Last Monday, I appeared at the University of Buffalo at the invitation of the courageous students of Young Americans for Freedom. They have to put up with campus Left-fascist thuggery on a daily basis, while I was able to leave Buffalo the morning after the event.
I say I “appeared,” because to say “I spoke” would be exaggerating a bit. Rather, I spoke a few sentences and made a couple of points in between being screamed at by Leftist and Islamic supremacist fascists who think they’re opposing fascism.
The Spectrum, the student newspaper of the University at Buffalo, reported:
Robert Spencer couldn’t speak for more than 30 seconds without students shouting and cursing at him.
…
Spencer planned to speak to students about “the dangers of jihad in today’s world” but constant heckling from the crowd made it near impossible for him to complete a full sentence.
Indeed. The raucous student mob, of course, believes it represents the side of all that is good and righteous. These students have been hoodwinked into thinking that “Islamophobes,” rather than jihad terrorists, are killing people around the world.
For example, one man held a sign that read “Queers Against Islamophobia.” The crowd booed lustily when I attempted to read from Islamic authorities about Islam’s death penalty for homosexuality. Even to read from Islamic sources is hate, apparently, at the University at Buffalo — unless, of course, one endorses such penalties rather than oppose them.
By shutting down any discussion of the motivating ideology of the jihad threat and consigning it all to the realm of “hatred” and “bigotry,” the student mob at the University of Buffalo enables that threat to grow. One day, the Leftists who screamed, heckled, and booed as I tried to speak may very well experience the consequences of their actions, carried out by those with whom they thought they stood in solidarity.
The Spectrum article did capture one thing I managed to say:
The attempt to silence someone who has a differing viewpoint was a “quintessentially fascist act, and you are manifesting it in a wonderful way tonight,” said Spencer.
There was also this:
Spencer frequently discusses terrorism by Muslims as being religiously motivated, an argument that has put him in the cross-hairs of American Muslims who say his interpretation of Islam is dangerously inaccurate and perverts their faith.
Those American Muslims have a big problem on their hands, because in reality, I offer no interpretation of Islam at all. I only report on how Muslims interpret Islam, which all too often involves justifications of and exhortations to violence. They are anxious to silence me because they don’t want Americans to know how jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify hatred, violence, and supremacism.
An extraordinary aspect of this ugly incident’s aftermath: even though I hardly got a word in, University of Buffalo officials and the campus Muslim Students’ Association chapter were apparently so shaken by my appearance that they have featured not one, but two events in response. The events feature highly disingenuous Islamic spokesmen, apparently an effort to make sure that campus Left-lemmings stay on message: Islam is a religion of peace that has nothing to do with terrorism, despite the ever-growing evidence to the contrary.
Hassan Shibly of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) slandered me repeatedly. He said:
When I hear Spencer say that Islam should be illegal, I hear him saying my religion should be outlawed … and what I hear him saying is that he will chip away at the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
What a noble act by Shibly, guarding the republic against the forces of hatred and division.
But there’s just one problem with his statement: Shibly is outright lying. I simply have never said that Islam should be illegal.
The other speaker the University of Buffalo featured, Ahmadi spokesman Qasim Rashid, was no more honest than Shibly. (I have many times in the past exposed the dishonesty of Rashid’s presentations on Islam.) At Buffalo, he made a number of risible claims, including that in Islam, women are equal to men. And he slandered me as cheerfully as Shibly did:
The speaker last night was promoting ISIS ideology on campus. He was essentially their spokesperson. That’s how dangerous this rhetoric is.
The thinking is extremely tortured here. Because I point out that the Islamic State (ISIS) uses the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and make recruits among peaceful Muslims, Rashid says I am promoting and supporting ISIS. This is tantamount to saying that Winston Churchill was pro-Nazi for pointing out that Hitler was motivated by Nazism.
No one at the University at Buffalo called out Rashid for his vicious slander or twisted logic, because what Rashid said conformed to Leftist beliefs. American universities today do not reward speaking the truth and defending it rationally. They only reward parroting the agenda of the hard-Left.
The University of Buffalo Left-fascists signaled their virtue by screaming at me for an hour and a half. What did they accomplish by doing so, besides revealing their institution to be yet another Leftist indoctrination factory opposed to the freedom of speech?
Now that they have neutralized the threat they thought I posed to them, will the jihad threat about which I tried to speak thereby go away? Alas, no.
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