Understandable concerns
There are a lot of links worth following up in that piece by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela. One is University of Alberta fires Sexual Assault Centre director for signing letter questioning Hamas rape reports:
The University of Alberta fired its Sexual Assault Centre director for signing an open letter questioning sexual assault and rape claims against Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack in Israel.
Samantha Pearson’s use of the centre’s name was “improper and unauthorized” and “raised understandable concerns from members of our community and the public,” U of A president Bill Flanagan said in a statement Saturday.
Pretty much the last category of person who should endorse such an open letter, you’d think. “Bitches be lyin’,” said the director of the Sexual Assault Center.
The open letter posted online urges politicians in “so-called Canada” to “end their complicity in the ongoing massacres and genocide in Gaza, Occupied Palestine.”
Federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was also singled out in the letter for repeating the “unverified accusation that Palestinians were guilty of sexual violence.”
“Furthermore, by failing to recognize Israeli occupation as ‘terrorist’ and only directing this term at Palestinian resistance, you perpetuate an Islamophobic trope,” the letter reads.
We’re allowed to hate Islam just as we’re allowed to hate Catholicism and any other religion. Hatred of Muslims is one thing and hatred of Islam is quite another.
And we are allowed to condemn terrorism by rape no matter who perpetrates it.
In what way is hating islam so much different from hating muslims? Because the only way that islam really exists is through how moslims excercise it. And the same for all other religions.
My experience elsewhere is that a lot of the times, criticism of islam is just a front for harrasing muslims. There rarely is an attempt at a balanced view. More often these critics are just looking for ways to make islam look as negative as possible, and by extentension try to paint muslims as negative as possible, because muslims follow islam, don’t they.
True, it can be that – criticism of Islam can be just a front for hostility to Muslims. That’s true of all religions, and it’s true of atheism too. But we still need to be able to dispute religions, and that’s especially true of religions that make extreme demands of their followers. Official Catholicism wants women to die if the alternative is an abortion.
Stanley Fish has an interesting chapter on ‘campus speech’ in his book ‘The First: How to think about hate speech, campus speech…’, which I largely agree with (though I have strong reservations about his view of one of the cases he draws attention to, one which bears some resemblance to the University of Alberta case). The cases he draws attention to and questions are all to do with academics who have expressed certain opinions in a private capacity. In the case of Samantha Pearson, however, she makes use of the Centre’s name in order to bolster her position, and so does not speak in a purely private capacity, but associates the Centre with her views. It is understandable that the Centre acted as it did.