National Review Online’s Rod Dreher has a pretty damning piece about the state of campus tolerance toward differing views. A couple scholars who have documented the repression of Christians in Islamic states was invited to speak at Georgetown, but the frank discussion of the issue was apparently too much for anyone to handle. Even the group that sponsored the scholars disavowed her speech.
Two Jewish student leaders who sponsored the event wrote a bizarre letter to the Georgetown student newspaper complaing that the speakers made “no effort to make a clear distinction between pure, harmonious Islam, and the acts of a few who falsely claim to act in the name of Islam.”
One of the scholars, Bat Yeor, had an excellent retort to this absurd posture,
This is pure nonsense. When one studies the Inquisition or the Crusades, one does not feel obliged to make a clear distinction between ‘pure’ Christianity and those historical events. In a university, the examination of several analyses of history should be encouraged. The Muslim view is exclusively religion-based, and proceeds from the assumption that there is only one valid interpretation of history: the Islamic one. No criticism of jihad is accepted because it is a just war according to Muslim dogma.
This attitude imposes the worst law of dhimmitude on non-Muslims: the refusal of their evidence. The historical testimony of the millions of human victims of jihad is rejected on its face by this doctrinal attitude.
Dhimmitude, by the way, is Yeor’s term for the system of repression that Islamic sharia law directs at non-Muslims. Under sharia, non-Muslims may not testify against Muslims, may face blasphemy charges for teaching their religion (as happens in Pakistan), and are part of a two-classed legal system analogous to the two-tiered system that Jim Crow laws created for whites and blacks in the United States.
Source:
Damned If You Do. Rod Dreher, National Review Online, October 29, 2002.