Free speech takes a hard knock at Columbia and Princeton Universities

JUST hours before Nonie Darwish was due to speak at US universities Columbia and Princeton on the subject of Sharia Law and Perspectives on Israel the events were abruptly cancelled on the grounds that her talk “might offend the Muslim community”.

Nonie Darwish

We can see why Muslims on campus would wish to silence the 60-year-old activist. Not only is she a Muslim apostate (she converted to Christianity) but is also pro-Israel. The Egypian-born human rights campaigner established the Arabs for Israel blog which describes itself as an organisation of Arabs and Muslims who “respect and support the State of Israel”.

Darwish is convinced that:

Islam is an authoritarian ideology that is attempting to impose on the world the norms of seventh-century culture of the Arabian Peninsula. She writes that Islam is a ‘sinister force’ that must be resisted and contained. She has said that it is hard to ‘comprehend that an entire religion and its culture believes God orders the killing of unbelievers’. and accuses Islam and Sharia of forming a retrograde ideology that adds greatly to the world’s stock of misery.

Furthermore she claims the Koran is a text that is ‘violent, incendiary, and disrespectful’ and says that barbarities such as brutalisation of women, the persecution of homosexuals, honour killings, the beheading of apostates and the stoning of adulterers come directly out of the Koran.

Darwish, auther of Cruel and and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Sharia Law, may have ditched Islam, but sadly she has certainly has not embraced secularism. She is now an evangelical Christian. Writing on the fundie website, WorldNetDaily, she blames Princeton Imam Sohaib Sultan for scuppering her talks at the two univeristies.

The imam, Muslim Students Association and the Arab Society all said that, to Muslims, I am akin to the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads and neo-Nazis. According to Shariah, their claim could be right in the sense that Muslim blasphemy and apostasy laws regard those who question Islam as enemies of the state, a crime punishable by death.

She adds:

I understand why Jewish groups disinvited me after Muslim pressure, since they are the ones who must live daily with Muslim groups who can make life unpleasant. Jewish groups are trying to make friends with Muslims to show the world ‘it can happen’.They are trying to accomplish in the small world of campus life what Israel has failed to accomplish for generations. Sadly, they cannot see that appeasement has already been tried and failed in real life.

For centuries, Jews, Copts, Assyrians, Kurds, Lebanese Christians and others had to live under Sharia where they could not have equal rights under the law with Muslims. Those who attempted to live under self-rule were crushed. Minorities have left and are leaving the Middle East to escape forced Islamization and Arabisation. Women are still being stoned, and apostate and honour killers are getting away with murder.

Darwish says her speech at Princeton was going to start this way:

I want to stress that I am not here to offend the good and peace-loving Muslims. Most people, including myself, don’t want or care to criticise religion, in the sense that it is a personal relationship with God. But if a religion, any religion, expands itself to the point of a one-party political and legal system, while condemning those who question to death, then it makes perfect sense that such a religion has put itself in the realm of criticism.

No religion or ideology can be beyond questioning when human rights are at stake. Religious or secular, we all must question obstacles to freedom and peace. The rights of any one religion must never supersede human rights or the rights of other religions to flourish. Tolerating intolerance is not a virtue; it is gross negligence.

By stifling free speech, shaming speakers of the truth and calling them names, we allow tyranny to win. Fear tactics has worked for centuries in the Muslim world; now it is spreading like cancer in US institutions of higher learning.