by Ben Shapiro
Islam means peace, agrees Professor Ali Asani of Harvard. “If you look at it this way,” Asani continued, “a Christian or a Jew is Muslim as well; any who submit to the one God is already Muslim.”24 Really? What happened to that whole bit about Christians and Jews being non-believers, and nonbelievers sitting in everlasting fiery torment?25
Not only does Islam mean peace, Islam is the “religion of peace.” “Islam is a religion of peace,” states Professor John Berthrong of the Boston University.26 Professor Ahmed Asker of Florida A&M University calls Islam a religion of peace, love, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness.27 “Islam is a religion of peace,” concurs Dr. Tayyib Rana of the University of Buffalo. “It wants to liberate men and women to live life to its fullest.” Then why does it fail to liberate men and women wherever it is tried?
Islam is just misunderstood, professors maintain. “The level of understanding of Islam is abysmally low in this country, even among educated people,” scolds Professor David Mitten of Harvard.28 Professor Akel Kahara of the University of Texas blames anti-Islam sentiment on “ignorance, prejudice and intellectual racism.”29 Sure, that must be it. It couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that most terrorists are Muslim and that Muslim terrorists have killed thousands of Americans.
“Although the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad . . . have given Muslims a general understanding of Judaism and Christianity,” writes Professor Nimat Hafez Barazangi, “Jews and Christians usually have little, if any, knowledge about Islam.”30 The Quran teaches that Jews think Ezra was the son of God (false), and warns Muslims not to be friends with Christians or Jews, both of whom will suffer in the everlasting flames.31 Is that what Professor Barazangi considers a general understanding of Judaism and Christianity?
Islam isn’t stagnant, either—in fact, Islam means progress. Or something like that. Islam is “moving forward and increasing in self-awareness,” says Professor Gerhard Bowering of Yale.32
Professor Akbar Ahmed of Princeton calls Islam “the third great religion of America,” and says that it is “one of the most misunderstood religions in the world.” “How many people,” he asks, “know the greatest names of God in Islam are compassion and mercy?”33 That’s good to know when Christians and Jews are burning in Allah’s eternal flames.
SCIENCE VS. RELIGION
Most Christians and Jews feel that there is no implicit conflict between science and religion. Gregory Mendel was a priest. Maimonides was a doctor. Sir Isaac Newton was a religious man. It was Albert Einstein who said that God does not play dice with the universe. Science and religion bolster one another. The more we learn about the world in which we live, the clearer it becomes that there must be a divine Planner.
Professors don’t think so. Science and religion are completely at odds with one another. God is not a master designer; everything is an accident. As Professor David Krupp of Winward Community College puts it, “The minute you start bringing in religious concepts, it messes up science.”34
Perhaps the perceived dichotomy between science and religion explains the lack of faith among scientific faculty. While the percentage of Americans who believe in God remains between 85 and 95 percent, the percentage of scientists who believe in God is less than 40 percent.35
The main battle between science and religion takes place in the field of evolutionary biology, where professors demonize creationists as archaic relics of the Dark Ages. Creationism isn’t just wrong, it’s intellectual sin, they say, despite the fact that 45 percent of Americans believe in intelligent design.36
An assigned textbook in a UCLA biology course reads: “Many adaptations seem more easily explained by natural selection than by God’s design because God presumably could have ‘done better.’”37 The text also derides creationists as people who “tr[y] to portray themselves as scientists, calling their new approach ‘creation science.’”38
“American neoconservatives promote creationism because, as their own statements reveal, they apparently fear an educated population and see the theory of evolution as a threat,” writes Professor Paul Ehrlich.39 Did it ever occur to Ehrlich that perhaps many neoconservatives believe in the word of God? Probably not, since Ehrlich believes conservatives are out to lynch blacks and enslave the poor.
