Professional Soldiers ® - Don't Challenge The 'Way People Feel'

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Don't Challenge The 'Way People Feel'

And yet, I suspect the likes of Miss Chialastri would be quick to decry the curtailment of her freedom of speech if told she couldn't speak about a subject she was passionate about because it challenged 'the way people feel.'

Quote:

Anti-Wilders Activists do not like Speakers Who Challenge “the Way People Feel on this Campus”
2009 October 20

The Freedom Center is sponsoring an event tonight at Temple University.

Dutch parliamentarian and Islam critic Geert Wilders will be addressing a college audience in the United States for the first time. David Horowitz has blogged previously here and here about attempts to shut down the speech.

An article about the controversy ran today in the Philadelphia Daily News:

Student Senate President Jeff Dempsey said he couldn’t support the decision to invite Wilders and hoped that the university would pull the plug on the program at the last minute.

“I’ve never been ashamed to be a Temple student,” Dempsey said, adding that university-sponsored dollars were not used to fund the event. “Our proud embrace of diversity and inclusion is tarnished by this man’s provocation of hate.”

Wilders was invited to speak by a new group on campus called Temple University Purpose.

Before the meeting, about a dozen students held signs with phrases including “Temple U. Does Not Condone Hate” and “Hate Speech [does not equal] Free Speech.”

Among the demonstrators was Megan Chialastri, vice president of All Sides, an organization that seeks to promote peace between Israel and Palestine.

“We feel student groups should not bring people on campus that jeopardize the safety, or just the way people feel on this campus,” she said.

[Emphasis Added]

Read those last nine words that Chialastri says carefully. That’s the real problem with Wilders. He presents views counter to the way a segment of students, faculty, and administrators feel.

In his speeches and his film Fitna Wilders presents facts and ideas (principally drawn from the Koran itself) which offend people’s feelings about a political-religious movement about which they know next to nothing. Feelings is the operative word here. How many who oppose Wilders and slander him as a man of hate have ideas about Islam and how many have feelings? How many have actually read the Koran and scholars like Robert Spencer and how many just have some fuzzy feelings about not wanting to be politically incorrect?

Well, we have to live based on what the facts demand, not on what feels good. It’s time for students to put their feelings aside and look at facts and ideas. And Wilders is just the man to advance this necessary task.

Link

The article in the Philadelphia Daily News.

Quote:

Temple U. uneasy as anti-Islam figure is set to speak
Student Senate denounces Geert Wilders

By DAFNEY TALES
Philadelphia Daily News

talesd@phillynews.com 215-854-5084

A student organization's event scheduled for tonight has caused quite a stir on Temple University's campus.

The Student Senate has joined ranks with several organizations decrying a student group's invitation to Dutch politician Geert Wilders, known for anti-Islamic and anti-immigration beliefs, to speak on campus.

In an overwhelming vote yesterday, the governing body passed a resolution denouncing Wilders for "intolerable, disgraceful and prejudiced slandering of the Islamic faith." [Did they back this resolution with facts and evidence of slander, or did they accept as fact the complaints of those opposed to having their feelings hurt?]

Student Senate President Jeff Dempsey said he couldn't support the decision to invite Wilders and hoped that the university would pull the plug on the program at the last minute.

"I've never been ashamed to be a Temple student," Dempsey said, adding that university-sponsored dollars were not used to fund the event. "Our proud embrace of diversity and inclusion is tarnished by this man's provocation of hate."

Wilders was invited to speak by a new group on campus called Temple University Purpose.

Before the meeting, about a dozen students held signs with phrases including "Temple U. Does Not Condone Hate" and "Hate Speech [does not equal] Free Speech."

Among the demonstrators was Megan Chialastri, vice president of All Sides, an organization that seeks to promote peace between Israel and Palestine.

"We feel student groups should not bring people on campus that jeopardize the safety, or just the way people feel on this campus," she said.

In a letter issued last week, Monira Gamal-Eldin, president of the Muslim Students Association, criticized the university for being the first in the United States to allow Wilders to address students.

"The Muslim population at Temple feels attacked, threatened and ultimately unsafe that Mr. Wilders has been invited to voice his hate-driven opinions," she wrote.

"The decision to allow Mr. Wilders to share his viewpoints is a danger not only for the public safety of Muslims and the honor of the core principle of Islam, but also for academic integrity and objectivity on campus."

Nonetheless, the event will go on as planned, said university spokesman Ray Betzner. "We respect the right of our student organizations to invite people who express a wide variety of views and ideas," he wrote in an e-mail yesterday.

David Horowitz, of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which funded the event, issued a letter asking university officials to disregard the concerns of the Muslim students.

"The Temple community should reject the call by the MSA to censor free speech on the Temple campus, and should recognize it for what it is - an assault on the right of all Americans to have a democracy that is inclusive, tolerant and respectful of the rights of others," he wrote.

The event is not intended to offend any group, but to provide a forum for students to discuss sensitive subjects, said Brittany Walsh, president of Purpose, a social and political group that organized the event. She added that her group does not share Wilders' views.

"I respect their opposition to it," she said of the Muslim students. "The purpose of TU Purpose is to hash out unconventional views . . . to promote freedom of speech and give students an education opportunity of a lifetime to raise concerns and issues with a prominent international figure."

