Academia and the Religion of Peace

| May 10, 2020

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment to the Constitution, the backbone of law in this country. Most of us here raised our right hands and swore allegiance, once if not several times. Seems of late our rights defined in that document are are getting thin, if not plain trampled upon. Dem Governors and Mayors, even down to unelected county and town “officials” have shamelessly taken our rights away under the guise of safety.

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
-Benjamin Franklin

Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the Ivory Towers of Academia, and it’s been that way for a long time. A male student accused of impropriety against a female is instantly expelled without recourse, Conservative speech is routinely crushed, anyone straying from the narrative, banned. So this story isn’t really shocking at all.

Poetrooper sends.

Arizona: Muslim Students Threaten to Kill Prof for Suggesting Islam Is Violent

By: ROBERT SPENCER

This will teach those Islamophobes that Islam is a religion of peace: a professor is facing death threats for suggesting otherwise. Nicholas Damask, Ph.D., has taught political science at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona for 24 years. But now he is facing a barrage of threats, and his family, including his 9-year-old grandson and 85-year-old parents, is in hiding, while College officials are demanding that he apologize – all for the crime of speaking the truth about the motivating ideology behind the threat of Islamic jihad worldwide.

Damask, who has an MA in International Relations from American University in Washington, D.C., and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Cincinnati, says he is “to my knowledge, the only tenured political science faculty currently teaching in Arizona to write a doctoral dissertation on terrorism.” He has taught Scottsdale Community College’s World Politics for each of the 24 years he has worked at the school.

Professor Damask’s troubles began during the current Spring semester, when a student took exception to three quiz questions. The questions were:

Who do terrorists strive to emulate? A. Mohammed
Where is terrorism encouraged in Islamic doctrine and law? A. The Medina verses [i.e., the portion of the Qur’an traditionally understood as having been revealed later in Muhammad’s prophetic career]
Terrorism is _______ in Islam. A. justified within the context of jihad.

Damask explained: “All quiz questions on each of my quizzes, including the ones in question here, are carefully sourced to the reading material. On this quiz, questions were sourced to the Qur’an, the hadiths, and the sira (biography) of Mohammed, and other reputable source material.” And indeed, the three questions reflect basic facts that are readily established by reference to Islamic texts and teachings and numerous statements of terrorists themselves.

Despite this, the student emailed Damask to complain that he was “offended” by these questions, as they were “in distaste of Islam.” Damask recounted: “Until this point, notably, the student had expressed no reservations about the course material and indeed he said he enjoyed the course.”

Damask sent two lengthy emails to the student responding to his complaints, but to no avail. A social media campaign began against Damask on the College’s Instagram account. Damask notes: “An unrelated school post about a school contest was hijacked, with supporters of the student posting angry, threatening, inflammatory and derogatory messages about the quiz, the school, and myself.”

At this point, College officials should have defended Professor Damask and the principle of free inquiry, but that would require a sane academic environment. Scottsdale Community College officials, Damask said, “stepped in to assert on a new Instagram post that the student was correct and that I was wrong – with no due process and actually no complaint even being filed – and that he would receive full credit for all the quiz questions related to Islam and terrorism.”

On May 1, Damask had a conference call with Kathleen Iudicello, Scottsdale Community College’s Dean of Instruction, and Eric Sells, the College’s Public Relations Marketing Manager. Damask recalls: “I was not offered to write any part of the school’s response, and there was no discussion of academic freedom or whether the College was even supportive of me to teach about Islamic terrorism. The very first point I made with them on the call (and virtually the only input I had) is that I insisted that the College’s release was to have no mention of any actions to be required to be taken by me personally, I was very clear about that.”

Predictably, Iudicello and Sells ignored that. They issued an apology to the student and to the “Islamic community,” and stated on the College’s Instagram page that Damask would be “required” to apologize to the student for the quiz questions, as the questions were “inappropriate” and “inaccurate,” and would be permanently removed from Damask’s exams.

Damask also had three phone calls with Iudicello, who gave him a bracing introduction into today’s academic funhouse world, where if someone is offended by the truth, it’s the truth that has to be deep-sixed. “During one call with Iudicello,” Damask recounts, “she stated that my quiz questions were ‘Islamophobic,’ that before continuing to have any further class content on Islamic terrorism I would likely need to meet with an Islamic religious leader to go over the content, and that I would likely need to take a class (perhaps at Arizona State) taught by a Muslim before teaching about Islamic terrorism.”

“The irony here,” says Damask, “is that literally during this phone call, I and my wife were tossing socks and jammies and our nine-year-old grandson’s toys into a suitcase to get the hell out of the house because of the death threats made by Islamic commenters on the College’s Instagram page.”

The rest of the article may be viewed here: PJ Media

Thanks, Poe.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 19 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Category: America, Guest Link, The Constitution

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Sparks

I think there should be a bounty on the phuckers.

5th/77th FA

“I think there should be a rope around the necks of the phuckers.” There…I fixed it for you.

The only religion in the world where the Commandments bid you to kill the non-believers. How quickly we have forgotten the treachery of the 9/11 attacks. A cancer in the body starts as a small spot. If not rooted out it will overtake and destroy the host body.

