The former Enloe High School history teacher who invited a Christian evangelist [actually an Egyptian Copt] to speak to his students is not taking his reprimand quietly….
The question is this, he said: “Are we going to be open to a variety of different perspectives versus are we going to limit and censor and shut down the educational experience and environment to keep out people with certain views?”
Escamilla, who readily avows his own Christian faith, acknowledges that Solomon was not neutral toward Muslims. But he insists that his guest did not denigrate Islam or attempt to convert students to Christianity during the visit”¦.
The school system sees it differently. In a sharply worded release last month, Wake County Schools Superintendent Del Burns said Solomon’s primary message was to convey his anti-Muslim and pro-Christian views. Burns has apologized to Muslims for Solomon’s visit. And he issued new guidelines that require guest speakers to sign forms saying they will not denigrate any culture, race, gender, national origin or religion.”– from this article
Disgusting. Disgusting because we know that that form which one is now forced to sign would not stop any “Palestinian” or other Arab or Muslim from presenting a highly tendentious view of the Lesser Jihad against Israel. That view would tend — as it has tended all over Western Europe — to both exploit pre-existing hatred, and to promote the pathological mental condition known as antisemitism.
Disgusting because the treatment by the Egyptian government of Christian Copts is a subject of great and enduring interest. If an Egyptian Copt now lives in the area, if he can testify as to the treatment of Copts by Muslims in Egypt today, and to the role of the Egyptian government in this treatment, should he be prevented from doing so? On what theory? What does Superintendent Del Burns think of Francis Bok and the other “Lost Boys” of the southern Sudan, the Christian and animist black Africans who were enslaved or killed — some 1.8 million killed — because of the deliberate policies of the Arabs who run the Sudan?
If Francis Bok were to be willing to come and speak before student groups in North Carolina (and here’s an idea: invite him), would Superintendent Burns prevent him from speaking? Would Francis Bok not be allowed to testify as to what the Muslim Arabs of the north did to the black Africans of the south? Would that be impermissible because, in the view of Superintendent Del Burns, such statements would “denigrate any culture, race, gender, national origin or religion”?
It is this absurd ban, and the dangerously broad language, of Superintendent Del Burns that should be the subject of strict, and devastating, scrutiny. And it is he, rather, who should, pour encourager les autres like him all around the country, lose his job, his mandate. He’s in the wrong job, in the wrong country. I’m sure he can get a job working for John Esposito at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, beavering away at the task of protecting Islam and Muslims from the slightest criticism, no matter how eminently justified.
Surely the treatment of the Copts can help to explain what is now happening, and has been happening, to hundreds of thousands of Assyrians and Chaldeans, and to Mandaeans, and Yazidis — that is, to all non-Muslims in Iraq — at the hands of those who can now practice their Islam without being reined in any longer, for reasons that had nothing to do with sympathy for Christians and everything to do with calculated realpolitik, by the late Saddam Hussein.
But this lesson will not be learned. The understanding that might come from greater understanding of how Christians or other non-Muslims are treated not just in Iraq, but in Egypt, or in Lebanon (where only the size of the Christian community has helped to keep it from outright persecution, but the steady pressure of Islam is whittling down the Maronites who are the original inhabitants of Lebanon, and who were there before the Arabs arrived with their “gift” of Islam), will not be permitted as long as Superintendent Del Burns is there to enforce the Don’t-Say-Anything-Uncomplimentary-About-Islam Act that he himself proposed, and immediately passed, without any discussion with himself, and with nary a dissenting vote.