Hamline University and how liberals finally stood up against the myth of Islamophobia
The catalyst was the attack on Salman Rushdie
Here we go again. Another controversy over false allegations of Islamophobia but this time on a college campus where free speech was first attacked going back to 2014. And now the backlash began. But not against the teacher who was fired in the Hamline art history case class case over a painting of, whom Muslims refer to as a prophet, the founder of Islam Muhammad. But the backlash didn’t come over the actual depiction of Muhammad, but rather on the students and the university for firing the professor. Across many different venues of publications online, liberals, who are quick to shout Islamophobia without providing any meaning when shouting it over offending Muslims, finally stood up to the myth of Islamophobia which has hurt free speech since the September 11, 2001 attacks and the awful attacks on Charlie Hebdo in 2015. For liberals, the catalyst was the failed attempt on Salman Rushdie's life last year.
Hamline University is a pretty small institution. It only has a couple of thousand students whether undergraduates or graduates. Before this controversy, I had never heard of the school. It wasn’t until the January 8 New York Times article covered this saga that I went, here we go again. To break down briefly what happened, in October 2022, Erika López Prater was an adjunct professor teaching her art history class where she had warned students as part of the curriculum that images of religious figures would be shown with a warning attached to them. She offered students to contact her if they had concerns about it. According to her, no one did. But low and behold, Muhammad is shown despite the warning, and the Muslim students got offended. No one can argue that the trigger warning wasn’t there. But she lost her job after the Muslim students complained. The University sided with the students. Hoping to avoid controversy, they ended up with one. The president of the school Fayneese Miller co-signed an email that said respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” The response to the actions of the school has rightly met with controversy. Organizations such as PEN America called it “one of the most egregious violations of academic freedom in recent memory.” FIRE, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has done more for free speech than the ACLU, has filed an Academic Freedom Complaint demanding Hamline lose its accreditation as it had violated the very thing schools like Hamline are meant to uphold. And in a vote by the faculty, 71 to 12 with eight abstentions voted to urge Miller to resign. Now Prater is suing the school for “religious discrimination and defamation” and the school has now found its support for academic freedom.
Strange.
The school released a statement stating, “Like all organizations, sometimes we misstep. In the interest of hearing from and supporting our Muslim students, language was used that does not reflect our sentiments on academic freedom. Based on all that we have learned, we have determined that our usage of the term ‘Islamophobic’ was therefore flawed. It was never our intent to suggest that academic freedom is of lower concern or value than our students — care does not ‘supersede’ academic freedom, the two coexist.” Nothing like a lawsuit and a national controversy to make you reflect on your own actions. Sounds like they should have done this back when the “problem” first occurred.
Aram Wedatalla, the student who filed the complaint that led to Prater losing her job for the Spring 2023 semester is being sued by Prater for defamation in what was clearly a false claim of Islamophobia. Aram was a student of Prater and thus knew her course would cover images of Muhammad, the founder of Islam. In the lawsuit, Aram “wanted to impose her specific religious views on López Prater, non-Muslim students and Muslim students who did not object to images.” The local Minnesota chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations viewed it as Islamophobic while the national organization didn’t. They stood by the students even while acknowledging the academic freedom and the non-malicious intent of Prater. The entire organization has never stood for free speech when Islam is criticized. In 2020, the organization called for American Muslims not to travel to France over a rise of “Islamaphobia” following the murder of Samuel Paty, who showed his students images of Muhammad and warned his students in advance before showing them. While condemning the murder in a statement, but still having the audacity to say the French government’s response would lead to more bigotry toward Muslims. This is a clear example of them doing a sorry, not sorry by still blaming the victim than the attacker. Part of the statement read, “The French government has responded to the horrific murder of teacher Samuel Paty by collectively smearing and punishing the French Muslim community at-large instead of only targeting those individuals responsible for this crime. This despite the fact that the French Muslim community vocally and strongly condemned the crime.” But yet, they don’t address the root cause of the issue. The freedom of speech and academic freedom. CAIR doesn’t care. Don’t be fooled when acronyms spell out words that mean something compassionate.