Teaching creation science is foolish, professors believe. “They could just as well talk about Kumulipo,” the Hawaiian creation chant, scoffs Professor Pauline Chinn of the University of Hawaii.40 “Creationism isn’t science, it’s faith,” nods Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology Professor Gerald Fryer.41 “The big lie is that there’s something to (creationism),” sneers Professor Victor Stenger, also of the University of Hawaii.
In Cobb County, Georgia, creationism is a hot topic. The school board there is attempting to clarify its policy with regard to teaching creationism in the public schools. The professors are livid. Professor David Jackson of the University of Georgia maintains that while he does not tell students what to believe, “I make it clear what Cobb County is doing is pretty clearly illegal.”42 Professor Norman Thomas, also of the University of Georgia, is more blunt: “We’re dealing with science, and we don’t deal with issues that aren’t scientific,” he says. “I think the state needs to tell Cobb County what should be in the science classroom.”43
Patrick Henry University, in Virginia, was denied accreditation by the American Academy of Liberal Education because it teaches creationism. Despite meeting all of the criterion for accreditation and openly stating that it is a Christian college, the AALE dismissed its accreditation. University President Mike Farris calls the ruling “discrimination on the basis of viewpoint and ideology,” and states that the AALE “want[s] to force us to teach what they want us to teach.”44 And he’s right. If you don’t teach it the liberal way, the liberal education establishment will shut you down.
Professor Kevin Haley of the Central Oregon Community College was fired from his post for allegedly teaching creationism as well as evolution. Haley denied the charges. “I am a creationist and I’m also a scientist, and I have no trouble teaching evolution,” explains Haley, but “[a]s far as teaching creation in the classroom, not on a bet.”45 Let’s assume for the moment that Haley actually did teach creationism as well as evolution. What’s so wrong with that? Professors are allowed to teach homosexuality, Marxism (a secular religion), and anti-Americanism, but mention God and you’re out of a job.
CHRISTIANS NEED NOT APPLY
The receivers’ coach for Nebraska’s football team, Ron Brown, was interviewed in 2002 for the position of head coach at Stanford. Brown has a stellar record in his seventeen years at Nebraska: in that time, twenty-six of his pupils have gone on to play in the National Football League.46 Brown is black. It seems he would have fit perfectly into the system.
There was only one problem: Brown is a religious Christian. And that was the deal-breaker. The assistant athletic director at Stanford, Alan Glenn, said that Brown’s religion “was definitely something that had to be considered. We’re a very diverse community with a diverse alumni. Anything that would stand out that much is something that has to be looked at.”47
In specific, it was Brown’s commitment to the biblical ban on homosexuality that Stanford found objectionable. As Brown described the discrimination against him, “If I’d been discriminated against for being black, they never would have told me that. They had no problem telling me it was because of my Christian beliefs.”48
Brown’s story isn’t unusual. Christians are turned away from university jobs and ridiculed in the classroom for their religious views.
Dr. Troy Thompson tells a story about his time at Wayne State University, where he went to medical school. As Thompson relates: “Our class asked Dr. Jack Kevorkian to come and speak to us about his practices— at the time he was calling it ‘medi-cide’ . . . He asked us to raise our hands if we thought abortion wasn’t ethical. I was the only one in the class of three hundred to raise my hand. Kevorkian pointed right at me and told the class, �
��Raise your hand if you think that man is a religious fanatic who will never be a true physician.’”49 Where was the professor during all of this? Euthanizing one of the students?
At Depauw University, a Methodist college, Professor Janis Price was the victim of another anti-Christian attack at the hands of the administration. Price brought in the James Dobson-sponsored magazine, Teachers in Focus, and placed it on the back table of one of her classrooms. At the end of lecture, she told the students that they were free to take a copy of the magazine if they were interested. No article was ever discussed in class. One of the articles in the magazine discussed how public schools should handle the touchy subject of homosexuality. One student was offended by the article and reported Professor Price to the administration.
Busted.
