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Brandeis’s
dishonor diaries
By
Charles Jacobs and Ilya Feoktistov
Imam
Suhaib Webb was a happy man last Wednesday. The radical Islamist leader of
Boston’s Saudi- funded mega mosque boasted that his Muslim community persuaded
Brandeis University President Fred Lawrence to withdraw a Brandeis honorary
degree from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the courageous, Somalia-born humanrights activist
who fled – and who campaigns against – the horrors radical Islam inflicts on
women.
Webb
blasted out thanks to his tens of thousands of social media followers, to the
Brandeis Muslim Student Alliance and to Brandeis Professor of Islam Joseph
Lumbard for their activist work. He cheered: “Great job, ,!” Umma is the
Muslim community.
If you
watch the videos of his sermons, you might conclude that Webb is homophobic,
anti-Semitic
and a misogynist,
a man who claims
that uncovered women are “bad people.” His mosque’s website once had
instructions for men on how to beat their wives.
Ali’s
brave words expose this kind of abuse of women in the Islamic world. She
threatens to contest – and to expose – Islamist ideology for what it truly is.
So Webb sought to have her silenced. And he succeeded.
If
Brandeis President Fred Lawrence lived in a world not drenched in post-modernist
political correctness, he would be Ali’s most natural champion. But he is
owned and ruled by that canon. Too many people do not understand how much
America’s ideological world has been shifting over these last 30
years.
It was
almost exactly a year ago – just after Rabbi Ronne Friedman of Boston’s Temple
Israel publicly
endorsed his “depth, sincerity and religious scholarship” in an expression
of Jewish interreligious “tolerance” -- that Webb attacked
Ali. He did it from the podium at the annual banquet of the Council on American-
Islamic Relations (CAIR), the extremist Hamas front group that led the hateful
campaign on Brandeis to snub her. Webb called Ali – a black African woman who
converted away from Islam – an “idiot” and wondered: “How can she teach at the
University of Phoenix, let alone Harvard?” (Ali is a fellow at Harvard
University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.)
Ayaan
Hirsi Ali It’s a topsy-turvy world. Most Jews older than 40 don’t have a clue
about the fast-flowing river of politically correct thought that runs beneath
and undermines our society’s foundations of history, reason, morality and logic.
Most do not comprehend the difference between the mental world in which our
children are steeped (in their schools and in the popular culture) and the 1960s
ideology of our elites. That’s why so many were shocked that a “Jewish” and
“liberal” university could publicly dishonor a black woman who fights for human
rights.
Many
are shocked because they do not know the new rules of social and political life,
and how deeply those rules have penetrated. But only by knowing today’s reigning
rules that comprise a secular theology with a complex hierarchy of values could
one understand how Webb, a white man, can call a black woman an idiot, question
her qualifications to teach at Harvard and not be relegated to social
hell.
Only
operating under those rules could Lawrence publicly shame and dishonor a woman
who escaped her medieval society – after having been genitally mutilated, forced
by her devoutly religious family into marriage, and threatened with death – and
who now bravely faces down her murderous enemies. Only in this new and PC world
can Webb, the white son of an Oklahoma bank executive, claim greater victimhood
and moral sanction from Lawrence than a brutalized but brave African woman
simply because he adopted a fake accent and converted to Islam while Ali
converted out of it.
Parents
considering the huge tuitions that colleges now fetch are persuaded to pay
through the nose in part because, yes, they deem it practical, but also because
they are moved by glowing phrases about the glory and power of ideas. They have
yet to understand that the ideas in power on today’s campus can turn on a black
heroine and give victory to an Islamist because the president of a “Jewish,”
“liberal” center of learning needs to be in line with the Islamist, even though
he claims that Jews were Muhammad’s “greatest antagonizers” and that animosity
toward the Jews is understandable.
On May
9, 2006, I met Ali in Harvard Square for breakfast. She was to speak at the
Kennedy School that night. She would relate over toast and coffee that her
adopted country, the Netherlands, was soon to withdraw her body guards; that the
Dutch decided they could no longer protect her.
While
in the Netherlands, Ali had co-produced with Vincent Van Gogh’s
great-grandnephew Theo Van Gogh a film called “Submission” about the Islamic
oppression of women. In response, CAIR’s fellow Islamic extremists stirred up so
much violent hatred against her and Van Gogh that one of their followers decided
to act. The Muslim terrorist ambushed Van Gogh in a street in broad daylight,
shot him eight times, sliced his neck until his head was barely hanging on by a
flap of skin, and pinned a note to his mutilated body with a knife. The note was
for Ali. It read: “You’re next.” Interestingly, the recent attacks against Ali
by Webb and CAIR are motivated by a new film she made about suffering Muslim
women called “Honor Diaries.”
Waiting
in the lobby of the Harvard Inn – she was 10 minutes late – I saw strategically
placed at every possible entrance three very large, athletic blonde men whose
jackets bulged with muscle (or metal). A smiling giant walked up to me, said my
name, and when I confirmed, led me into a private breakfast room. I had put my
hand on his back as we walked. It felt sheathed in steel. He had me sit facing
away from the door.
Ali
entered the room and her guards left. We spoke of her situation briefly and then
turned to the business of that night’s panel, sponsored by the Dutch Student
Club at Harvard, which had, I had to tell Ali, gotten cold feet and begged me to
have her mitigate her message about Islam.
Today,
I’d have to tell her that at Brandeis much of what counts as Western
civilization got cold feet and won’t stand with her. It may therefore not stand
up for itself. That this happened at the hands of a Jewish president of a Jewish
center of learning is extraordinarily painful.
But now
comes the pushback: After the shock and dismay, people are mobilizing. I see
that professors, writers and intellectuals, many of them liberals, are coming to
their senses. The resultant protests and discussions will be a gauge of just
have far we have fallen and just how well we can recover.
Charles Jacobs
is president and Ilya Feoktistov is research director of Americans for Peace and
Tolerance (www.peaceandtolerance.org).
Charles
Jacobs
Follow
me on Twitter: @DrCharlesJacobs |
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