of Lars Vilks. In both cases the putative crime was “blasphemy.”

Not everyone was prepared to surrender: in the United States, Pamela Geller helped to organize a Draw-Muhammad contest in Texas, and for her pains now finds it necessary to be accompanied at all times by security guards. Indeed, one could fill up pages merely listing Muslim attacks either planned or carried out within Europe and North America; still other pages would be needed to list all the Muslim attacks on non-Muslim targets in such varied places as Mumbai, Beijing, and Bali. Clearly something larger than that Arab anger over Israeli “occupation” explains these worldwide attacks.

As more and more people in the West are beginning to realize, the “root cause” of all this violence by Muslims against non-Muslims is to be sought not in a local grievance, but in the ideology of Islam itself. The personal testimony of ex-Muslims such as Ibn Warraq and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ali Sina and Wafa Sultan, the analyses provided by Western students of Islam such as Robert Spencer and Bat Ye’or, have had their slow and steady effect. This small army of truth-tellers dissects the contents of the Qur’an and Sunnah (which consists, in written form, of both the Hadith and Sira), and for this have been described as “bigots,” but it becomes harder and harder to ignore or refute their evidence.

Among the learned analysts determined not to listen either to the apostates or to such people as Spencer, one comes immediately to mind. John Esposito, who created the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, associated with Georgetown, can be counted on to ignore the contents of Islam and to serve as an apologist. Alwaleed bin Talal, a Saudi prince, is now that Center’s main funder, and the Center itself was renamed the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Esposito has a long record of managing to find ways to ignore or dismiss the textual evidence that Spencer, Ibn Warraq, and others adduce from Qur’an and Hadith.

But money alone does not explain why so many people in the West have been so ready to ignore the evidence of Muslim malevolence, of widespread support for violent Jihad. Many In the West simply don’t want to see what is staring them in the face. For if Islam really does inculcate permanent hostility toward Infidels, what, then, is to be done about the tens of millions of Muslims already ensconced in Western lands? Could it really be that, as suggested by some, the adherents of Islam see the world as uncompromisingly divided between Dar al-Islam, the lands where Islam dominates and Muslims rule, and Dar al-Harb, the Domain of War, that part of the world which has not yet come under the sway of Islam and rule by Muslims? Could it really be that it is incumbent upon Muslims to wage Jihad, that is, the “struggle” to ensure that the whole world ultimately comes under the sway of Islam, so that Muslims rule everywhere? Even if that goal sounds fantastic to Infidels, there are enough Muslims, it seems, among the more than 1.2 billion in the world, who apparently do not agree, and are willing to keep trying. And the more their numbers increase inside Dar al-Harb, the greater the threat they pose.

Could it really be, after all, that Israel was only one target of Muslim aggression among many, in a much larger war, first to regain all the territories once in Muslim possession (Israel, Spain, the Balkans, Sicily) and then, after those re-conquests, to fulfill the duty to work to spread Islam until it everywhere dominated? And why did this explosion of violence begin not 50 or 100 years ago, but just in the last two decades?

A Saudi cleric, Dr. Nasser bin Suleiman Al-‘Omar, noted on Al-Jazeera TV on April 19, 2006:

The Islamic nation now faces a great phase of Jihad, unlike anything we knew fifty years ago. Fifty years ago, Jihad was attributed only to a few individuals in Palestine, and in some other Muslim areas.

How do things stand now, in 2015? The doctrine of Jihad wasn’t suddenly invented in the past fifty years. It’s been the same, more or less, for 1350 years. It had fallen into desuetude when Muslims felt themselves to be weak, but did not, and could not, disappear. What happened to make things so very different in recent decades? Some might point to the end of “colonialism.” They might note, for example, that the French, after forty years in Morocco and Tunisia, had withdrawn from both by the mid-1950s, and from Algeria in 1962. They might note that the British garrisons in Aden and elsewhere along the Persian Gulf had been withdrawn, largely for financial reasons, and that Saudi Arabia itself had never been subject to colonial rule. They might note the withdrawal of the British from India, and the creation of an Islam-centered state, in what was then West Pakistan (now Pakistan) and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The Dutch abandoned their rule over Muslims in the East Indies (what is now Indonesia). But the end of colonial rule over Muslim peoples, more than a half-century ago, is not enough to explain the current violence and threats by Muslims worldwide.

