The most unfortunate aspect of the whole Stanford circus is the certainty that the vast majority of the students who walked out have no idea who I am or what I say. They were just fed the nonsense about me targeting or dehumanizing Muslims, and they marched in lockstep with the herd. This crowd hysteria is just the opposite of what a university should be about, and that Stanford not only allowed it but its administrators aided and abetted and colluded with it, is an indication of what I have said many times before: universities today are no longer in any sense centers of higher learning. They’re just factories of hard-Left indoctrination and recruitment centers for Antifa.
James Dinwiddie’s letter is devastating: “As someone who has both studied and lived in Islamic countries and who encounters refugees from ‘Islamic conditions’ daily, I encourage these academics to consider their own plea: ‘For us, this means taking seriously the lived experience of the people most impacted by racism, bigotry, hate speech and xenophobia.’”
That’s a neat little shout-out from the real world into the fantasyland that all too many of Stanford’s students inhabit. Find out the appalling pervasiveness of this fantasyland, and its dangers, in my new book Confessions of an Islamophobe. Preorder your copy here.
“Letter to the Editor: On the Robert Spencer protests,” by James Dinwiddie, Stanford Daily, November 16, 2017:
To the Editor:
Those of us who came to see and hear Robert Spencer’s ideas and were disallowed into the auditorium were shocked and repelled by the actions of Stanford’s self-elected thought police.
This was a demonstration of the most selfish and narrow-minded bigotry – worthy of a fascist state – that has no place in an American academy.
The Stanford faculty who signed the “Letter from faculty and others regarding Robert Spencer” are, in my opinion, sorely misguided by their prejudgments and uninformed attitudes. As someone who has both studied and lived in Islamic countries and who encounters refugees from “Islamic conditions” daily, I encourage these academics to consider their own plea: “For us, this means taking seriously the lived experience of the people most impacted by racism, bigotry, hate speech and xenophobia.”
This “lived experience” perfectly describes the millions of hostage peoples living under “Islamic conditions,” of which Americans are barely aware. The empathy and advocacy for freedom of these Stanford academics, instead of preventing free speech and shared ideas in the academy, should extend to those enslaved by a totalitarian ideology in the form of state-sponsored theocratic oppression.
– James Dinwiddie
Adjunct Professor, Menlo College