And yet something strange happened in this incident than previous Islam controversies. The Muslim students faced the backlash. They failed to find support for their claims and actions. Even Islamists who are really terrorists or terrorism influencers. Why is that the case? Because for one, people who call themselves liberals based on free speech have not decided not to stand up for Islam in this regard, having called anyone who criticized any segment of Islam as being inherently Islamophobic, which they meant racist, because the woke bubble has finally burst. Liberals across publications online have finally decided to defend free speech and academic freedom rather than feelings or the right to be offended. Aram cried during the press conference. In my mind, they were fake tears. She found her five seconds of fame and now she needs to lawyer up to fend off Prater’s lawsuit. She should be kicked out of school as well as all those students that did this. One thing needs to be made clear, it's the teachers who run the classroom, not the students. Given all the controversy over classrooms in public schools with inappropriate books and the bans in general, and woke nonsense filling the minds of very young children, and critical race theory, the backlash is not about opinions, it’s about the lack of education. We are setting up many of our children and young adults for failure. America’s education system is failing and has been for decades. Lack of funding, lack of interest in either teachers and students, the lack of useful subjects being taught, parents not being more involved, overcrowdedness, teacher salary decline, school closings, the effects of the pandemic, and of course, Chat GPT becoming the latest fear.
The publications which stood up against this in articles about this case have come from places like Slate and The Bulwark. Liberals like Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens have criticized all religions and have done more so on Islam because of what Islam has become in the aftermath of 9/11. Islam was hated at the very moment we knew the civilian jets were hijacked to be used as weapons as an act of war targeting innocent people done so in the name of Islam. I will explain further in the future that the terrorist ideology of Islam has roots in the very foundation of the religion which will explain the complexities of Islam. I’m not here to say that all Muslims are terrorists. They are not. But the majority of terrorists in today's world are Muslims. You do have fanatics in the Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh faiths, and the growing number in the Hindu faith in India under Narendra Modi’s tenure as Prime Minister, but they are small in comparison to the number of Muslims who are fanatical. Many Muslims believe the attacks against Charlie Hebdo were justified because of “offense to Islam” over their satirical cartoons of Muhammad. Even liberals at the time blamed Hebdo for the attack against them because they were provocative. Charlie Hebdo has always been so. They mock and make fun of politicians, public figures, religions, pretty much everything. They are the standard bearer of free speech. They’ve gone so far beyond that they mocked the Srebrenica massacre. Not denying the horrible massacre or mocking the victims, but rather mocking those that conducted it.
Don’t believe Muslims when they feel “insulted”. This a word that gets thrown around a lot and has lost value like the racist analogy provided above. So has the word Islamophobia. Many Muslims are taught to be offended when they grow up or convert to the religion. While tolerance, acceptance of others, different viewpoints, and peaceful phrases are found in the Quran and the teachings and statements of the founder Muhammad, this still doesn’t outweigh the violent rhetoric coming from schools and the governments coming from majority Muslim countries around the world. And most times it is the governments like that of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Qatar, to name a few who finance Islamist groups around the world, charities, and think tanks, to promote their global Islamic agenda to quash any dissent at home or abroad. Even controlling media outlets to promote this ideology by printing lies. It should not come as a surprise to human rights activists that the worst offenders against human rights come from Muslim-majority countries in Asia and Africa. Countries that are majority Muslims like Albania, Kosovo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, do have human rights issues, but free speech mocking or criticizing Islam is the last thing they are worried about. Why? Because Muslims from these three Balkan European countries are westernized. They value free speech. They look to the West, not the East.
