Monday, April 24, 2006

Fear and Loathing at Penn State

Michelle Malkin takes note of Penn State's censorship of a student's 10-piece exhibit. The exhibit, called Portraits of Terror, explores the conflict in the Palestinian territories. Among its topics are "the destruction of Jewish religious shrines, anti-Semitic propaganda and cartoons in Palestinian newspapers, the disregard for rules of engagement and treatment of prisoners, and the indoctrination of youth into terrorist acts".

Their stated reason, the exhibit "did not promote cultural diversity" or "opportunities for democratic dialogue"

I have not seen the exhibit, but I am acquainted with the kind of propaganda disseminated in the Palestinian controlled areas. It involves Holocaust denial, 9/11 conspiracy theories and the kind of blood libel paranoia and editorial cartoons that would have been at home in a copy of Julius Streicher's Der Strummer.

The question that Penn State students, parents of students and alumnus all need to ask themselves is why a modern university, a supposed bastion of liberal intellectual freedom and enlightened values, would so cravenly carry water for Islamofascists. These are, after all, people who enslave women, murder homosexuals, take censorship of dissenting viewpoints to the point of cold-blooded murder and demand that the entire globe be brought under one totalitarian theocracy.

Is this what Penn State means by "cultural diversity" and "opportunities for democratic dialogue"?

Two theories have been put forward to explain the Left's odd defense of all that they supposedly stand against. One is that it is brought about by fear. They are trying to send a message to the terrorists, "don't bomb us we're on your side".

The other is that the motivation is nothing but pure hatred. Hatred of the United States of America and its current President. They simply hate George W Bush more than they hate the fact that the Taliban used to collapse walls on homosexuals. They hate George W Bush more than the practice of female circumcision. They hate George W Bush more than they hate the murder of Theo van Gogh, the death fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the "honor" killing of women for no other crime than being the victim of rape.

I leave it to the reader to speculate about why they hate George W Bush -- a man whose domestic policies rescued the nation from an inherited recession and whose foreign policies freed one nation from a theocratic tyranny with roots in the 7th century and another from a form of fascism directly spun off from Nazi Germany.

What is it about the President that inspires such hatred and does it not, perhaps, tell us more about the haters than the hated?