Vice President of Academic Affairs Neal Abraham sent Price a scathing letter calling her actions “reprehensible,” the magazine “intolerant,” and accusing her of creating a “hostile environment” in the classroom. He put Price on probation, cut her pay 25 percent and barred her from teaching at the university, saying that the college “cannot tolerate the intolerable.”50 It is a frightening era in which the administration of a Methodist university considers Christianity intolerable.
“WHAT WAS YOUR NAME AGAIN?”
Each year, usually during summer, movies about college life premiere. Most of them include some sort of “life-lesson” learned by the main character; for many, the climax of the movie occurs during finals week. But each and every one shows risqué sexual behavior taking place on campus. Is it an exaggeration? Perhaps. Is it occurring frequently? Assuredly.
Religious groups have protested this kind of behavior for years, and they have specifically targeted co-ed dorms as the cause of much of this promiscuity. But the universities maintain that co-ed dorms are good, and that the promiscuity that often results from close contact between the sexes is normal and healthy.
An Independent Women’s Forum survey of more than one thousand college women showed that 40 percent of them admitted to having engaged in a “hook-up”—an impersonal sexual encounter, ranging from kissing to intimacy, in which the woman did not expect further contact with her partner. Ten percent of the women admitted to having “hooked up” more than six times. Associate director of the McCosh Health Center at Princeton, Janet Finney, said that she was surprised by the number of “college students who become friends with people because of proximity” rather than shared interests. The same could probably be said for sexual relationships. Instead of being shocked by the statistics, Professor Fernandez-Kelley of Princeton was pleased, since she “disagrees with moralists” who feel that young people should not experiment sexually.51
In 1998, five Orthodox Jewish students sued Yale University for the right to live off campus after they were forced to live in co-ed dorms where most students used co-ed toilets and showers, sex manuals and condoms were openly available, and freshmen were required to attend “safe sex lectures.” Dubbed the Yale Five by the media, their story made national headlines.
Yale would not capitulate, stating that living in the dorms was a “a central part of Yale’s education,”52 despite the fact that Yale does not require juniors and seniors to live in the dorms. Richard Levin, president of the Yale Hillel (a campus Jewish organization), ripped the Orthodox students as close-minded, stating that they didn’t belong at Yale if they weren’t willing to live in the obscenity-filled world of the co-ed dorms: “Why come to a university like this one if you won’t open your mind to new ideas and new perspectives?” he said. “This is not a place where people who close themselves off to the world can thrive.” In essence, the university asked the students to either choose their morality or a Yale education. Morality won. The students paid for campus housing and lived off campus.53
A conversation I had with a female acquaintance on campus comes to mind. Both of us were at a meeting with some other Jewish students. For some reason, she decided to announce before the entire group that she had recently dated a Muslim (remember, she is Jewish). Since Jewish law forbids intermarriage, her unprompted comment irritated me.
“Why were you going out with a guy who’s not Jewish?” I asked.
“Well, I didn’t know he wasn’t Jewish,” she answered.
“How long did you go out with him?”
“About three months.”
“And you didn’t know that he wasn’t Jewish?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Well, you know, we met in the dorms, and we became really close, and then we kind of, you know, it just happened . . .”
By this time, the conversation had grown rather heated. “So you slept with the guy, not even knowing his religion? Next time it might behoove you to find out his name first,” I chided.
“Well, that’s the way it works in the dorms, you know,” she answered.
“KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF MY BODY!”
On June 5, 2002, a pro-life group came to UCLA campus. They went to BruinWalk, the main campus pathway, and set up gigantic twenty-foot-high posters containing horrific photos of aborted fetuses. I normally don’t use BruinWalk to get to class, but I was intrigued enough to walk down to the posters and observe the reactions of the people who passed by, both students and faculty. A few gasped in horror; some simply walked by the posters without looking back; most slowly shook their heads as they walked by, ridiculing the audacity of those radical pro-lifers who would dare to bring their conservative political views into the middle of this pristine campus.
