Get Herald RSSLast week, Islamofascism Awareness Week came to town. Yet, contrary to the campaign's promise that "the nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever," our lives went on much as before. The week was a bigoted joke, an insult to the intelligence of college students, and we're proud most of our peers didn't take the bait.
The purpose of "Islamofascism Awareness Week" is not awareness, but provocation. It's a stalking horse set up by David Horowitz, whose target is not Islamic fundamentalists or terrorists, but American liberals. The Web site of the "Terrorism Awareness Project," which sponsored the week, is filled with the language of confrontation. "The left is up in arms," the site notes, while colleges nationwide are "bracing for campus showdowns" as Horowitz's paladins seek to confront and expose liberals' support of the terrorists.
Horowitz knows that if he pokes liberals with a stick, they will poke back, and hard. His modus operandi has always been to say or do something outrageous and wait for the left's overreaction to become the story. He placed a racially charged ad about reparations for slavery in The Herald and other college newspapers in 2001, but the national headlines that followed weren't about reparations - they were about the reaction of some students who seized an entire production run of the paper in protest.
Fortunately, despite confrontational remarks made by Robert Spencer, who said in his lecture here Thursday that he does not believe "that Islam at its core is a peaceful religion," Brown's campus remained largely calm. There was tension and disagreement at the event, but no notable disruptions. A general letter sent to the Brown Muslim Students Association e-mail listserv earlier in the week said that Muslim student groups nationwide have been urged not to "allow themselves to be baited by" Islamofascism Awareness Week and noted that "responding to this campaign in a reactionary manner merely reinforces the very stereotypes that the campaign seeks to promote and creates controversy which will draw unnecessary attention to the campaign."
Bigotry obviously deserves confrontation, but campus groups did it the right way by organizing a left-leaning "Seven Days of Truth and Justice" of presentations and lectures instead of overreacting and giving the week's organizers exactly what they wanted: a fight. We're glad that the debate is being carried out at this level, not with signs and shouting.
U.S.-Muslim relations are a vital topic of discussion in our world, and a number of students and professors at Brown will dedicate their lives to exploring the issue. These issues are far too complex and far too important to be reduced to childish comparisons to Hitler's Germany with booklets like "The Islamic Mein Kampf" or "Jimmy Carter's War Against the Jews" (both available on the Terrorism Awareness Project's Web site).
In the continuing wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and in the midst of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we know students appreciate that it is more important than ever to try to understand the Islamic world and its troubled relationship with the West. Last week, almost nine months after Nonie Darwish's controversial visit provoked students' vitriol, we were pleasantly surprised to see students' recognition that polemics don't advance the debate. And since the true aim of the week was to provoke a response, we're happy that Brown students denied Horowitz that satisfaction, too.
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