Wednesday, November 3, 2004
Meryl Yourish is on the story of Palestinian students behaving badly at San Francisco State U with a little historical perspective from a similar incident a couple of years ago.
I remember when I was a student at BU in the late 80's, there was a program to bring a group of Lebanese students in from overseas to study. The one condition was that they were forbidden from participating in any form of political activity whatsoever. One student simply gave a newspaper interview and for that minor infraction was sent back to Beirut so fast it made your head spin. BU President John Silber was draconian enough and powerful enough not to give a damn about any carping about fairness and free speech. 'They were privileged to be here to study, not play at politics" was the attitude. You know the rules, violate them and back you go. I'd like to know how many of the people engaging in the misbehavior at SFSU are citizens of this country (probably a large number, of course).
I don't know what the solution is to these stories of problems that keep coming up - well, that's not exactly true. A few expulsions would certainly be in order, but I know that too much tolerance of too much bad behavior will lead inevitably to scenes like this:
Frontpage: Death of a “Blasphemer”:
Others were not quite so cautious. A Dutch student declared: “This has to end, once and for all. You cannot just kill people on the street in a brutal way when you disagree with them.” Job Cohen, the mayor of Amsterdam, declared: “We will show loud and clear that freedom of speech is important to us.”
Freedom of speech: Eight weeks ago, van Gogh’s film Submission aired on Dutch TV. The brainchild of an ex-Muslim member of the Dutch Parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Submission decried the mistreatment of Muslim women — and even featured images of battered women wearing see-through robes that exposed their breasts, with verses from the Qur’an written on their bodies.
In poor taste? Insulting? Probably that was a bit of the intention. Van Gogh, the great grandson of Vincent van Gogh’s brother (“dear Theo”), was a well-known gadfly on the Dutch scene; in the past, he had attacked Jewish and Christians with enough vehemence to elicit formal complaints. But after Submission, the death threats started to come. Van Gogh, in the eyes of many Dutch Muslims, had blasphemed Islam — an offense that brought the death penalty. The filmmaker was unconcerned. The film itself, he said, was “the best protection I could have. It’s not something I worry about.”
His death shows that it’s something that everyone who values freedom should worry about...
Update: Several posts at Peaktalk regarding the Van Gogh murder:
ANOTHER ASSASSINATION IN HOLLAND
A FIFTH COLUMN
BACK TO VAN GOGH: HIRSI ALI REACTS
