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Every year
college campuses across the country hold a festival of hatred aimed
at Jews and the Jewish State. Israeli Apartheid Week has become
notorious for the targeted harassment of Jewish students, support for
Hamas and even physical violence.
This year the David Horowitz Freedom Center responded to Israeli
Apartheid Week with Islamic Apartheid Week. Unlike Israeli Apartheid
Week, which is based on a lie, Islamic Apartheid Week addresses the
sexism, homophobia and religious bigotry threatening minorities in
the Muslim world. To promote Islamic Apartheid Week, the Freedom
Center attempted to place an ad in forty college papers.
The ad called "Faces of Islamic Apartheid" drew attention
to the victims of Islamic sexism, homophobia and theocracy by briefly
telling the stories of gay men hanged in Iran, women and girls
murdered by their governments and their families for the crime of
falling in love and the Christian Minister for Minorities Affairs in
Pakistan's cabinet who was murdered for trying to reform his
country's theocratic blasphemy laws.
These four women, three men and one little girl were the victims of
Islamic Apartheid. Five of them have been murdered. Their memory
lives on only when they are remembered. One has been on death row for
six years. Telling her story may help save her life. The remaining
two live under threat of death.
Instead of listening to their stories, the campus culture of
political correctness drowned out their voices and apologized for even
allowing their stories to be told.
Nine college papers turned the ad down, five of them in the
University of California system which has been criticized for
tolerating anti-Semitism. When the California State Assembly passed a
resolution condemning anti-Semitism on campus and warned that no
public resources should be used for anti-Semitic hate, the University
of California objected on free speech grounds. However free speech
for Israeli Apartheid Week did not translate into free speech for
Islamic Apartheid Week.
Seven college papers took the advertisement. Of those papers, Tufts
University's Tufts Daily, Austin's Daily Texan, and UPENN’s Daily
Pennsylvanian ran apologies from their editors for even printing the
ad.
Tufts Daily editor Martha Shanahan called the decision to run the ad
an "editorial oversight." Daily Texan editor Susannah Jacob
denounced the attempt to tell the stories of victimized women and
children as "hateful" and "an unspoken incitement to
violence."
Martha Shanahan spent two pages apologizing for the existence of the
"Islamophobic and violently offensive" advertisement, the
existence of Tufts Daily, its staff and her own existence. At no
point during her long series of apologies, did Martha acknowledge
that her paper had run four editorials in a single week from Students
for Justice in Palestine attacking Israel and promoting hatred for
the Jewish State. And in an unequal response to this, it also ran a
brief letter from Tufts Friends of Israel distancing itself from the
ad and politely suggesting that apartheid shouldn't be used to refer
to Israel.
Anthony Monaco, the President of Tufts University, took to Twitter to
denounce the advertisement for vilifying Islam, but made no such
denunciation of the Tufts Daily's op-ed, "The Case for Israeli
Apartheid" which (not coincidentally) appeared on the same day
as the ad. At Tufts, no one apologizes for accusing democratic Israel
of apartheid. There are only apologies when theocratic Iran and
Pakistan are accused of practicing Islamic Apartheid.
When anti-Israel voices are outweighed 4-to-1 and the editor
apologizes for publishing another perspective that would have made it
4-to-2 then the freedom of debate at Tufts University is in a very
sad state. When that same editor prints editorials describing Israel
as an apartheid state, but promises to put in place an entire
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system of oversight to make certain
that no advertisement challenging Islamic Apartheid is ever printed
again, then a system of censorship has been put into place silencing
the voices of victims and encouraging their persecutors.
The Daily Texan's Susannah Jacob claimed that the crosshairs over the
faces of the victims were an incitement to violence when they were
actually a way of bringing urgency to the violence that had been
committed against them. And making it clear that she never even saw
the advertisement that she was denouncing, Susannah described the ad
as depicting six women, when it included two gay men, one Christian
man and one little girl.
Susannah further distorted the truth about Islamic Apartheid when she
described the pervasive sexism, homophobia and theocracy that these
people fell victim to as "discrete incidents of violence by
Muslims" being used "to implicate all Muslims" while
ignoring the fact that five of the victims in the ad had been
targeted by their governments or with government backing.
Can the Daily Texan's editor honestly claim that Iran's persecution
of women and gay men or Pakistan's persecution of Christians are
"discrete incidents of violence", rather than state policy?
Could she find a single human rights organization that would agree
with such a dishonest whitewashing of the terror under which millions
live?
Jennifer Sun, editor of the Daily Pennsylvanian, printed a letter
revealing that her paper’s executive board has decided that they
“will no longer publish advertisements from the David Horowitz
Freedom Center.” This stunning admission of censorship was apparently
motivated due to negative campus response to our ad and pressure from
the Muslim Students Association and the university’s interfaith
student group, PRISM.
The responses to the advertisement have established once again that
some forms of apartheid are privileged on campus and that some forms
of persecution cannot be talked about. Demonizing the Israeli victims
of Islamic terror is within the realm of campus free speech, but
speaking about the vulnerable minorities in the Muslim world is
not.
If the advertisement was wrong, then there would have been no need to
censor it. False claims can easily be disproven. Five minutes with
Google would have told every reader and editor whether there was any
truth to the Faces of Islamic Apartheid.
It is never necessary to censor lies. It is only necessary to censor
truth.
That is why the majority of campus papers – ten so far, including
Harvard whose editors said they would not print it under any
circumstances -- refused to run this paid advertisement. It is why
those few who did have begun making ritual apologies while lying
about its contents. It is why the attacks on the advertisement have
taken refuge in vague platitudes about offensiveness, without a
single attempt at a factual rebuttal. It is why every response to the
advertisement has consisted of claiming that speaking about Islamic
bigotry is the real bigotry.
There were eight faces and eight names in the censored advertisement
that the President of Tufts, the editors of Tufts Daily, the Daily
Texan and the editors of ten college papers that turned down the ad,
did not want their students to see or know about because it might
disturb the manufactured campus consensus that they have constructed
with great effort around Israel and Islamic terrorism.
These are the names. Amina Said. Sarah Said. Afshan Azad. Sakineh
Mohammadi Ashtiani. Shahbas Bhatti. Rimsha Masih. Mahmoud Asgari.
Ayaz Marhoni.
They were repressed as individuals. Now their story is being
repressed on the American campus.
★ ★ ★
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