“Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him….”
The so-called Hadith (sacred teaching) of Hate is one of the most notorious writings in Islam. It instructs Muslims to kill Jews. One would think that Muslims would try to keep this phrase secret from the rest of the world.
Not so the Muslim Student Association at the University of Southern California, which has even put the hadith up on its campus website. Now, as a result of protests lodged by David Horowitz's Freedom Center and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the university's Provost, Chrysostomos L. Max Nikias, has ordered the MSA to remove the hadith from its website.
I applaud the action by USC. Finally, one university (hardly a conservative bastion) has summoned up the courage to put the MSA in its place, albeit belatedly. This haditha should have been struck down as soon as it appeared. This cannot be considered free speech. It is a call to murder, plain and simple. If this is what USC's MSA subscribes to, it reveals them to be nothing more than radicals and vicious bigots. This kind of language has no place in American society. Similarly, those Muslims who subscribe to this "teaching" have no place in our society. Decent Muslims who want to gain a place in our society must turn away from this kind of language.
It would be nice to see my own university, (UC-Irvine)take similar measures against the MSU (Muslim Student Union). It would be refreshing to hear UCI's leaders tell the MSU that speakers who come to our campus and call Jews "low-life ghetto dwellers" (Imam Mohammed Al-Asi), glorify acts of mass murder by suicide bombers in Israel (Amir Abdel Malik Ali) and displays that depict Jews with hooked noses, thick lips and leering gazes are not going to be tolerated any longer at UCI. Don't hold your breath. The cowards who run UCI have, up until now, not summoned up the courage to confront the MSU and their vicious speakers. In fact, the MSU receives funding from UCI in the form of money taken from student tuition fees. The May 2008"Palestine Awareness Week" was funded by UCI to the tune of $6,500, according to Frontpage Magazine. Thus, UCI supplies funding to MSU to bring in hate mongering speakers and erect racist, anti-Semitic displays that denigrate Jews.
So it will be up to the rest of us to bring the public's attention to what is going on in academia. David Horowitz's Freedom Center, for one, will be putting on a "Stop the Jihad on Campus Week", which will occur during the week of October 13-17, 2008 on over 100 campuses across the nation. Public attention must be brought to the actions and words of these various MSA's across the country. Hopefully, the public can demand that universities crack down on hate speech on their campuses.
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5 comments:
I'll just reiterate what I already said on Reut's blog:
It appears as though the university acted within the rules to have this censored. However, I still feel that censorship is MORALLY wrong. Like it or not, this Islamic quote is not a direct call to violence. Therefore it ought to be protected free speech.
I also want to submit to you that if you take a strictly fundamentalist view of the Christian book of Revelation, it states that all of the Jews except 144,000 will be killed in the end times and go to hell. Pretty anti-semitic stuff. Guess we better ban the Bible!
While I basically agree with you that it's for the best that the message was removed, part of me thinks that it should have been left up so people could know just how hateful and crazy these extremists are.
Bryan,
You seem to put free speech at the highest possible level. I also believe in free speech, especially in the area where the politically-correct crowd (usually at university campuses) tries to regulate speech. Where I draw the line is speech that advocates violence and hate toward other groups.
You have quoted a passage from the Bible. I am not familiar with it, but I don't know a lot of things that are in the Bible. I do not agree with this passage as you describe it, nor do I think it has any place on a university web site. You seem to put your own interpretation on whatever the exact words are.
So, if the MSU puts up a phrase on a university web site that advocates the killing of Jews based on "freedom of speech", you are ok with that?
How about the following:
A campus KKK/Aryan Brotherhood puts up a phrase on their university website calling for the killing of blacks-or Jews-or Hispanics.
You can say that is just free speech, but when some follower takes it literally and kills someone, then how do you feel?
Lance,
I will paraphrase what I said to Bryan but in another direction since you know a little about German history.
When Hitler was making his vile statements about Jews during his rise to power, was it correct for the Germans to let him have his say on the grounds that it would just show crazy he was?
I readily acknowledge that certain criticisms can be made without being racist. For example, we should be careful before we call people racists if they speak out against illegal immigration or affirmative action. (I am against illegal immigration and affirmative action.) I am still hesitant to call Jimmy Carter an anti-Semite because he takes the Palestinian side vis-a-vis the Israelis.
I guess what it comes down to is that we each have our own interpretation of what constitutes hate speech and our own definition of what should be protected free speech.
When you call for violence against another group, that to me is hate speech-and should not be protected.
Regarding Hitler, the problem was that too many people agreed with him or didn't care enough about Jews one way or the other to speak out against him.
The thing is, I probably lean more with Bryan on this issue, but I do think that when somebody makes explicit threats then there is some sort of legal action that can be taken. I'm no expert on that though.
Still, when you silence people, then you just make martyrs out of them and feed into their cause. From what I understood from your article, it was the University that censored the quote. I'm okay with that because if it's on a site that's affiliated with the school, then the school has the right to do what they want and they can get their own site.
Oh, and Bryan is definitely right when it comes to the New Testament and its anti-Semitism. After all, it's not like Christians have a long, peaceful and tolerant history when it comes to Jews, now do they? (It's not like the Nazis invented anti-Semitism! They had centuries of tradition that they built upon.)
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