In the American Thinker this morning, Pamela Geller and I discuss our recent encounter with the thoroughly indoctrinated students and faculty that one finds on all too many university campuses today, and their increasingly thuggish atmosphere. What I saw in Stuttgart yesterday I expect to be seeing at American universities before too long.
How completely has indoctrination and propaganda replaced rational discussion and intelligent debate in America’s universities? We were reminded of just how bad things have gotten several weeks ago at Ohio University, when we were invited to screen and discuss our documentary on the Ground Zero mosque controversy, The Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 911 Attacks. While universities today idolize “diversity,” they actively discourage the one kind of diversity that matters most: genuine diversity of opinion. We saw instead the effects of the stifling intellectual straitjacket that universities force upon students on all too many campuses.
Joining us was our cinematographer, David Miles, who is an alumnus of Ohio University. But OU students and faculty were in no mood to discuss the issues our documentary raised: even before we arrived on campus, the student newspaper, The Post, ran a “review” of the film entitled “NYC mosque film inaccurate, bigoted.” It was written by Brandon Kendhammer, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at OU. Kendhammer retailed libelous generalizations about us and about our work, without offering a single example of the inaccuracy and bigotry he purported to find in our film.
Indeed, Kendhammer couldn’t have given an example of those things even if he had wanted to. Why not? Because he had not even seen the film. Got that? The Post ran a review of the film written by someone who could not have seen it.
With a fine Orwellian touch, Kendhammer claimed that we wished to undo America’s legacy of religious freedom — without explaining how opposing forces that would establish a law that institutionalizes discrimination against women and extinguishes the freedom of speech and the freedom of conscience amounts to opposing religious freedom, while fronting for this repressive ideology presumably amounts to supporting that freedom.
In reality, we oppose the Islamic supremacist political agenda that supports elements of Sharia that are at variance with Constitutional freedoms; nothing in such a position involves any infringement on religious freedom. …