Dhimmitude at DePaul: teacher suspended for “racism” over remarks that “offended” Muslim students. Joel Mowbray in FrontPage (thanks to EPG and RB) discusses freedom of speech on campus:
In academia today, “academic freedom” protects those who compare the 9/11 victims to Nazi higher ups, but it does not cover a professor with the temerity to challenge the beliefs of Muslim students in a single encounter which constituted, in the words of his boss, an “assault on their dignity.”
Thomas Klocek, a part-time adjunct professor at DePaul University, knows this first-hand; he was unlucky enough to fall on the wrong side of the political correctness fence….The Muslim students who had the 20-30 minute run-in with him that precipitated his suspension charge [of] racism….
On September 15, 2004, Klocek was strolling through the student activities fair at DePaul’s downtown campus when he noticed a flyer showing Israeli tanks destroying Palestinian homes. “It was very one-sided,” he explained, “and I wanted them to think about the bigger reality.”
He put on his professor hat and tried to do what teachers do: he tried to get them to think. And that’s what has led to his downfall.
Approaching the Students for Justice in Palestine booth, Klocek engaged the students. And then he enraged them. Depending on who’s telling the story, Klocek either earlier or later in the conversation said something to the effect of that while not all Muslims are terrorists, all the terrorists currently operating in the world today are Muslims.
That’s not an entirely true statement-look at the Irish Republican Army for just one example-but then again, he was quoting a fairly prominent Muslim, the head of the al-Arabiya satellite television network. And while you can quibble with the full accuracy of the claim, you can’t deny its essence.
Same goes for what the Muslim students consider his other truly offensive remark, that there is no Palestinian ethnicity and that the term really only became prominent in media coverage in the last 20 to 25 years. There has been in various forms a region–though not a country, and certainly not an ethnically homogenous state–known as “Palestine” going back to the Ottoman period, but “Palestinian” is more of a regional identification than an ethnic one. And while older than two decades, its usage only became common in the 20th century.
Eight days later, some of the students involved met with the dean and cried racism. They asked for his head. They got it.
Read it all.