But Barry Scatton, whose College Republicans organization had co-sponsored the event but now condemns it, said that discussion shouldn't come at the expense of others.[Barry Scatton has publicly accepted status as a dhimmi.]

"It's caused so much personal trauma to a lot of students," he said. "That is not the goal for me or my organization."

As a precaution, Temple officials will dispatch university police for crowd control, a security official said. The event is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. in Room 17 of Anderson Hall, on Berks Street between 11th and 12th.

Wilders, a leader of the Party for Freedom, in the Netherlands, has made headlines for a string of controversial actions.

In 2008, Wilders escaped prosecution in England for allegedly inciting hatred of Muslims after releasing his short film "Fitna," in which Quran verses are shown alongside images from terrorist attacks.

Before that, Wilders had called for bans on the Quran - likening it to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf - and the burka, the Muslim women's garment that covers most of the body.

Link

Posted on Wed, Oct. 21, 2009

Protesters, but no incidents, greet anti-Islamist at Temple

By CHRISTINE OLLEY
Philadelphia Daily News

olleyc@phillynews.com 215-854-5184

Amid a firestorm of contention, several hundred people heard Geert Wilders, a controversial Dutch parliamentarian, speak last night at Temple University.

During his approximately 30-minute speech, Wilders called the Quran "an evil book" and said that the United States was facing Islamization.

A question-and-answer session was cut short, and Wilders was escorted out of the lecture hall after some students began shouting insults at him.

Before the speech, held in Anderson Hall, more than 50 protesters had denounced the appearance of Wilders at the school.

Members of All Sides, an organization that seeks to promote peace between Israel and Palestinians, held pink pom-poms and shouted, "Hey Hey, HO, HO, this racist bull----'s got to go." [What race are Muslims?]

Standing next to them with signs decrying Wilders' views were members of the Student Senate, Democratic Socialists and the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance.

"Wilders speaks out about free speech while at the same time banning the Quran," said Megan Chialastri, vice president of All Sides. [Really? He banned the Quran?]

"Banned books are not free speech and there is no way around that," Chialastri said. [No, but expressing an opinion about banning a book as well as an objection is free speech.]

"This is hate speech at its core," said Monira Gamal-Eldin, president of the Muslim Students Association.

Inside the auditorium, after going through rigorous security checks, students assembled to hear the Dutch politician speak.

Brittany Walsh, president of the student group Purpose, which had invited Wilders, introduced his 17-minute short film, Fitna - Arabic for disagreement and division among people - in which passages from the Quran are juxtaposed with newspaper clippings and video showing or describing violent acts by Muslims.

Wilders, 46, emerged after the film, flanked by a security detail which he said made him feel as if he was not free but which has been necessary because of numerous threats on his life.

Before he was escorted out, the last student allowed to address Wilders said: "Clearly fascism wasn't defeated, because if it was, a genocide-loving racist clown like you still wouldn't have anything to say." [I wonder what this student was suggesting? Perhaps in the world he envisions, Mr. Wilders would either be re-educated or exterminated?]

As the audience filed out of the auditorium, two Temple students offered their reactions to Wild-ers' visit.

"I'm proud," said Jonas Skovdal. "I think it's a big win for humanity that people stood up to him in there."

"It was a good experience," said Brian Wisnieski. "What he said was definitely negative, but it was a good experience that he came."

The event was funded by the California-based David Horowitz Freedom Center, a foundation that promotes conservative scholarship.

Link

Quote:

Originally Posted by SF-TX (Post 290040)

Posted on Wed, Oct. 21, 2009

Standing next to them with signs decrying Wilders' views were members of the Student Senate, Democratic Socialists and the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance.

Why, oh why...I'm sure they would love living under Shariah

I guess in the PC-gone-wild environment of "higher education," calling a spade, a spade, equals being a racist, non-tolerant, hate-mongering bigot :rolleyes:

There's a question in a different thread about when America will wake up. I'm skeptical whether the academic world would be the one taking the lead.

I would think feminists would be the first to raise the alert and challenge those societies where women are lower rated than some man's goats and sheep. Where women are murdered in what is called honor killing and women are systematically mutilated. They call themselves feminists?

Quote:

Originally Posted by HOLLiS (Post 290107)

There are alot of idiots who do not live in the same world the rest of us live in.

That is not to say all academic institutions function in that manner. NPS is full of civilian academics, but as a DOD facility, the Professors where very in tune to the fact that after our 16 months at school we would be headed back into the "real world" and they tried their darndest to give us an education that we could use in that world.

Yes there were plenty of "academic" discussions. But there were many more where we discussed whether the academics of what we learned were in any way relevant to what our "real" jobs were.

I guess what upsets me about not "challenging the way people feel" is if that is the way we all acted, racial issues would be still as they were in the 50's and 60s. If we didn't challenge the way people feel, I may be chained to my husband's stove barefoot and pregnant, rather than chained to my computer at work. :)

Challenging the way people feel is how we grow as adults. It is how we get out of the myopic view of our childhood into the world of reality as adults. I for one am certainly glad that we all don't have the same views, and that people often challenge the way I think. It keeps life interesting.