Earlier this month, PJ Media covered the story of a small college in Minnesota firing a professor for showing images of the Prophet Muhammad in class.
What makes this story doubly outrageous is the fact that the professor of art history, Erika López Prater, took enormous pains prior to showing the images to make sure none of her students would be offended.
In the syllabus she sent out before the course started, López Prater warned that images of religious figures, including the Prophet Muhammad and the Buddha, would be shown in the course. She asked students to let her know if they would be offended. No one raised any objections.
On the day she planned to show the artwork depicting Muhammad, she prepped the class by explaining if anyone was going to be offended by the depiction of The Prophet, they would be excused. No one left.
After class was over, a senior objected and other Islamic students on the Hamline University campus supported him. The cowardly administration then informed López Prater that her services would no longer be required.
Related: Re-painting History: University Fires Professor for Sharing Image of Muhammed in Islamic Arts Class
“Among other things, Hamline, through its administration, has referred to Dr. López Prater’s actions as ‘undeniably Islamophobic,’″ her attorneys said in a statement. “Comments like these, which have now been published in news stories around the globe, will follow Dr. López Prater throughout her career, potentially resulting in her inability to obtain a tenure track position at any institution of higher education.”
Hamline began to backtrack furiously.
Hamline University President Fayneese Miller and Ellen Watters, the Board of Trustees chair, released a joint statement Tuesday saying recent “communications, articles and opinion pieces” have led the school to “review and re-examine our actions.”
“Like all organizations, sometimes we misstep,” the statement said. “In the interest of hearing from and supporting our Muslim students, language was used that does not reflect our sentiments on academic freedom. Based on all that we have learned, we have determined that our usage of the term ‘Islamophobic’ was therefore flawed.”
Why not just admit that “in our haste to reassure students that we at Hamline are sensitive to the feelings of everyone but white Christians, we stupidly jumped to a conclusion we had no reason to reach”?
Perhaps surprisingly, the number one Islamic grievance organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, supported the professor.
On Friday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national civil rights organization for Muslims, disputed the belief that López Prater’s behavior was Islamophobic. The group said professors who analyze images of the Prophet Muhammad for academic purposes are not the same as “Islamophobes who show such images to cause offense.”
And it turns out that the Islamic student who filed the original grievance against Lopez Prater, Aram Wedatalla, is president of Hamline’s Muslim Student Association. She didn’t care how many warnings she was given or opportunities to object to the showing of the art beforehand. She was bound and determined to make this a political issue on campus.
She should be the one leaving the University.
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