Reports from Local Islamofascism Lectures

Here are three reports on local lectures given yesterday as part of Islamofascism Week:

• Solomonia attended the Daniel Pipes lecture at Tufts and wrote a good review of the event, lots of photos from it too. He reports that the crowd was generally well-behaved.   Pipes' low-key and dispassionate demeanor had something to do with that, I bet.  Lots of protestors handed out "Fight Hate" flyers.  Yes, my dears, that's the point of Islamofascism Week, to fight hate, hate against non-Muslims, women, and Muslims who aren't considered "real" Muslims by the fanatics.  "Fight Hate" is exactly the point. Hopefully, some students got it.

• The University of Rhode Island student newspaper reports on a lecture by Women's Studies Professor  Donna Hughes.  "Hughes told roughly 35 people in the audience that the two largest obstructions to women's rights are Islamic fundamentalism and sex trafficking."  She noted that some folks are reluctant or afraid to condemn women's rights violations in other countries, thinking that they have no right to judge another culuture.   "What it translates into is being silent, and accepting some of the worst human rights violations against women," Hughes said.  Hughes maintains that the world has a responsibility to protect the rights of Muslim women (and children), among the most repressed in the world. She believes that the solution to the problem is to develop Islamic interpretation of the Quran that support women's rights.  Many Muslim feminists, Middle Eastern and Western - agree with that and are developing just such interpretations.  You can read the full text of Hughes' lecture, which describes her own experiences teaching Pakistani women in England, here.
• Here's an article from the Providence Journal about Robert Spencer's talk.  "Invited by the College Republicans club, author Robert Spencer spoke for about 45 minutes, arguing that Islam, rather than being a religion of peace, is the source of writings and traditions that ardent followers are using to justify terrorism against the West and poor treatment of people in Muslim countries. Spencer said no culture and no religion has a superior hold on good or evil, but he said the writings in the Koran have been and are being used to mistreat women, persecute and kill religious minorities and kill homosexuals. He said it is ironic that in the West, where such actions are considered unacceptable, that attempts to bring attention to such actions result in cries of bigotry and intolerance against the people who speak up."  Yes, it is. “ 'The silence of the human-rights establishment, the silence of the left is appalling,' he said."  Yes, it is.
• One college student at Spencers's lecture asked an odd question: why was Spencer was so concerned about discrimination in Muslim countries when gays are discriminated against and killed in America? Do these students not know that homomsexuals are put to death by the government in Iran and Saudi Arabia and other countries?  That esteemed Islamic clerics, including Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, have argued whether to crush homosexuals with rocks or throw them off a building? Is a country that allows gays to marry or have civil unions, that allows homosexuals to adopt children, that has laws against discrimination against homomsexuals in employment and housing - is  such a country really the same as one which routinely hangs men for being homosexual?  Have college students always been so willfully blind?   

Comments

[Jill]

Thanks so much for pulling together all these reports.