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Robert Spencer: Indiana University Hosts Deported Jihad Mastermind as Featured Speaker, History of Moslem Art Prof Fired for Showing Students Moslem Art
[PJMedia] In yet another sign of the thoroughgoing corruption of American academia, Indiana University’s McKinney School of Law and its Moslem Philanthropy Initiative recently co-sponsored a conference with a man who admitted to being a key member of a jihad terror group and was accordingly deported from the United States. According to an Investigative Project on Terrorism report Tuesday, and to his great credit (although he was acting after a barrage of complaints), Amir Pasic, dean of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, apologized for the university’s role in showcasing this terror leader, Sami al-Arian. Pasic did explain, however, that the university had hosted al-Arian because he had done such great work combating "Islamophobia
...the irrational fear that Moslems will act the way they usually do...
." As "Islamophobia" is a manipulative propaganda term designed to inhibit criticism of jihad violence and Sharia oppression, this is hardly reassuring.

Sami al-Arian pleaded guilty back in 2006 to a charge of "conspiracy to make or receive contributions of funds to or for the benefit of Paleostinian Islamic Jihad
...created after many members of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood decided the organization was becoming too moderate. Operations were conducted out of Egypt until 1981 when the group was exiled after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. They worked out of Gaza until they were exiled to Lebanon in 1987, where they clove tightly to Hezbollah. In 1989 they moved to Damascus, where they remain a subsidiary of Hezbollah...
, a Specially Designated Terrorist" organization. He was then deported from the United States, but he remains a darling of American academia. Back in 2021, according to JNS, al-Arian organized a conference that was co-sponsored by the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School for International Studies. Conference speakers denounced Israel as the "apartheid Jewish Zionist colonial state" and called for its eradication. The program, JNS reported, was "replete with Paleostinian propaganda, revisionist history, and blatant anti-Semitism and anti-Israel vitriol."

At that conference, Paleostinian Islamic Jihad’s al-Arian denounced Israel in the hysterically false terms that are now becoming familiar in America thanks to the likes of Reps. Ilhan Omar
...Somali-American Dem representative from Minnesota. She was apparently married to her brother and may be her own grandmaw on her mother's side...
 (D-Mogadishu) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Ramallah): "There is no doubt we are talking about a settler, colonialist movement. What we see here today is an attempt to depopulate the indigenous people, and bring in as many Jews from around the world and try to bring a system that is properly being identified now as apartheid. There is no doubt about this."

Israel, al-Arian thundered, was a "racist movement," a "Zionist onslaught" that was directed toward replacing the "indigenous people." The solution? Israel’s total destruction: "the essence of the struggle should be to dismantle this structure."

Neither Indiana University nor the University of Denver can plausibly claim that they didn’t know what they were getting into. al-Arian has been quite clear about his views for decades. Back in 1991, during a speech in reliably Democrat Chicago, aka The Windy City or Mobtown
...home of Al Capone, the Chicago Black Sox, a succession of Daleys, Barak Obama, and Rahm Emmanuel...
, al-Arian screamed: "The Koran is our constitution. Jihad is our path ... Victory to Islam... Death to Israel... Revolution... revolution till the victory."

Showing he hadn’t changed, in mid-December 2020, al-Arian spoke via Zoom at the Fourth International Conference on the Moslem Ummah. There al-Arian also called for "defeating and dismantling the Zionist project," adding: "We cannot pursue an ummah project without actually attaining our real independence. We cannot attain our real independence without dealing with the problem of Israel....As long as Israel exists, the ummah will stay weak and fragmented, and disunited and divided and dependent and under control."

Numerous American academics and other Leftists have counted al-Arian as a friend for years and were anxious to portray him as a victim of "Islamophobia." Before al-Arian pleaded guilty, he was dismissed from his post at the University of South Florida, whereupon Georgetown professor John Esposito claimed that al-Arian was merely falling victim to "anti-Arab and anti-Moslem bigotry."

Al-Arian himself pushed all the right buttons as well, declaring: "I’m a minority. I’m an Arab, I’m Paleostinian. I’m a Moslem. That’s not a popular thing to be these days. Do I have rights, or don’t I have rights?" In March 2002, Nicholas Kristof went to bat for the professor in the New York Times

... which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
: "The point is not whether one agrees with Professor al-Arian, a rumpled academic with a salt-and-pepper beard who is harshly critical of Israel (and also of repressive Arab countries) — but who also denounces terrorism, promotes inter-faith services with Jews and Christians, and led students at his Islamic school to a memorial service after 9/11 where they all sang ’God Bless America.’ No, the larger point is that a university, even a country, becomes sterile when people are too intimidated to say things out of the mainstream."

Re-painting History: University Fires Professor for Sharing Image of Muhammed in Islamic Arts Class

[PJMedia] Try to figure this one out: A professor was fired for Islamophobia
...the irrational fear that Moslems will act the way they usually do...
 after he shared a Moslem image of Islam’s most important religious figure in a class on Islamic art. If that doesn’t make sense to you, a Minnesota university would like to reeducate you.

In the earlier days of Islam, depictions of humans, including the Prophet Muhammed, were not taboo. Later, Islam turned iconoclastic and images of Muhammed — particularly his face — were condemned. This would not seem to have any application to a professor teaching American students about Islam and using a medieval image of the Moslem prophet to do so. But St. Paul, Minnesota’s Hamline University fired its Islamic arts instructor for showing his students an image of Mohammed from pre-iconoclast times, according to both The Siasat Daily and Jihad Watch.

For daring to show Islamic art in his Islamic art class, the unnamed instructor was reportedly accused by Hamline administrators of being "hateful, intolerant and Islamophobic" and hurting "the feeling of the Moslems" because of the ban on representations of Muhammed within modern Islam.

When I took a college class on Islamic art, my instructor showed us more than one depiction of Muhammed. To leave them out would be to erase an entire era of Islamic art — and not being Moslems, we were not required to rewrite (or re-paint) history. But Hamline’s student newspaper The Oracle called out the university’s instructor in a November issue, Siasat said, reporting the episode under "incidents of hate and discrimination." The university’s "associate vice president of inclusive excellence" — whatever that means — called sharing the image in class "undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic."

Siasat explained, "The artwork that landed the instructor into trouble depicts Prophet Muhammad receiving his first Koranic revelation. It is alleged that the painting of Prophet Muhammad is usually part of the Islamic art history classes in many universities across the world." I can testify to that from my own experience.

I guess Hamline, a private liberal arts institution founded in 1824, is more interested in woke pandering to authoritarian Sharia law than in educating their students.
Posted by: trailing wife 2023-01-03
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=654293