Nothing Warms Up A Speech Like An Arson Fire

Nonie Darwish is a noted Arab scholar and writer as well as a human rights activist for peace in the Arab-Israeli conflict in Palestine. She opposes radical Islam and founded a group called Arabs for Israel and is a director of Former Muslims United. She is the daughter of an Egyptian general who was killed by the Israeli army during the 1956 Nasser attempt to take over the Suez Canal. She hated Israel, and wanted revenge for her father's death.

But after his death, she was sent to a Catholic school in Cairo, and began to see the middle east in a different light. She later married an American, and converted to Christianity upon coming to the U.S. She saw the evil that Islamofascism was producing, and began to oppose it actively. So naturally, she is one of the most hated speakers at universities where Israel is considered a fascist murderous state, and Islam is the poor victim of unprovoked attacks. And what American universities would that be? Pretty much all of them.

David Horowitz at Campus Watch, along with numerous others in the blogosphere and conservative journals, have been keeping track of the numerous attempts by the left to keep speakers such as Darwish away from their campuses. Failing that, they become disruptive and try to render the speaker ineffective with displays of anger and shouting the speakers down. Darwish, a rather smallish woman of a certain age with a soft voice is a particular target of the hatred because she fits almost every single trait of sensible, ethnic Arab, female, Christian convert, pro-Israel thought which is anathema in the American university environment.

Darwish spoke most recently at Boston University. Immediately before her speech was slated to begin, a fire broke out in a bathroom on the next floor up. Fire department authorities investigated, and declared it unequivocally to be an arson fire. Whether it was merely a coincidence that it started just before an unpopular speaker was ready to begin remains unproven. Fortunately, the fire didn't spread, and after some major confusion, the speech went on. The demonstrators were unusually subdued, perhaps because they had expected the fire to end the issue, so no other preparation was necessary.

Darwish is hardly the only target of Islamic/leftist suppression of free speech on the campuses. Back in October, Geert Wilders, was scheduled to speak at Temple University. The propaganda and leftist attacks began in earnest long before the speaking date. In an article written for the Philadelphia Daily News, Student Senate President Jeff Dempsey said he couldn't support the decision to invite Wilders. "I've never been ashamed to be a Temple student. Our proud embrace of diversity and inclusion is tarnished by this man's provocation of hate." There's your standard ignorant leftist talking-points knee-jerk reaction. Because we believe in diversity and inclusion, we wish to exclude a speaker who is different from us and who says things we don't agree with. The buzzword "diversity" has become a sword, rather than a word which has any actual meaning. "Diversity" now means "people who think like us."

Wilders was a danger to diversity and inclusion because he had documented evidence which ran counter to what the students (and the enabling faculty) feel. Wilders has some ethnic opinions which I feel go too far on occasion, but he is on solid ground speaking of the horror that Dutch Islam has become. Almost all of his opinions of the Islamic threat come straight from the Koran, and haters of all things Western consider quoting the Koran to be unfair argument. None of the students protesting the speech could counter his arguments, and none felt the rope of Allah tightening around their own necks.

Horowitz himself spoke at the University of Southern California in November. His topic, like Wilders' at Temple, was a simple quotation from the Koran: "The hour of judgment will only come when Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, when the Jews hide behind the rocks and the trees, and the rocks and the trees cry out, 'O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.'" That, of course, is what leftists call "love speech." Several USC organizations prepared a flier in advance which announced in large, bold letters: "Hate Muslims? So Do We," referring to the USC College Republicans who invited Horowitz to speak. "Disagree? Offended? PROTEST!" Which in campus-speak means "disrupt, lie, shout and keep the speaker from being able to speak to his point." The Muslim Student Association (an arm of the radical Muslim Brotherhood) demanded that the quote from the Koran be deleted from any of the Republican Students' publications as offensive. Yeah, well, it's offensive all right. But not in the way they mean. A see-saw battle then ensued. The USC provost removed the quote from the official USC website, calling it "disgusting." But while the Republican Students demanded that the quote be restored, a group called the Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement got it back on the USC website, and there it stayed.

So the USC Daily Trojan proceeded to print multiple allegations of racism on Horowitz's part. There were no contrary views, and despite a carefully-detailed response from Horowitz sent to the editors, Horowitz never got the opportunity to refute the charges in the paper. The editors simply tossed the response in the wastebasket. The most infamous charge against Horowitz was that he had said publicly that blacks slit people's throats. In fact, the only time Horowitz said anything about any black slitting throats was his discussion of the O. J. Simpson throat-slitting.

Horowitz's speech went forward, but was constantly interrupted by catcalls, shouts of "racist," and Islamic vows of revenge. He spent much of his limited time defending himself against the baseless charges made against him by the Muslim Students Association and the Daily Trojan. Not once was he able to address the original point of his citing the hadith from the Koran, which is specifically that the Koran was written two hundred years after Mohammed's death, and that reasonable Muslims could believe that such a hadith (warning, parable) was not in reality part of Mohammed's theology. Islamofascists will not tolerate anyone suggesting that the Koran is not the exact word of Allah as revealed by Mohammed and written down by his scribes. Thus, the murderous words of the Koran are to be both denied and rigidly followed at the same time. No wonder they're frothing-at-the-mouth crazy.

My own alma mater, UC Berkeley has had some nasty confrontations between Islamofascists and anti-Islamofascists. Yet Berkeley is fairly tame compared to the antisemitic, anti-Israel activities at UC Santa Cruz and UC Irvine. UCLA also has a large contingent of student organizations ready to do whatever is necessary to squelch any speeches critical of Muslim concepts of world domination. At Irvine's most recent graduation ceremonies, the Muslim students were allowed to wear traditional caps and gowns, but with green cowls mimicking those of Arab suicide bombers with the word shahada or "martyr" printed on them.

The University of Rochester held perpetual sit-ins until they intimidated administrators into "divesting their holdings in the Israeli war machine." At campuses nationwide, Jewish Stars of David are depicted on signs and in publications joined with the swastika of the Nazis. Pro-jihad groups such as the Muslim Students Association (which is not only a mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood, but a very vocal supporter of Hamas) are allowed free reign to spew their anti-Israel, anti-Western garbage, but free speech for opponents is either violently suppressed or rendered incomprehensible by loud, unruly protests. At San Francisco State University, Muslim students came armed to a demonstration of Israeli solidarity, and beat up a few Jewish students (mostly women). When the police finally arrived, they made no arrests, and told the Jewish students they should disperse before there was any more violence. God help us all.

The one place where free speech was intended to rule was the American college and university campus. The exchange of ideas of all kinds was meant to make better citizens with great tolerance for opposing views. Instead, the campus has become the focus of suppression of speech and even violence to advance the causes of the left and the anti-Western, anti-Israel thugs.

Apropos of absolutely nothing in this article, I just noticed that my National Geographic calendar has no indication of Pearl Harbor Day, but tells me I should be celebrating "human rights day" on the 10th, Islamic New Year on the 18th, and Kwanzaa on the 26th. Anybody want to take bets on whether I'll be purchasing any more National Geographic products?

CORRECTION: I just received a very nice note from Winfield Myers the Director of Campus Watch. In the first sentence of my third paragraph, I accidentally indicated that David Horowitz was "at Campus Watch," and that sentence should have read, "David Horowitz,Campus Watch, along with a host of others . . ." My apologies for the error. Another of my favorite writers and speakers, Daniel Pipes, is in fact the man behind Campus Watch, and I highly recommend that our readers familiarize themselves with Campus Watch as well as the Middle East Forum.