It was about the reaction I expected. College faculty is overwhelmingly and militantly pro-choice, and it rubs off on the students. Fully 99 percent of Ivy League professors oppose a legal ban on abortion.54 The effect on the students? A 1996 Gallup poll showed that while 47 percent of women were pro-life when they finished high school, that number dropped to 24 percent by the time the women finished college.55
Professor Sarah Weddington of the University of Texas is probably the leading pro-choice advocate in the country. In 1967, Weddington wrote about her own abortion experience in Mexico in her book, A Question of Choice. Six years later, in 1973, Weddington successfully argued Roe v.Wade before the Supreme Court, the case in which abortion was deemed a “woman’s right to choose.” Now, she’s out proselytizing for abortion: “[W]e have to have a new generation of younger women [supporting abortion rights]. . . . we can’t win it without them. We’ve got to have their help in organizing people to vote pro-choice, protecting clinics, working with Planned Parenthood.”56 Weddington uses her podium as a weapon.
Professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University, who is pro-choice, did a study examining reasons for the extremely pro-abortion tilt of the law school professoriate. He concluded that the population groups most likely to be pro-life—Hispanics, Catholics, and Republicans—are among the most underrepresented on law school faculties. Republicans compose only 32 percent of the law school faculty, according to the study.57 No wonder most lawyers are leftists.
At the University of Illinois, pro-choice Professor Eileen McDonagh of Northeastern University pulled out of a debate with pro-life speaker Scott Klusendorf of Stand to Reason after McDonagh’s supporters refused to allow her to speak. Said one of McDonagh’s supporters, Chrissy Trilling of Campus for Choice: “We don’t want to give [the pro-life side] a forum for their extremist views.”58 Women’s Studies Professor Sonya Michel of the University of Illinois attacked Klusendorf as unlearned, calling his academic record insufficient.59 Debates are acceptable as long as there are no right-wingers. That’s the intellectual’s way.
Professors are willing to go out on a limb to kill babies. Many professors even support the gruesome D&E (dilation and evacuation) and D&X procedures (dilation and extraction). A D&E is a late-term abortion wherein the doctor crushes the baby’s skull in the uterus with a forceps, then dismembers the baby and extracts it. A D&X is also a late-term abortion, but in this one, a doctor pulls the baby through the birth canal
by its feet, then cuts a hole in its skull and sucks out its brains, afterward removing the corpse.
To ban D&X is cruel, claims Professor Susan Frelich Appleton of Washington University in St. Louis. “Would you want the Legislature deciding whether some other option is safer or better when that is a medical issue?”60 she asks. Dr. Ann Davis of Columbia University is involved in pro-choice group Medical Students for Choice; she calls both D&E and D&X procedures “very safe.”61 Safe for whom? Certainly not the baby.
Professor Mary Mahowald of the University of Chicago feels that Americans’ views on D&X are clouded by outside influences: “The media has totally exaggerated the incidence and evoked perceptions that informed and experienced clinicians would challenge.”62 A woman’s right to choose takes precedence over all—even if that means crushing the skull of a living child and sucking its brains into a sink.
UNALIENABLE RIGHT TO DIE
Judeo-Christian tradition says that euthanasia is inherently wrong. God gives life, and God takes it away—it is not up to the individual to decide when he should die. In Jewish ritual, in fact, Jews are required to say a blessing when they hear of another’s death: “Blessed is the True Judge,” to show that the question of life and death is always in the hands of God.
For professors, however, human life is not divine, and therefore man should be able to take it when he sees fit. Without a higher authority to answer to, life belongs only to the one who possesses it, and he or she can decide to end it.
Sidney Wanzer of the Harvard Law School Health Services and Harvard Professor James Vorenberg teamed up to create a piece of model legislation that advocated permitting physician-aided suicide. “I’ve felt for a long time that anyone has a right to be released from life if life has become a trap,” explains Vorenberg. And Wanzer says, “I would look at physician-assisted suicide as part of the spectrum of treatment that should be available to the patient.” Wanzer and Vorenberg agree that euthanasia should be available to those who are not even terminally ill.63