But many Muslims don’t question why they should be offended. Rather they say my religion says so rather than asking if it does or needs to. They take the words of Imams, Mufti’s, and the like, and thus accept it at face value. Some Imams and Mufti’s do teach and practice tolerance even if they are against criticism of Islam or Muhammad cartoons. And there needs to be more of them around the world. If asking questions is too provoking for a religion, then it’s clear that religion needs change. At least an overwhelming number of American Muslims weren’t offended. And these voices need to be amplified more often to defeat the Islamist virus. They value freedom of speech and expression which is something the students at Hamline need to learn. And students in general who lead the cancel culture brigade need to understand. This isn’t about them. It’s about everybody. Freedom is for all. Not for one or one group. There is no right to be offended, but rather the right to offend. In Europe, this is something that they lack unlike in America. America doesn’t have strict hate speech laws like they do in places like France or Germany which have often seen many different governments and rulers over the centuries be against freedom whereas America, albeit had certain types of people lacking, the values and guarantees of freedom like that of speech.
And laws in Muslim countries over blasphemy are another form of quashing dissent, free speech, and even justify it by committing murder. Being a Muslim minority like say a Shia Muslim, nonreligious Muslim, ex-Muslims, non-Muslim follower of another religion, non-religious like an agnostic or atheist, and a member of the majority sect but with a more open-minded mindset, have gotten people killed by public beatings, sentenced and executed with the death penalty, or sent to prison. The latter probably being a better option, but still, not one that should avoid condemning out of fear of “insulting” and the lie that is “Islamophobia”.
To also say that “this is their culture” is quite insulting by liberals who before would defend this as a way to not be racist even all they are doing is siding against liberal principles which is what liberals are supposed to stand by like freedom of speech. The culture in various Muslim communities certainly needs reform. Whether they are taught this by a few radicals, or the variation of interpretation of the religious text. Or how the majority of Muslim countries in the Middle East ignore the genocide of the Ughyurs and Rohingya by non-Muslims but only care more about drone strikes killing innocent Muslims by accident by the U.S. The sheer hypocrisy of Muslims is that the two cases of genocide are legitimate forms of Islamophobia than anything professed in this article. This is a topic for another time.
The lie of Islamophobia has finally peaked. The catalyst for this was the attack against Salman Rushdie on August 12, 2022. Two months before the Hamline controversy began. Stabbed over his book and the fatwa issued against him over the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. A book that I have and am proud to say is amazing. One of the best books ever written. Rushdie is an ex-Muslim. The fatwa against him by then-Supreme Leader of Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini, was issued to attack alleged insulting the prophet and Islam. Even though most Muslims have never read the book and only listen and never question the leaders who teach them to do such things in the first place. Rushdie lives. The attack thankfully failed. While he has lost the use of his right hand and the sight in one of his eyes, he lives on. The attempt on his life brought widespread condemnation leading to a backlash against the fatwa. For years, he lives in hiding and under strict security, but what did this all signify? Liberals who for decades shouted Islamophobia certainly saw it in action at the hands of a Muslim. One who never finished the book. And that’s the thing. Books from around the world are constantly banned in the Middle East. As are films, music, television shows, magazines, and online materials because they don’t conform to their worldview.
The world doesn’t need to. And liberals who stood up against the students at Hamline over Prater being fired certainly saw what happened to Rushdie when you don’t defend free speech. Rushdie shouldn’t pay the price for his book or any of his writings. We shouldn’t live in fear for our freedom. We should be out in the open about it. The woke couldn’t defend this attack nor could they justify it. Some Muslims couldn’t either including the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan. Rushdie should win the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature. His survival showed that Islamophobia was a tactic used to deny free speech when criticizing Islam in general. They say “free speech, but not hate speech.” Sadly for them and good for freedom, no one is on their side with this lackluster argument. Which in fairness was never an argument. Just a distraction to never actually confront the argument at hand. With a touch of hatred for western values and a lack of respect for it.
As a result, The Satanic Verses ranked number thirteen on Amazon.com by the afternoon after he was stabbed. Within days, the novel's Spanish translation was a number-one bestseller and his other books written, including Midnight's Children, were also selling well, whereas on the day he was stabbed, his books were outside the top 100. I bought his 2001 novel Fury off Amazon and will be glad to read it in the coming days. The attack only helped Rushdie, not hurt. Figuratively, of course.
The attack on Rushdie and the firing of Prater showed that liberals have finally taken back free speech from the myth of Islamophobia and moving forward so should the rest of us.