Anyone else seen the latest George Soros backed potential Presidential Candidate from Michigan?

Hack Stone

He should head over to Rutgers. The Professors over there are under the delusion that you can say whatever you with no repercussions as long as you have tenure.

https://www.theblaze.com/news/rutgers-professor-blames-trump-voters-covid-deaths

Hack Stone

She also blamed Donald Trump for obesity in African American women. Judging by her photo, the last time that she saw 135 pounds was in 3rd Grade.

11B-Mailclerk

One nice outcome of thexcessive stupidity of this damn-panic is that folks are looking long and hard at what passes for education.

Folks are learning that there are top quality online and home alternatives to the cesspits of failure called “government schools”.

Folks are getting to listen in on their kids attending Asinine-101 and Marxism-102 at “university” indoctrination. They get to see what garbage is bought for their kids with their hard earned (or harder borrowed) tuition dollars. Again, they are discovering quality alternatives to academic-in-name-only idiocracy.

That Djinn is -not- going back in the lamp.

Likewise, folks get to see the jackboots warming up for the next act, and I think some folks are going to get a surprise come early November.

OWB

How DARE he! Just because he actually knows the topic, he should know by now that he should never share the truth with academics or students.

By the way – the academic version of Utopia never seems to include the discovery of truth as a joyful journey. Oh, well.

11B-Mailclerk

“Don’t call us violent or we will kill you.”

The irony has to be seen to be believed.

Why doesn’t that “freedom from religion” idiot go after those religious idiots who say stuff like that? Ignoring them could be interpreted as a lack of sincerity,

or, of cowardice.

The Other Whitey

I had a college teacher say some offensive and ignorant things about my religion (Roman Catholicism). She ignored anything I said to debate her assertions, and was rude and condescending about it to boot. I didn’t threaten any kind of violence, though. I didn’t complain to the school either, because we all know that would’ve led exactly nowhere due to Christianity in general being fair game in academia (though islam is to be coddled at all costs). I just said, “Alright, if you wanna be that way about it, then fuck you too.”

I got the last laugh a month later, though. She tried to advance some really off-the-wall conspiracy crap concerning the adoption of the M16 that ran afoul of both my gun nut and history nerd sensibilities. After whipping out some facts, including technical data, ballistics, differences between the AR-15 prototype, XM16, M16, A1 through A4 models, M4, and commercial AR models, and briefly explaining the manual of arms, takedown, maintenance, modifications, and likely malfunctions, I finished with this: “Are you sure you wanna keep arguing this with me? Because we’ve pretty well established that I know a hell of a lot more about it than you do.”

Ret_25X

I had a professor in grad school who continually told us that no nation other than the USA would enter into any agreements with Israel.

My major work for that class was on the trade and mutual defense treaty network in the Levant and Eastern Med. One item that caught my eye was the fact that Israel did, in fact, have several negotiated treaties for various things with Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Greece, and SA.

When I did my presentation for the final grade the professor was visibly angered that these nations had agreements with Israel.

He gave me a C…I appealed the grade and the department head agreed with me…even though he also hated Israel, he agreed that the research was correct. I left that school and major after another incident like this about tax policy.

I should have known that “major” east coast universities would be as full of sh*t as Kaleefornya universities.

This is why I have less respect for a person with a PhD than I do for a farmer or plumber. In the PhD’s case, they appear to master something but always seem to be wrong, as is evidenced by the fact that all true catastrophic failures have a bone head PhD behind them. The tradesman masters their trade and feeds the world.

Ret_25X

Nothing is more dangerous to freedom and prosperity is a politician with a PhD advisor.

FuzeVT

If someone told me that PC was invented by an Islamist in the early 90s as a way to shackle any truthful discussion of their religion, I would believe it. How’d it start out?
“Don’t say the N-word”. Ok, no problem.
“Don’t use ‘retarded’ as a pejorative”. Well, I’m going to have to come up with some new words for all of my pals for the dumb stuff they do, but ok.
“Don’t say fat”. Aren’t they? “It offends them”. Yeah, so? “We need to stop offending people”. That one may be difficult, because in the military you sometimes have to say people are fat so you can tell them not to fat be or they will get their fat ass kicked out, but I guess.
“Pointing out that Islam is violent is wrong”. But they are, they just killed 3000 people in NY and DC. “They were reacting to us”. I don’t really care about that so much. The Japanese were reacting to our oil embargo and other political actions in the 30s but I don’t think I would have cared much about that, either. “It’s Islamophobic”. So we’re making up words now, too? Countless thousands of people since Islam became a thing (and to this very day) have reasons to ‘phobic’ of Islam, but I guess that doesn’t make it an irrational fear, but a real one. “We’ll get you fired”. Screw you, my business/school will defend me. . . .

ArmyATC

The irony is truly amazing. Adherents to the so-called “religion of peace” threaten the lives of the professor and his family, thereby proving that what he said was correct. That point flies right over the pointy heads of them and their leftist defenders.

11B-Mailclerk

Funny how so many enemies of the USA, and of Western Civilization, seem to lack a concept of “truth”.

SFC D