The Times Higher reports on…well it’s too complicated to paraphrase.
Headline: Students’ unions hit back at group monitoring campus extremism
Subhead: Student Rights’ agenda questioned by LSE, Birkbeck, Goldsmiths unions
The article starts:
Three students’ unions have condemned a group that monitors extremist speakers on campus for “targeting Muslim students”.
Student Rights, which refutes* the students’ unions’ claims, released a report in May 2013 on events organised by Islamic societies that found that a quarter of those it monitored had enforced gender segregation.
That’s what the Times Higher reports on.
And we’re in the weeds right at the outset. I disagree that monitoring for instance Islamist speakers equals “targeting Muslim students.” Equating the two implies that all Muslim students are fans of Islamist speakers, and they’re not.
Isn’t it one of the claims of people who talk about “Islamophobia” that “Islamophobes” equate all Muslims with the most fanatical of Islamists? Yes, it is, so what can be the point of framing things as if monitoring Islamist speakers meant “targeting Muslim students”? Islamists aren’t the friends of liberal Muslims, they’re their deadly enemies.
Last month, unions at the London School of Economics, Goldsmiths, University of London and Birkbeck, University of London all passed motions claiming that the group indulges in “sensationalism” around Muslim students.
These motions have been coordinated by a group called Real Student Rights.
One of its supporters, Hilary Aked, a doctoral student at the University of Bath, argued that the Student Rights report, Unequal Opportunity – Gender Segregation on UK University Campuses, had exaggerated the proportion of events that are segregated because it monitored only Islamic events where the speaker had a history of extreme views, or where gender segregation was explicitly promoted.
So…Student Rights monitors only the reactionary Islamist groups, yet somehow doing that is “targeting Muslim students.” Isn’t it, rather, the opposite of that? Isn’t it not targeting Muslim students, but instead, targeting reactionary Islamist speakers and groups?
She also argued that Student Rights’ focus was disproportionately on Muslim groups, rather than on far Right extremists.
What?
Islamist groups are far Right extremists.
*sic. Should be “rejects”.