Last week our campus invited a speaker to explain to the student body that A) cause and effect is irrelevant, implying that B) America is not responsible for any attacks against it by Islamic groups, and that C) Islam is the world's most intolerant religion.

Robert Spencer--the Catholic founder of Jihad Watch, a group that tracks Islamist terrorism-related events worldwide, and writer of "The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion"--came to Dartmouth last Friday to speak for "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week," an event organized by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. About 60 students showed up.

Introducing the program, Meir Kohn, Dartmouth Professor of Economics, stated that the event's purpose was to rectify the "silence on American campuses about Islamo-fascism," which is "never heard [about in] academic circles." He attributes this absence in academia not to its superior knowledge but because academia is purportedly "dominated by the left, and the culture of the left is dominated by watered down Marxism." He told the audience that "the view in these leftist circles is that a movement that is anti-American and anti-capitalism can't be all bad." In other words, just in the introduction, the event proclaimed that it wants more discourse about the propensity for Fascism to exist in Islam, and that current academia is basically communist and anti-American. Sadly, the event only became more ridiculous.

Spencer's main argument was that Islamo-fascism--and not the foreign policy of the West--is responsible for 9/11. He attempted to point out hypocrisy in the "multicultural" left by stating that it "doesn't take into account the events of 9/11 ... from the worldview of the perpetrators." He continued: "They refuse the possibility that [the terrorists] may have reasons of their own... independent of the United States." It is, in Spencer's opinion, a ludicrous idea that America's actions could have caused the disaster.

At the crux was the assertion that we are being attacked by people who ostensibly abide by, and attempt to spread, Islamic religion. He cited "Islamic Jihad," asking the audience what to call a group that explains "what they are doing in terms of traditional and classic categories of Islam." He failed to acknowledge that these religious references merely could serve recruitment purposes--rather than convey ideological truth. Justifying a campaign by exploiting abstract religious terms has been a worldwide practice from the Inquisition's insistence on "religious purity" to the Neoconservatives' on "family values."

Furthermore, this reasoning would logically entail that the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is truly a democratic republic full of free people. His line of thought asserts that if a group rhetorically equates itself with an ideology, it makes it so. Would it not be contradictory to assert it propagandistic when North Korea wraps itself in an ideology but true ideology when a terrorist organization does the same?

He believes that if terrorists do horrible things, backing them up using the Koran, then the Koran--rather than being a misguided justification mechanism--is conducive to their actions. He believes that Islam is the most intolerant religion. Along the same line, he believes that Islam is necessarily against women's rights. He cites the Koranic verse that "[women] are supposed to be beaten if they are not obedient." He believes that because the practice is rampant and that clerics approve of it, the Koran must be the cause.
What he fails to realize is that this, too, is not without precedent. The Old Testament was formerly used to condone slavery. He needs to be reminded that slavery, less than 200 years ago, was rampant in the United States, and some, if not most, southern clerics condoned it.

At the end of his speech, he ended with a call to action--but not really any specific action. Instead, we should disperse awareness of facts that simply aren't true. In fact, in closing this self-proclaimed politically incorrect speech, he announced that "everybody with a healthy functioning conscience" should promote awareness of the Islamo-fascism movement. In other words, we should promote "knowledge" that has the potential to become bigotry on college campuses.