Posted on 04/17/2014 10:32:35 AM PDT by reaganaut1
There is a growing trend on American college campuses, a trend that augurs badly for free speech and robust debate.
I refer to the way various groups of people use expressions of hurt feelings to trump speakers they disagree with. The most recent manifestation of this was at Brandeis University.
Brandeis had invited the Somalia-born Ayann Hirsi Ali to receive an honorary doctorate and speak at the universitys commencement exercises. Her remarkable story is certainly worth honoring. She fled her native Africa to avoid one of those arranged marriages, finding asylum in The Netherlands. While living there, she was elected to the Dutch Parliament and became an outspoken critic of the way women and girls are treated under Islamic law.
She wrote the screenplay for a short film entitled Submission in 2004. The films director, Theo Van Gogh, was stabbed to death in Amsterdam by an Islamic zealot in 2006 retribution for his role in the film. For a year, Hirsi Ali continued living in The Netherlands, under heavy security, since she was also a target. In 2007, she left for the United States.
Among her awards is the Free Speech award given by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the paper that dared to publish the Muhammad cartoons.
Brandeis thought that she was worth honoring for her work on womens rights around the worldbut then came the opposition. An online petition excoriated Brandeis for its decision. It stated that Hirsi Ali had engaged in hate speech against Islam because she denies that it is a religion of peace and argues that it cannot be reformed by moderates.
The pressure of an online petition with over 6,000 names was too much for Brandeis to bear. On April 8, the university released a statement announcing its cancellation of the honorary degree.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Brandeis is in Massachusetts...........No surprise there.......Free Speech dies at the place of its birth.................
“...Free Speech dies at the place of its birth...”
It’s not dead.
A certain subversive element within just needs a second dose of Lexington-Concorde Remedy.
I believe that soon there will be another American Civil War. Will make the first one seem like a Tea Party......................
It’s important to remember that while Leftists are purely politically motivated, liberals are motivated by pure cowardice. When told what to do by Leftists, they jump. And is that means jumping right off a cliff, they do it. The collapse of America is not because of an embracing of collectivism by a majority of the population, but by the engineering of the moral collapse of the majority of the population by collectivist leaders. They are two very different things.
The Courage and Wisdom of Oriana Fallaci
http://www.torahdemocracy.org/?p=1129
EURABIA and the ISLAMIC OBAMERICA
Cowardice is taking U.S in the path of Eurabia.
“...soon there will be another American Civil War....”
Brother, we’re already IN it... the left IS at war with us, and we aren’t fighting back yet.
Just make sure you do not hire anyone who attends that University!
Waiting for the Ft. Sumter moment..................
Almost had it in Nevada, evidently.
Perhaps Brandeis should have all governmental funding haulted if they don’t want to allow full and free debate....
Cowards!
it ain’t over yet...................
Forget Zarathustra - at Brandeis it’s now Also Sprach Das OffenJude-Dhimmi.
By liberal faculty and students of Brandeis.
Some have speculated that cancelling the honorary degree was the result of pressure from donors (but you don't figure Brandeis would get much from Muslims anyway). Brandeis got into financial trouble a few years ago when a lot of its big donors lost money in the Madoff scam.
Faculty outrage at Hirsi Ali degree is overblown
By Martin Gross
Letter to the Editor
Published: Tuesday, May 20, 2014
When I graduated from Brandeis in 1972, where I majored in Philosophy, I immediately knew that I owed Brandeis a great debt. And so, over the past two decades I have been, at times, an adjunct lecturer at the Brandeis International Business School, served on the Board of Trustees of IBS, and the Board of the University itself. With gratitude I have contributed significant sums to my alma mater, including a chair in financial markets and Institutions to IBS.
It was at Brandeis that I was introduced to the pre-Socratic philosophers and was fascinated with how they struggled to find ways to explain the world around them, and how their ideas influenced Plato, Aristotle and others who succeeded them. It was at Brandeis that I was introduced to the thought of Immanuel Kant, and the other giants of Western thought, as well as the thought of other cultures. It was at Brandeis that I came to understand that in intellectual dialogue all ideas are on the table, that everyone is entitled to his point of view and that public scrutiny of ideas is the best way to assess their worth. It was at Brandeis that I was taught how controversy served as an impetus to critical thinking, and that it is often the very people who are condemned for expressing ideas, like Spinoza and Galileo, who are later considered the great minds of Western thought. And it was this foundation that I relied upon when I next studied philosophy and politics at Oxford University and then law at the University of Chicago.
I must now confess to having serious concerns about the spirit of free inquiry at my alma mater when it rescinds an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman who champions womens rights in the Muslim world. A woman honored in Denmark, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. A woman who received the Moral Courage Award from the American Jewish Committee and was voted Woman of the Year for 2006 by the European editors of Readers Digest magazine. And I thought it regrettable that upon learning that Hirsi Ali was offered an honorary degree 87 Brandeis faculty members were so filled with shame that they presented University President Frederick Lawrence with a letter urging him to rescind immediately the invitation to Ms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali for an honorary doctorate based on her virulently anti-Muslim public statements.
These faculty members said that the selection of Ms. Hirsi Ali further suggests to the public that violence toward girls and women is particular to Islam or the Two-Thirds World, thereby obscuring such violence in our midst among non-Muslims, including on our own campus. And they also could not accept Ms. Hirsi Alis triumphalist narrative of western civilization, rooted in a core belief of the cultural backwardness of non-western peoples.
For the sake of argument, lets stipulate that some of her comments may be provocative and controversial. But that is what intellectual inquiry is all about. For decades serious scholars have examined in all major religions the use of force, the role of violence and compulsion, male dominance over women, the role of honor killings, etc. Since when have these topics become off-limits to scholars?
It is hard for me to imagine that these faculty members seriously think that violence against women on the Brandeis campus is in any way comparable to the violence against young women in a single Nigerian village. When was the last time a Brandeis student was sold into slavery?
What is worthy of note is that Hirsi Alis views do not come from an ivory tower but from the concrete reality of her personal experiences as a woman. She was genitally mutilated as a child, fled a forced marriage at age 12 and lives under constant threat of death by the very people who proudly wear the ideology she condemns. Who are we to judge that her conclusions are beyond the pale? Surely we would not condemn a Christian or Jew at the time of the bloody Crusades who said similar things about Christianity. When Tony Kushner said that the very creation of Israel itself was a mistake, this did not disqualify him from receiving an honorary degree from Brandeis University.
And how preposterous is their issue with her Western triumphalism, especially when she fled to the West from the very ideology that is trying to kill her. Is not the belief in American exceptionalism triumphalist in nature? Just last September, President Barack Obama himself celebrated the idea of American exceptionalism before the UN General Assembly. Would this disqualify him from an honorary degree?
I am profoundly perplexed that there is no counter letter submitted by any faculty member to Lawrence. Is there not a single woman faculty member in the Women and Gender Studies program who can find the compassion to defend her? Is the majority of the faculty too intimidated to speak out against this new tyranny for fear of being ostracized?
The only acceptable response to bona fide controversy is robust dialogue. It now appears that Brandeis motto of truth unto its innermost parts has been replaced by the eleventh commandment of political correctnessThou shalt not offend.
Martin Gross is a member of the Brandeis Board of Trustees.
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