If there is one thing that militant Islamists will not tolerate, it is the charge that they are intolerant. Back in 2005, it will be recalled, the publication by a Danish newspaper of cartoons mildly satirizing the violence recently inflicted in the name of Islam generated violent protests throughout Europe. Most American television networks and newspapers, normally eager to cover “controversial” stories involving fundamentalist Christians, refused even to display the cartoons so as to show what the fuss was about — for fear of giving “offense.” More recently, an indirect allusion by the pope to the historic tendency of some leaders of Islam to spread their faith through violence, along with an exhortation to consider the proper relation between faith and reason, led to another wave of violent protests, including the murder of a nun in Africa.
The administration of Pace University, a largely business-oriented school with 14,000 students on its campuses in New York City and the Westchester county area, recently joined the self-censorship bandwagon regarding Islamism when school officials warned the school’s chapter of Hillel, the national association of Jewish college students, against screening the award-winning film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, on the ground that the film might incite hate crimes against the college’s Muslim students.
Obsession, parts of which were recently aired on the Fox News Channel, documents the frightening influence of radical Islam in the Middle East, including widespread calls for violence directed against Israel, Jews, and the United States. It carefully distinguishes between radical Islamism and the beliefs of most Muslims.
Michael Abdurakhmanov, the Hillel president at Pace, said that, as a courtesy, he had told the college’s Muslim Students Association about the planned showing and invited the association to suggest a speaker for a panel that would comment on the film following its showing, but that the association instead notified a dean. Having heard rumors that the dean, Marijo Russell O’Grady, wanted to block the film’s showing, Abdurakhmanov made an appointment to see the dean along with the head of the student organizations on campus, David Clark. Shortly after the meeting with Dean O’Grady began, Abdurakhmanov reports, the dean “warned” him that because of the recent “hate crimes” that had been committed against the Koran at Pace — a few weeks earlier, two copies of the Koran had been found in toilets on campus, and (unspecified) racial slurs had been discovered on walls — any attempt by Hillel to show Obsession might result in the police being called in, and Hillel officers being investigated as possible suspects in the bias incidents. Mr. Abdurakhmanov reports that, while bias incidents had been committed against Judaism as well as Islam, “school administrators showed concern only for the sensibilities of Muslim students.”
Subsequently, Abdurakhmanov relates, he was called to attend a “mediation meeting” with Dean O’Grady, David Clark, two representatives from the college’s Affirmative Action office, and two professional mediators, along with the president and secretary of the Muslim Students Association. Apparently, the meeting was precipitated by the fact that in response to the plan to show Obsession, the MSA had sent Hillel several angry and insulting emails, directed not only at the organization, but at Judaism. At the mediation meeting, however, instead of working towards conciliation, the president of the MSA directed a tirade against Abdurakhmanov, for which the administrators who were present made excuses, and Abdurakhmanov himself was prevented from responding. (When he complained to the dean about not being allowed to speak, he reports, she responded, “I am sorry you feel that way.”)
Most significantly, Abdurakhmanov reports, no member of the administration or the MSA had ever seen Obsession. Yet both the MSA representatives and the administrators refused Abdurakhmanov’s invitation to view the film. Instead, Pace administrators adopted a plan to sponsor a series of events focusing on “eco-terrorism.”
Abdurakhmanov told the New York Times that Hillel still plans to show Obsession in the spring. The president of the MSA, Zeina Berjaoui, however, said that her organization would oppose the showing because the film “says Islam is a terrorist religion.” No reasonable viewer of the film should come to that conclusion — but then again, Berjaoui evidently didn’t claim to have seen it. However, it may help to clarify Berjaoui’s perspective to note that she is a Lebanese woman who told a reporter for NYU’s Urban Journalism Workshop, during an anti-Israel demonstration in New York last summer amid Israel’s military response to Hezbollah rocket attacks, that “Hezbollah is just a resistance movement,” one that “like Hamas, is giving the Palestinians and Lebanese a voice.” In other words, Pace has effectively allowed an apologist for Islamist terrorist groups to exercise veto power over the portrayal of Islamist terrorist groups on campus.
It is understandable, though hardly excusable, that several European governments, faced with substantial, restive, domestic Islamic populations, have treated the problem of radical Islam with kid gloves. What excuse can there possibly be, however, for an American college administration to try to suppress the showing of a film that graphically illustrates the problem? Is it healthy or desirable for mainstream American Muslims to pretend that the problem doesn’t exist, by trying to prevent an open discussion of it? Are college administrators exercising their educational responsibilities when they accede to such demands? If only wishing radical Islam were imaginary would make it so — then college administrators would be our great defenders of freedom.
– David Lewis Schaefer is professor of political science at Holy Cross College and author of Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition.