How Fighting ‘Islamophobia’ Leads to Theocracy

By Daniel Greenfield, 14 Jan

The decision by Hamline University to purge a minority art teacher for showing a Shiite painting of Mohammed has traveled from the outskirts of a few blogs, and a student paper of the small private college in St. Paul, to art sites, a PEN condemnation and finally the New York Times.

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Erika Lopez Prater, an adjunct at Hamline, showed a Persian painting of Mohammed to her class. Aram Wedatalla, a president of the Muslim Student Association, objected. The MSA rallied to denounce her, along with its advisor, Nur Mood: the college’s Assistant Director of Social Justice Programs. The Latina professor was dumped and condemned as an Islamophobe. Jaylani Hussein, CAIR-Minnesota’s director came in to hold a session on Islamophobia. The MSA and CAIR have both been linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

When a religion professor pointed out that Muslims have different views on paintings of Mohammed, Hussein described such Muslims as “extremists” and argued that, “You can teach a whole class about why Hitler was good.”

The New York Times then describes how “Ms. Baker, the department head, and Dr. Everett, the administrator, separately walked up to the religion professor, put their hands on his shoulders and said this was not the time to raise these concerns”.

After years of ridiculing warnings that an alliance with Islamists would require them to enforce sharia law, liberals did just that at Hamline University. And this time their targets weren’t white men, but a minority woman and Shiite Muslim paintings.

Minnesota liberals have embraced diversity. And sometimes diversity requires purging a Latina academic trying to teach students about Islamic art because she used works from the Shiite side of the spectrum, rather than the Sunni one that the Muslim Brotherhood belongs to.

One of the paintings comes from Rashid al-D?n: a Jewish man who converted to Shiite Islam. His motives like those of the vast majority of converts was to avoid persecution and get ahead. The painting, like most Islamic pictoral art, is objectively terrible and could be improved on by a moderately talented six-year-old. The only reason Islamic art is ever taught is for diversity.

Islam was quickly tossed into everything after September 11 as a show of tolerance. Muslims, formerly obscure, became ground zero for diversity. A market for Islamic art heated up. Despite hard strictures against religion in the workplace, corporations and government offices felt the need to virtue signal with a show of support for Muslims. That meant posters with women wearing hijab and a lot of Koranic calligraphy in places that would never display a Bible.

Many Muslims were not happy to see Islamic scriptures displayed in ‘filthy’ places. Muslim groups had previously accused everything from a Nike sneaker to an ice cream swirl, and any set of curves, of blasphemously containing Allah’s name. They were enraged to see it being offered up for tattoos or hanging in the bathroom of a urologist’s office.

Islamists were never interested in “diversity”. What they wanted was for everyone to respect Islamic laws. In the name of tolerance, liberals became theocrats and Islamists used the grammar of diversity to eliminate any diversity. Confronted with objections, Hamline’s Islamists resorted to equating Shiite pictures of Mohammed with Hitler or the ‘N-word’.

Liberals, who accepted the premise that tolerance requires theocracy, are unable to navigate the issue. The New York Times interviewed a Persian Shiite professor at Duke who explained that he loves and shows pictures of Mohammed all the time. Yet the entire article never uses the terms, “Sunni” or “Shiite” or suggests that there are sectarian differences at work.. After having taken it on themselves to impose Islamic theocracy, they are reluctant to adjudicate it.

And yet, unlike Mohammed cartoons, what happened at Hamline University shows that the intersectional enforcement of Islamic theocracy alongside Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ and Planned Parenthood requires more than just banning criticism of Mohammed, but even suppressing other Islamic doctrines in favor of the supremacy of Sunni Islamists.

Anything else is a hate crime.

Hamline University’s social justice administration purged a Latina art teacher because she dared to show works from the Shiite canon which offended Sunnis linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Liberals found it very easy to support Islamic supremacism when it was a matter of banning conservative protesters from burning the Koran or mentioning that Mohammed was a child molester. But that was just the camel’s nose creeping into the tent. The rest of the camel requires that America be reordered thoroughly in line with Islamic law in every possible detail.

While liberals see a distinction between a defaced Koran, a Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Mohammed and a Shiite painting of Mohammed, to the Muslim Brotherhood there is no difference. And the Democrat political establishment and the leftist cultural affiliates that surrendered to the Brotherhood’s front groups have to decide where to draw the line.

Islam has been in a state of perpetual civil war for most of its existence. Muslim civil wars have killed far more people in the last decade than all our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And we’ve imported that civil war into America.

That’s not just idle talk or conspiracy theories. The worst series of Muslim murders in America were carried out by an Afghan Sunni targeting Afghan Shiites in Albuquerque. Importing Islam doesn’t just mean machete attacks in Times Square, it also meant three teens who were arrested in November for plotting to kill everyone in a Shiite mosque in Chicago.

The leftists who got into bed with Sunni Islamists thought that all they had to do was make Americans defer to Islamic theocracy, but getting schoolchildren to visit mosques or convincing our leaders to ban criticism of Islam was the easy part. The hard part is doing what the Muslims themselves were never able to do for any real length of time: maintain a unified theocracy.

Hamline University had a lot more Sunnis than Shiites. Its Islamic student organization is the MSA. And the leadership found it expedient to accept Sunni Islamic theocracy and denounce Shiite depictions of Mohammed. Nationally, liberals are less comfortable with that bargain. PEN has denounced Hamline and the New York Times awkwardly suggests it’s a complex issue.

It’s complex, but not in a way that the media or their party are willing to discuss or accept.

Islamists repeatedly tell us that there is “only one Islam”. What they really mean is that there’s only one Islam that they will accept. Sunnis, with their superior numbers and Muslim Brotherhood organizations financed by oil money, dominate. And it is now our job to help them enforce that “one Islam” in America. Sharia means that we are their religious police.

Intersectionality has outsourced the enforcement of Islamic theocracy to social justice groups, campus administrators, corporations, government offices and all the woke institutions.

Wokeness is sharia. That is the awkward reality playing out at Hamline which brought in its first black president, who denounced academic freedom for permitting the display of Mohammed art, where Islamists were appointed to administer social justice, and now faces a liberal backlash.

But the backlash carefully avoids the central issues, especially the conflation of theocracy with tolerance, which is at the heart of the post 9/11 dirty deal that liberals made with Islamists.

Until they’re ready to rethink that deal, they’ll have to enforce Islamic law in America.

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Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.<
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