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Islamic Posters

Couldn’t the group have toned down the advertising a bit and then hold a civil, balanced discussion post-movie? Or are we no longer capable of holding intelligent conversations?

Generalized Soapbox Statement for This Morning: Everyone needs safety, but no one needs hatred.

kgotthardt, at 7:10 am EST on December 6, 2007

Letters of Condemnation

It strikes me that both letters are exercises of free speech but both are ill advised.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has a treasure trove of examples of university administrators branding student expressions of political opinions as hate speech, some times as a public reprimand and other times accompanied by further punishments.

There is no question that sending a letter to the entire student body criticizing the posters was a public reprimand and as such a form of punishment of speech. It carried the force of an official sanction.

The letter from the attorney general is also out of place. It is his job to uphold the law and not to interfere with people expressing opinions with which he disagrees.

In both cases, the university official and the attorney general, the letter writers are not writing as individuals expressing their opinion but as official authorities rerimanding people over whom they have authority.

The practice of university officials sending official reprimands for political speech deemed “offensive” is a practice that is beginning to land them in hot water.

Duke University is believed to have paid out a settlement in the many millions of dollars for essentially slandering its own students in the Duke lacrosse case. Tom Klocek is suing DePaul University for defamation and libel for statements made about him by campus administrators.

In both the Duke and Klocek case, administrators were pressured to make statements of condemnation against individuals by groups with political agendas claiming to be offended.

In the case of the attorney general he is implying a violation of law, when in fact he is only describing an error in judgment. As the attorney general of the state that is a poor exercise of judgment.

Jonathan Cohen, Professor of Mathematics at DePaul University, at 9:15 am EST on December 6, 2007

Radical islam

Well of course we don’t want to express the truth about radical Islam,do we? Notice the words “radical Islam". This means that the Republican Students are not incompassing the entire Islamic religion or what is known as the umma in their comments about Islam. They are reflecting on a strain of Islam. And of course anyone that has bothered to open up the Qu’ran, or the hadiths will easily discover that these Republican students are absolutely correct as to what their poster says. Radical Islam wants you dead if you are an infidel,if you are a kaffir,a non Muslim,an apostate,an adulteress, and a blasphamer of Mohammed or the Quran. What part of that don’t you understand? Also did you somehow forget that these students are also intitled to free speech just as Patricia Telles-Irvin is. Yes; if you so choose ,go ahead and continue to drink the kool-aid.

Mackie, at 9:40 am EST on December 6, 2007

And what about Radical Christianity?

“Radical” does not necessarily mean violent, OH Right Wing (im)Potentate. It means “to the root of.” Most college freshmen know that. Radical Christians, for example, want to go to the root of their faith (the Bible or the sacrifice of Christ) devoid of the church’s accumulated traditions or compromises. Radical Muslims wish to do the same thing: go back to their faith in Islam and no longer compromise with the secularists of the modern world. In fact, their rhetoric is very similar to that of the fundamentalist churches: they want a theocracy, decry the secular state, hate immorality, want to legislate moral codes for nonbelievers, etc. There are also no homosexuals in the fundamentalist church just like in Iran! Radical does not necessarily mean violent. It does get that way on occasion. There are plenty of potential Eric Rudolph’s in fundamentalist Christianity (judging by the number of “Run Rudy Run” bumper stickers I saw in church parking lot around my humble southern school a few years back). While I admit there is, for the time being anyway, more violence among Muslims than Christians (as opposed to, lets say, post Constantine Rome, the Crusades, the witch trials, the Inquisition, the KKK, and such banner years as 1572, and 1618-1648). But “radical” does not always mean “violent” for either faith. Like “Islomofascism", its another media buzz word with a checkered history and a limited shelf life!

Diogenes, at 10:10 am EST on December 6, 2007

“There is no question that sending a letter to the entire student body criticizing the posters was a public reprimand and as such a form of punishment of speech. It carried the force of an official sanction.”

I would not go this far. Just as students enjoy considerable 1st amendment rights, a school, via its deans, can send letters arguing that the point the students are trying to make is wrong, immoral, or crazy. Unfortunately, some deans (usually not academic deans) word these letters in such a way as to actually threaten punishment. Most of the time non-academic deans can’t distinguish between the own views and the opinions of the college, so their letters come out awkward.

The Attorney General can pretty much send out whatever letters he wants. He can send out letters saying that he is “investigating” just about anything. Since they are not of legal effect, they really don’t matter. The discussion of what the ‘law is” is obviously an ongoing discussion and the AG is free to participate in it.

Larry, at 11:05 am EST on December 6, 2007

Couple of Thoughts

Larry and Professor Cohen have the right take on the Florida situation, so not much more to say there. Not sure, though, why there always has to be a gratuitous (and in this case irrelevant) reference to the Duke lacrosse case. The institution never “slandered” the players, essentially or otherwise. I know this is the Greatest Injustice Ever Committed, but people really need to move on.

The only other thing I wanted to note was that quite a few of the supporters of the radically libertarian Ron Paul are tenured professors at state universities. Doesn’t sound real libertarian to me...

