Last month I noted (here and here) efforts by some campuses to suppress the screening of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, a documentary that depicts the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Muslims urging attacks on the West, Muslim children being urged to become suicide bombers, as well as scenes from Nazi rallies.
According to the New York Times, the film was in fact shown on 30 campuses last semester, despite protests by Muslim students and entrenched avoidance of the subject by many academics and campus administrators.
A major reason given for suppressing Obsession has been that Islam as a whole must be shielded from any telling of the unadulterated truth about militant Islam. This was implicit in a comment, for example, by Adam Osman, president of Stony Brook’s Muslim Students’ Association, who opposed the showing of the documentary. “The movie was so well crafted and emotion manipulating,” he said, ”that I felt myself thinking poorly of some aspects of Islam.”
That the film is beginning to get a hearing on campuses is a victory against political correctness and for academic freedom. And, in spreading the truth about jihadism, it leads more among us, in the words of the film’s producer, Raphael Shore, to “stand up and make a difference in combating this threat.”