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March 13, 2007
World Net Daily reports the shocking account of students at San Francisco State University being brought up on charges for desecrating the name of the Islamic "god", Allah. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is fighting for the rights of the persecuted students.
SF State's actions here are wrong on so many levels. First of all, this attempt to persecute the College Republicans is a direct violation of two separate clauses of the First Amendment. First, SF State is in clear violation of the Establishment clause by attempting to punish conservative students for disrespecting the name of the Islamic "god". Just as a tax-funded university cannot prohibit students from blaspheming Jesus Christ, a tax-funded university cannot prohibit similar speech against Allah, Gaia, Zeus, Odin or any other pagan "god".
The parallel violation that SF State's administration has engaged in is punishing political speech. (The fact that SF state is even holding a hearing on this is punishment.) Whether one agrees with what the CR's did or not, and whether one finds the protest to be "offensive" or not, the College Republicans clearly have the First Amendment right to express their opinions on this issue. As I said last week, the first and most important line of defense for free speech is unpopular or "offensive" speech.
The whining and crying from Muslim students about the "attempts to incite violence" is laughable. People get angry about politics on a regular basis; some of those people get angry to the point where they react violently to opposing views. The answer is not to allow these nutcases to shut down opposing views with acts of violence; the answer is to prosecute the fanatics who attempt to use force to silence political opponents. In addition, does anyone think that a Christian group would be taken seriously if they made a similar claim about a student group burning a Bible?
When one thinks of flags that should be desecrated, the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah are at the top of the list. These are not legitimate political entities; they are terrorist groups that are known for slaughtering innocent women and children. Hamas and Hezbollah deserve the same amount of respect that Timothy McVeigh got when he blew up the federal building in Oklahoma city because he was angry about the federal government's actions in Waco, Texas.
For the last three decades, Islamic radicals have been waging war against the United States of America. September 11, 2001 was a wake-up call to this country, forcing us to take this War on Terror seriously. There is no question that the destruction of freedom is one of the primary goals of the Islamic terrorists who have declared war on us. Therefore, frontal assaults on fundamental constitutional liberties provide aid and comfort to the enemy and as such are acts of treason.
If we are going to ask our soldiers to fight a war against Islamic terrorists, then we owe it to them to carefully guard our liberties at home. If we do not aggressively fight against and defeat domestic threats to our liberty, then every life lost in Afghanistan and Iraq will have been wasted. Islamic terrorists cannot defeat the United States on the battlefield, but we could very well lose the War on Terror anyway.
Discuss this topic at Multi-Level Political Debate.
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