Three developments explain the explosion of Islamic aggression in the last two decades, developments which permitted the Jihad to widen in scope and no longer be merely a small-scale Lesser Jihad against Israel:

1) First, there is the money weapon provided by the OPEC oil bonanza. Inshallah-fatalism and hatred of innovation (bida)—both tend to hinder economic development in Arab and Muslim countries. You are likely to put in less effort if, in the end, Allah decides the outcome. And Muslim distrust of innovation dampens the desire of individuals to jettison age-old methods and to introduce new ways of manufacturing and distribution. Muslim Arabs have acquired fantastic sums, nonetheless, because such acquisition required no effort on their part – it merely reflects an accident of geology. Since 1973, Arab and other Muslim-dominated oil states have received close to 25 trillion dollars from the sale of oil and gas to oil-consuming nations. This constitutes the greatest transfer of wealth in human history. The Muslim recipients did nothing to deserve this. Many interpreted the oil bonanza as a deliberate sign of Allah’s beneficence, inshallah-fatalism in their favor. That money did not just save them from poverty, but made many of them fabulously wealthy. And the higher prices that the OPEC cartel for a while managed to exact could even be interpreted as a kind of Jizyah, exacted from the Infidels.

What have the Arabs done with that twenty-five trillion dollars in OPEC money that they received over the past one-third century? They did not create paradises of artistic and scientific creation. Their peoples continue to rely on armies of wage-slaves to do the real work; in Qatar, for example, one-tenth of the population, the native Qataris, are serviced by foreign workers, Arab and non-Arab, who make up the remaining nine-tenths. Arab oil states have bought hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Western arms. And this has created a network of middlemen, bribes-givers and bribes-takers, and Western hirelings involved not only in arms sales, but also in the business of supplying other goods and services to these suddenly rich oil states. And these people not unnaturally find ways to explain away or divert attention from the less pleasant aspects of the countries with which they are involved. Saudi Arabia, for example, has long enjoyed the support of powerful Western business interests for whom Saudi Arabia is a major client; these interests have a stake in continued good relations and are not about to let unpleasant truths (such as the hatred of Infidels found in Saudi schoolbooks) get too much attention. Thus has the oil money become the fabled “wealth” weapon of the Jihad, by which boycotts, and bribery, and the dangling of profitable contracts, contributed to creating a vast and loyal constituency among some influential and meretricious people in the capitals of the West.

How else have the Arabs spent that oil money? As mentioned above, on wage-slaves, those foreigners who, in Saudi or Qatar or the Emirates, arrive to do all the work. On palaces for the corrupt ruling families and their corrupt courtiers. On foreign real estate at the highest end, and luxury goods. It’s not only the ruling families who help themselves to the oil wealth – there’s so much to go around. Play your cards right and you could share that wealth, even if you are not a prince, princeling, or princelette of the Al-Saud family, but merely a lowly commoner. The original Bin Laden, founder of the clan, arrived in Saudi from Yemen, became a successful contractor, even won contracts for building in Mecca, and become fabulously rich. Courtiers such as the commoner Adnan Khashoggi began as a middleman in arms deals and made a fortune. Many started out as such fixers and middlemen in the Arab Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, and then metamorphosed into legitimate businessmen.

This creates a class of people who profit from, and support the regime. In the same way, the rich Arabs have created a lobby of Westerners, who divert attention from Islam’s tenets and teachings. The highly profitable contracts that have been given to Western businessmen for the construction of office parks, hospitals, apartment complexes, military cities have created a natural lobby in the West for Arabs and Muslims, consisting not only of those who receive such contracts, but also of others, including Western public relations experts, former government officials, journalists, academics, whose services are made available to the rich Arabs in presenting their case. Such institutions as the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, or, again, John Esposito’s Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, both in Washington and in England, such as the Arab Studies programs at Durham and Exeter and many departments of Islamic studies or Middle Eastern history, have been staffed by apologists for Islam. Columbia University offers a particularly egregious example.

Another product of the “wealth” Jihad are the thousands of mosques that Arab oil money pays for, in London and Rome and Paris, as in Niger and Pakistan and Indonesia. Much of that money comes from Saudi Arabia, whose clerics make sure that the mosques that are built, or that receive Saudi support, preach the stern Wahhabi version of Islam. It is the same for madrasas that receive Saudi subventions. And campaigns of Da’wa (the Call to Islam, particularly effective in Western prisons), too, often receive OPEC money.

