The shame of Brandeis and a culture that's lost its way

Brandeis’s chairman of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, Joseph Lumbard, explained anemically that the invitation “makes Muslim students feel very uneasy.” One would rather expect so, yes. Ali has described Islam as “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death,” and she has made no secret of her holistic distaste for both its tenets and its practice. “Once [Islam] is defeated,” she argued bombastically during an interview with Reason in 2007, “it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace. I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars.”

There is no middle ground in progressivism either, it seems: Either one is in or one is out; one is a player on the right team, or one is a bigot to be protested and to be shunned.

Illustrating this neatly last week, the Council on American-Islamic Relations complained to Brandeis that Ali was a “notorious Islamophobe,” thereby managing in a single sentence to dismiss a lifetime of experience and of work with the insinuation of irrationality and to apply to the victim a term customarily reserved for the tormentor. Typically, I object to the use of “phobic” on the grounds that, where once it meant something useful and concrete, it has now been hijacked by our self-appointed arbiters of taste and transmuted into a multipurpose cudgel against dissent. In this case, however, I must cut CAIR some slack, for, wholly inadvertently, it has hit the nail on the head. “Phobia,” as any first-year student of the classics knows, is derived from the Greek word phobos, which translates literally as “panic flight.” Could there be a more apposite description of Ali’s experiences than just that? Here is Ali on her experiences as a young Muslim girl in Somalia: “I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage, for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values.”