Administrators at Ripon College have banned the Young America’s Foundation from exhibiting a poster to commemorate the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The offending item?
Why offending? As YAF commentator Spencer Brown notes, administrators say that the poster unjustly focuses on “one religious group, one religious identity — in associating that one religious identity with terrorist attacks which go back far before 9/11 and after 9/11 — creates for some students here an environment which they feel like they are not able to learn.” The administrators also claim “nothing that this poster, in particular, adds to the conversation about 9/11, or about the politics of terrorism, or about national security or responses to it that couldn’t be done easily and more constructively without it.”
Excuse me, but, what?
This poster reminds of what caused 9/11 — Islamic terrorism. How is it counterproductive to point out the struggle between western modernity and Salafi-Jihadist supremacism or Khomeinist authoritarianism? How is one “not able to learn” from the past on the day the terrorists hit America hardest?
The administrators’ suggestion that concern over Islamic extremism is tantamount to anti-educational activity is utterly absurd. On the contrary, the poster’s identification of various atrocities conducted in various locales by various Islamic extremist groups is inherently educational. It illuminates the scale of challenge that the various streams of extremist political Islam represent.
The poster’s comparative referencing of James Foley’s execution by the Islamic State’s Mohammed Emwazi (aka “dust boy“) and Omar Mateen’s Orlando terrorist attack, for example, speak to the direct connectivity between ISIS-directed and ISIS-inspired terrorism.
The only mistake in the poster is its presentation of ideological alignment between groups like the Lebanese Hezbollah and ISIS, which pathologically hate each other.
It’s easy to understand why the Ripon administrators are acting as they are. Like most college administrators and faceless corporate bureaucrats in America, they believe that the avoidance of controversy is preferable to an abundance of commentary. Their agenda may be antithetical to the most basic norms of enlightened philosophy, but it is one that abounds at many colleges across America today.
Nevertheless, Islamist terrorist groups are both truly evil and truly determined to do more damage like they did on 9/11. We should never be afraid to identify their continuing threat and their historic atrocities. YAF deserves to have their poster exhibited.