2) The second development, observable at the same time as the oil money really began to flow into the countries of Western Europe, was demographic: millions of Muslim migrants have over the past four decades been allowed to enter Western Europe. These were mainly Pakistanis in England, Turks in Germany, Algerians in France, Moroccans in Spain, Indonesians in Holland, and in every country, assorted mix-‘n-match Muslims from all of these and still other places. They brought their wives; their families always became much larger than those of the non-Muslim natives. These Muslims could now enjoy Western medicine (lower rates of infant mortality), Western education, Western housing — free or greatly subsidized.

What Muslims brought undeclared in their mental baggage to the West –Islam itself — was not held up for close examination. And it was taken as an article of faith that nothing seriously prevented Muslims from integrating with the same ease as non-Muslim immigrants. Those who expressed doubts about this, who suggested that there might be special problems with Muslim immigrants — and these skeptics included both some who had been raised as Muslims (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq) and non-Muslims (Bat Ye’or, Hans Jansen, Robert Spencer) who had studied Islam — were at first dismissed as bigots. But they could not be silenced. These informed commentators insisted that the belief-system of Islam, the system that suffuses the minds of Muslims wherever they are, has taught them to be hostile to Infidels, and should not be ignored. But many non-Muslims, at a loss as to what they might do with this knowledge, have willfully ignored Islamic doctrine. The notions that first, a Muslim’s true loyalty is to fellow members of theumma al-islamiyya, and second, that Jihad to spread Islam (so that ultimately Islam will everywhere dominate) is a duty incumbent on all Muslims, have not been taken seriously by those whose duty it is to protect and instruct us.

In recent years, an older generation of Western scholars of Islam and the Middle East has died or retired (one thinks of Bernard Lewis, A.K.S. Lambton, J. B. Kelly, Elie Kedourie, P. J. Vatikiotis); these people were critical both of Islam and of its apologists in the West. They have been replaced, in academic departments, by those who are often Muslims themselves or, if not Muslim, less critical, and more admiring of both. Their background and training were received from Arabists, and they were inclined to be apologists for Islam. Ibn Warraq once said that in his experience, many of those who choose to enter the fields of Islam and Middle Eastern history possess a pre-existing animus toward Jews, or toward the West itself, and are predisposed to find Islam attractive. He calls this “self-selection.” And then there is still sympathy for peoples from the “Third World” — never mind that Qataris, Kuwaitis, Saudis, Emiratis hardly qualify, given their fabulous unearned wealth.

The flow of Muslims into Europe has consisted mainly of Pakistanis to Great Britain, Moroccans and Turks to the Netherlands, Algerians and other maghrebins to France, Turks to Germany, Egyptians and Libyans to Italy. In 2015, they are now joined by Syrians (or “Syrians,” since many so identified in fact come from elsewhere), who are being admitted in huge numbers. They will swell Muslim millions already in the West. More than 800,000 of these “Syrians” are set to be received by Germany alone this year, thanks to Angela Merkel.

Demography is destiny. The greater the number of Muslims in Europe, the greater their political power becomes. Muslims have been attempting, unsurprisingly, to limit the ability of non-Muslims in Europe to enforce laws, or to enjoy freedoms, or to fashion foreign policies, to which Muslims might object. Think of the difficulties the French government still experiences in enforcing the no-hijab rule in state schools; think of the cartoonists in France and Denmark and elsewhere in Europe who now hold back on caricatures of Muhammad, fearful of meeting the same fate as theCharlie Hebdo staff. Jews in France are worried about their future; the spate of attacks by Muslims on Jews in France suggest they are right to worry. There has been a great increase in the numbers of French Jews going to Israel.

Meanwhile, Muslims continue to push for changes in the laic state. They still have not given up, for example, attempts to challenge the ban on the hijab in schools. And when cartoonists are killed for having “blasphemed” Muhammad, too many Muslims express not abhorrence but approval. Muslims recognize and are prepared to exploit the freedoms, political and civil, created by and for the Infidels, and are ready to exploit them to further their own, Muslim, ends.

For Western man, the legitimacy of any government depends on that government reflecting, however imperfectly, the will expressed by the people through elections. Islamic political theory is based on a very different idea: the legitimacy of government depends on the ruler being a Muslim, and the will to be expressed is that of Allah, as set down in written form in the Qur’an, and an additional fleshing-out of the Qur’an’s meaning comes through study of the Sunnah, that is, the practices of the earliest Muslims, derived from the Hadith and Sira, which become a kind of gloss on the Qur’an.

