Calvin Freiburger
NewsReal Blog
2010 May 19
Jonah Goldberg has a valuable new LA Times column with more thoughts on David Horowitz’s recent encounter with pro-jihad sentiment at UC San Diego. We all reacted with disgust (though not surprise) at Jumanah Imad Albahri’s words, but how did her school’s administration take it? Goldberg decided to find out:
I asked UCSD, via e-mail, whether the woman in question was censured in any way for endorsing bigotry and genocide, or if the video was somehow misleading. In response, I received boilerplate about how, in the tradition of Aristotle, UCSD treasures “discourse and debate” and how “the very foundations of every great university are set upon the rock-solid principles of freedom of thought and freedom of speech.”
I wrote back, in part: “Thank you for your response. I must say I find it fairly non-responsive. Out of curiosity, if a UCSD student publicly called for the extermination of gays and blacks, would this be your only response as well?”
I then received an even less responsive primer on how student groups are funded on campus.
Sadly, this moral backwardness from academia is also to be expected. The Left’s professed allegiance to “academic freedom” is really a refusal to acknowledge that not all moral values are relative, that some cultures really are inferior to others, and that there exists ugliness in the world that cannot ultimately be blamed on America.
The article continues at NewsReal Blog.
Read also at NewsReal Blog, UC-Irvine Professer Mark LeVine and the MSA Revealed.
