The American cultural establishment behaves like the Saudis when it comes to Islam. Op-ed.
A professor at Hamline University, Erika López Prater, showed a picture of the Prophet Mohammed in class. The decision sparked a storm on campus after students reported the incident and the university refused to renew the professor’s contract. The case took place during an art history lesson. The lecturer had shown images of two paintings of Muhammad from the 14th and 16th centuries.
Medieval works are considered canonical. The teacher had given a two-minute warning to the class beforehand so that observant Muslim students could choose not to view the material for religious reasons. The case was reported by the university’s Muslim Student Association, which described the lecturer as an “Islamophobe” in an email to staff.
Hamline president Fayneese S. Miller said respect for Muslim students “should have replaced academic freedom.” We are at this level now. What about respect for Catholic, Jewish or Hindu students?
The American cultural establishment behaves like the Saudis when it comes to Islam.
It is enough to recall “The Jewel of Medina”, the novel by the American Sherry Jones on the life of Mohammed’s third wife, censored and rejected by the book giant Random House after having bought it, after paying an advance to the author, and having already launched an ambitious campaign promotional.
In recent days, the television giant HBO has censored some episodes of South Park on Mohammed.
After the massacre of the editorial staff of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, whose seventh anniversary is being celebrated these days, all the major American liberal newspapers, television networks and photo agencies, starting with the “Big Three” (Msnbc, Cnn and Ap) , vied with each other in justifying the decision to censor the cover of Charlie Hebdo, the one in which Mohammed is crying and saying “all is forgiven”.
Brandeis University has withdrawn the honorary degree from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the most famous Islamic dissident, under security guard since 2004, now accused of “Islamophobia”.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has refused to exhibit the Danish cartoons for fear of attacks, but the editions of Yale University Press have gone one step further. They published the book by Jytte Klausen, “The Cartoons that shook the World”, dedicated to the history of Mohammed caricatures, without reproducing the cartoons! Self-censorship and intellectual dhimmitude has reached one of the most prestigious American universities, once one of the symbols of freedom of thought in the United States.
I repeat: The university editions of Yale have decided not to publish the Mohammed cartoons in a book that speaks, strange but true, precisely of the Mohammed cartoons. Not even the illustration of Dante’s Inferno by Gustave Doré.
In the case of Yale there is the aggravating circumstance of money. At Yale, Saudi Arabia has donated $10 million to create a Center for Sharia Studies. The Wahhabis, the custodians of Islam in Mecca, have funded chairs of Islam at Harvard, Georgetown, Columbia, Rice University, Arkansas and Berkeley, the major American academic centers. Saudi Arabia alone donated $650 million to American campuses from 2012 to 2018. Then there are funds from Qatar, the Emirates, Kuwait and other Muslim states.
Flemming Rose, the Danish journalist who first published the Mohammed cartoons and who has lived under guard ever since, took years to find an American publisher for his book, “The Tyranny of Silence”. He had to settle for the small Cato Institute. He said: “They hesitated because they were afraid of what would happen.”
No wonder the American academic world has shown no sympathy for Salman Rushdie, who lost an eye and a hand in a bombing last summer.
And just see what happened to Molly Norris, the Seattle Post cartoonist guilty of having published a cartoon about Mohammed, who became a “ghost”. She changed her name, and has never showed herself in publiic again. Nothing more is known about her after the FBI placed her in a witness protection program. One of its employers wrote to the Seattle Weekly: “She compares it to cancer. It could be nothing, it could be urgent, it could go away and never come back, or it could pop up again when one least expects it…” .
After the Rushdie case, we live in a new era, in which every publisher, academic, journalist, writer, editorial director and politician is self-censoring on Muslims. The “rules of Regensburg” and of the Pope who quoted a phrase from a Byzantine emperor about Mohammed and was lynched worldwide.
Clearly, Islam is winning.
Giulio Meotti is an Italian journalist with Il Foglio and writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author, in English, of the book “A New Shoah”, that researched the personal stories of Israel’s terror victims, published by Encounter and of “J’Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel” published by Mantua Books, in addition to books in Italian. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Gatestone, Frontpage and Commentary.
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