Over at Minding the Campus, Yale student Matt Shaffer has an interesting essay about his freshman orientation. He rightly notes the odd disconnect between the administrators’ diversity utopianism and “we will help you learn to think rather than tell you what to think” boilerplate with the keynote speakers’ anti-American screed. But what really pricked my interest was the subject of the screed itself — the supposed hostility of American culture to “gays and Muslims.”

Of course, any such speech has to be followed by breakout sessions:

That evening, things went from mere disappointment to sheer farce. Tedious lectures turned into indoctrination. We were required to attend ‘discussions’ with our freshman counselors about Professor Yoshino’s speech. The freshman counselor set the tone, and then student after student performed a series of variations upon a single theme: white men are bad, Islam is fabulous and judgment is bad. We need to be eternally vigilant and morally courageous in the face of the innumerable male WASP bigots around us. (Why we are allowed to judge white people as bad and Islam as good when judgment is supposedly forbidden is beyond my ken.)

Honestly, this exaltation of Islam is beyond puzzling. How many of these “freshmen counselors” have spent any significant time in an Islamic country? More specifically, even if they have visited an Islamic country, have they actually seen the lives ordinary people live or did they stay only in those areas safe for Westerners? How many of the Muslim students at Yale (or any other top college) are shepherds from Diyala as opposed to the sons and daughters of the privileged elite?

In short, when it comes to Islam as it is lived and practiced in the heart of the Islamic world, these people know nothing — except apparently that a religious culture they have never experienced is virtuous and seemingly more worthy of respect than our own religious and cultural traditions.

I don’t hold myself out as an expert on Islam or the Islamic world — despite having spent far more time in the heart of the Muslim world than 99 percent of Americans. Yet one has only to walk through one deserted, blood-stained village — stained with the blood of children massacred by alleged “true believers” — to understand that Islam’s virtue depends greatly on the virtue of those who practice it and that right now there are many millions of Muslims whose hearts are full of a very dark and bloody hate.

Question to Matt: Would that have been acceptable to say at one of your breakout sessions?