Western man exalts the individual; in Islam, it is the collective, the community of Believers. And the true object of worship in Islam turns out to be Islam itself; it is Islam itself that Believers must protect from attack. Morality in Islam is determined by what Muhammad said or did; he remains the Model of Conduct, the Perfect Man, and for all time. Those who assume that the millions of Muslims who have been allowed into Europe and North America are going to “integrate” into non-Muslim societies, societies with manmade laws quite different from the Sharia, without difficulty, fail to recognize that this would mean jettisoning much of Islam. It could require seeing Muhammad in a critical light, and doing away with Muslim supremacism. Is this conceivable? And it should not be forgotten that Muslims have a duty to conduct Da’wa, the Call to Islam, to promote Islam as the Truth.

3) The OPEC trillions from oil, and the Muslim migrant millions in the West, are two of the three significant developments that explain Muslim power today. The third development consists of the appropriation and effective use, by Muslims, of technological advances originating in the Western world, and therefore made by Infidels, that made it much easier to disseminate the Call to Islam to Infidels, and the full message of Islam to Believers worldwide, to spread the message of the most austere and implacable kind of Islam — Wahhabism — and even to recruit for Al Qaeda and ISIS (who would have thought that decapitation videos could serve as recruitment tools for those luring others to actively participate in violent Jihad?).

Without audiocassettes, without those taped sermons urging violence, Khomeini might never have been able to whip up, from his distant exile in Neauphle-le-Chateau in France, so many hundreds of thousands of fanatical followers in Iran. Without videocassettes, and satellite television channels and the Internet, it would have been much harder to spread Islamic propaganda, including that put out by Al Qaeda and ISIS. Decades ago, simple pious Muslims could conduct their lives without being whipped up to violent Jihad, aware that they needed to fulfill their five canonical daily prayers, but only vaguely aware of the duty to take part in Jihad. Thanks to the Internet, they are now much more aware of the extent of their duties as Muslims.

In summary: it is these three developments — first, the OPEC trillions, that have given the Arabs such wealth to influence everything from U.N. votes to Western economic interests; second, the Muslim migrant millions in the West who have become, in 2015, many millions; and third, the appropriation of Western technological advances to spread the message of Islam — that help explain the reappearance of Islam as a fighting faith that everywhere threatens non-Muslims. Muslims who just a century ago were deploring Muslim weakness and Western strength are now able to deploy vast financial power and use it to increase their political clout and to obtain arms. Muslims by the many millions are now settled in Dar Al-Harb, behind what they regard as enemy lines.

What will happen now to the Arab use of the “wealth” weapon? Advances in renewable energy (e.g., in solar collectors and wind farms), and the growing recognition that the use of oil has to diminish if climate warming is to be slowed down, may lessen the amount of money that flows to Muslim oil states. But those states already have money stockpiled that they can still use to buy arms and influence. And as we have seen, the Muslim presence in Europe continues to increase, especially with the influx of “Syrians”; the geert-wilders and marine-le-pens bravely keep up their warnings about the Muslim invasion, but continue to go largely unheeded by the main parties. It’s still easy to affix the word “bigot.” Still, reports from Germany suggest that Merkel’s admitting so many “Syrians” is meeting with increasing opposition.

ISIS, the Islamic State, came into existence because Sunni Muslims in Iraq and Syria believed that their governments – Shi’a-dominated in Iraq, Alawite-dominated in Syria – scanted Sunni interests in the distribution of the national spoils. Those in the West who thought that ISIS was a fleeting phenomenon, that the Shia-dominated Iraqi government would retake Mosul, that ISIS could not possibly hold the territories it seized in such rapid fashion, or would not be able to run the territories it had conquered as a real state, when it has both held those territories and has begun to organize them and assume the responsibilities of rule, should recognize how formidable ISIS has become. Its appeal is wide, as the tens of thousands of recruits, including doctors and engineers, who have arrived from abroad testify.

No Western government has yet dared to broadcast any information about the connection between the political, economic, social, and intellectual failures of Muslim societies and Islam itself. Indeed, one discovers that even in the West, deep behind enemy lines, in Dar al-Harb, Muslims are watching not the regular Western channels, but insisting on getting their news — in Dearborn as in the East End of London, and in the banlieues of Paris and Lyon and Marseille — from Al-Jazeera (owned by Qatar), Al-Manar (run by Hezbollah), and other Arab stations. Willingly, many Arab Muslims in the West choose to limit themselves to stations spouting Arab Muslim propaganda, for only these stations are “telling the truth.” The ability to modify the views of Muslims enjoying life in the West, so that they will no longer pose a threat to the non-Muslim order, is limited.

Islam is naturally totalitarian — a total belief-system that leaves no area of life untouched. It offers a Compleat Regulation of Life and Total Explanation of the Universe. Over many centuries when Muslims had no technological advances to appropriate from the Western world, nor the wealth with which to exploit those advances (and thus lacking the ability to spread the full doctrines of Islam throughout both Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb), Muslims were able to conduct their lives without necessarily being fully aware of, much less always following, at every step, all the teachings of Islam. But today’s technology makes things different. The full undiluted message of Islam, now easily available to those who might once have been ignorant or even unobservant Muslims, is available. Muslims everywhere know that the full teachings of Qur’an and Hadith are a mere click away, and the Internet makes the same undiluted message available to Infidels who are suffering from various degrees of disaffection with the modern world, the West, Kapitalism, The System, Amerika, call it what you will, and who may find Islam attractive.

For we have seen that Islam is a mental system that appeals to those who prefer to have a life totally regulated from above. They find it perfectly acceptable to take as a model a seventh-century Arab, who may or may not have existed (that doesn’t matter, as long as Muslims believe he existed), described in the Qur’an as uswa hasana (the Model of Conduct), and elsewhere as al-insan al-kamil (the Perfect Man). For the socially and psychically marginal among Infidels, for those yearning to suppress their own individuality in a larger group, the umma al-islamiyaa(Community of Islam) provides an instant community. Islam is just the thing. Western man, who has come to prize skepticism and individualism, may not understand its attraction. The convert to Islam, in or out of prison, does not deplore, but welcomes, his own submission to Islamic authority, is glad to be supplied with answers as to the conduct of life based on passages in the Qur’an or stories in the Hadith, and finds soothing the notion that Allah Knows Best. It makes life simpler. In other words, Western governments should not underestimate the attraction of Islam to non-Muslims, nor assume that Muslims in the West will forget their duty to conduct Jihad.

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Professor makes class sign “Vote for Obama” pledge

A citizen, whose nephew attends Brevard Community College, reports that he brought home the below bookmark pledging to vote for President Obama. The bookmark and pledge was handed out during a mathematics class taught by Assistant Professor Sharon Sweet. This occurred “while the student was in class at the request of his College Algebra teacher, Sharon Sweet, from Brevard Community College in [Melbourne] Florida.”

On the tear away GOTTAVOTE.org pledge form that students recieved, was the requirement to “state their party affiliation”. The student reported that Sweet has repeatedly stated her personal political views in support of President Obama in class. The student noted, “There is an older gentleman in the class that will argue with her but he said most of the students did not.”

Actress and Singer Tatyana Ali supporting GOTTA VOTE

GOTTAVOTE.org is a site paid for by the Obama-Biden campaign to urge Floridians to register and vote. The website is targeted at young voters.

It appears Sweet may have violated the College’s harassment policy by handing out the GOTTA VOTE pledge. The Brevard Community College policy on harassment states:

Definition of Harassment

Harassment is any repeated or unwelcome verbal or physical abuse which intimidates or causes the recipient discomfort or humiliation or which interferes with the recipient’s educational or job performance. Any form of harassment related to an employee’s, applicant’s, student’s, or student applicant’s race, ethnicity, color, genetics, religion, national origin, age, gender, gender preference, physical or mental disability, marital status, veteran status, ancestry or political affiliation is a violation of this policy. [Emphasis added]

Brevard College policy states, “Any employee or student of this institution, who is found to have harassed another employee or student … will be subject to disciplinary action up to and including termination, suspension and or expulsion, within the provisions of applicable current College Procedures and Board rules.”

NOTE: According to the Brevard Community College staff directory, Sharon Sweet is an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at the Melbourne Campus. A request for comment has been sent to Ms. Sweet and Ms. Darla Ferguson, Chief Equity & Diversity Officer for Brevard Community College.

RELATED VIDEO:

UPDATE:

The following was posted as a comment to this column:

Darla Ferguson forwarded your email to me. I am the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Chief Learning Officer for the college. Thank you for referring your concern to us. The college does have specific procedures related to the political activity of faculty and staff. The expectation is that no employee of the College shall solicit support of any political candidate during regular work hours or on College property.

The college first learned of this concern on Thursday and an investigation was initiated. Any inappropriate activities will be curtailed and the faculty will be dealt with according to college policy.

Again, thank you for your concern. The college is taking appropriate actions. We do not want any student to feel coerced.

Linda Miedema, PhD, MSA, BSN

Vice President Academic Affairs

Chief Learning Officer

BCC Administrative Building, Viera