Unapologetically Tenured, at 11:55 am EST on December 6, 2007

bigotry and defamation

Professor Cohen,

You write, “However, it is not the job of college administrators to give the students an official public scolding.”

It probably isn’t “their job” in the sense that it isn’t in their job description. But, there isn’t anything illegal about it, either.

The behavior of the non-law professors at Duke (for obvious reasons, no law professor would engage in such prejudgment of a criminal matter) wasn’t illegal, either. It was ill-advised, and dumb. But, as a practical matter, my guess is that most Americans think that arrested people are guilty of something. So, it is hardly outside the mainstream of political thought.

But, I fail to see the parallel between Duke and Florida. There nothing illegal about being a “bigot.” (Nor is it “defamatory per se” under Florida law, unlike accusing someone of being a rapist.) It seems that their comments were not an accusation of a crime, but rather an analysis of a text.

Larry, at 2:20 pm EST on December 6, 2007

Clarification

Larry,

I never said that the actions of either the administrator in Florida or the attorney general were illegal. My point was that they were poor judgment.

The administrators and faculty at Duke who very publicly condemned the lacrosse players certainly did nothing illegal. But their conduct was awful. And the school essentially acknowledged as much by paying the players an undetermined amount as part of a settlement.

You don’t “settle” with someone unless there is at least a plausible reason to believe you have harmed them.

Jonathan Cohen, Professor of mathematics at DePaul University, at 3:20 pm EST on December 6, 2007

mostly agreement with Professor Cohen

Professor Cohen, I agree with your first parts. As to reasons for settlement, settlements can be on the basis of many things. Most in private litigation common is the “litagative risk” settlement, in which both sides assess their changes of winning based some view of the law and some view of the “facts.” Examples of common reasons to settle private litigation without a subjective belief in the plausibility of one’s own fault include, a 1) prior determinations of liability leading to a settlement of damages (even though there is disagreement on the issue of liability), 2) a need to “engineer” litigation by eliminating certain claims to avoid bad precedent or to change the dynamics of ongoing litigation, or 3) a desire end one’s own litigation by allowing one’s opponent to seek indemnification of contribution from a 3d party, usually an insurance carrier.

LArry, at 4:50 pm EST on December 6, 2007

GWU flyers were a hoax

I thought by now everyone knew that the offending flyers alleged to have been posted by the YAF at GWU for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week were a hoax. The organization that put them around, in an effort to discredit organizers, admitted their action in a letter to the administration and the student body. You can read their letter describing their motivation at this site.

http://files.gwhatchet.com/i/071008/letter.pdf

Kc, at 10:55 pm EST on December 6, 2007

Suicide Bombing

TA: Good question. My guess is that persons raised in Christian societies are more “indivudualistic” and tend to use automatic handguns when they “take people with them” after going postal or something. You’re right. It’s not in the name of Christianity.

My guess also is that you won’t see suicide bombing (Timothy McVeigh parked his truck and got out of the way) because the western Christian world emerged as economically, politically, and militarily dominant in the last 500 years, so it doesn’t need martyrs, except that McVeigh got caught and was martyred anyway.

If you want to get a sense of why some in the “Middle East” feel a deep and abiding insult, especially to their religion, there are all kinds of scholarship that cover everything from economic, political and military history to cultural history. Edward Said’s “Orientalism” and “Culture and Empire” come to mind. Scope them out for whatever explanatory power these books might have.

My guess is that a few, a very few, Muslim groups have, in the 20th and 21rst century, “coped” by falling in on themselves so to speak, constructing a version of Islam that is not only anachronistic, but psychologically regressed as well. Sorry, I can recall neither the book nor the author in recent years arguing that suicide bombing appears endemic, under certain circumstances, to being occupied by a foreign power, and it cuts across religious lines.

For a sense of how some may be experiencing the unwelcome dominance from without we have only to look at the film “Independence Day” (1996). If not quite the physical damage of the alien space ships then the sense of devastation to one’s meaning system may be perceived as it is portrayed so graphically in that film. Remember that Randy Quaid finally, successfully, flies his fighter jet into the underbelly opening of an alien space ship and detonates a nuclear device: a suicide bombing that to this day elicits cheers in the movie theater.

The glory of suicide bombing is indeed found in the Judeo-Christian tradition. As a Southern Baptist I remember my Sunday School teachers celebrating Samson when he pulled down the pillars of the Phillistine’s temple on himself and children inside—all for the glory of God. That, of course, is only a story. But under the right circumstances, groups of people who have gotten really twisted in their thinking can indeed come to enact such stories in real life. That response to history does not make it right. It’s just that, were the situation reversed in the last 500 years, and some tradition other than the Judeo-Christian one was world-dominant in so many ways, who knows? There might be such thing as a Christian strapping explosives to his or her body and. . . . And the “civilized world” would see Christianity itself as flawed, depraved even.

That’s my guess. But you raise an excellent question.

Apologetically Inured, at 12:00 pm EST on December 8, 2007