Academic Prohibition

Academic Prohibition By Rabbi Aryeh Spero
FrontPageMagazine.com
8/10/2007

In today's America, you can burn our flag but you can not mistreat the Koran. Burning the flag is freedom of expression, a form of allowable speech our courts tell us, but mistreating the Koran is a criminal felony punishable under hate-crime legislation. If you are a Moslem you can, together with your brothers, wave posters at public protests on college campuses calling for "Killing the Jews", "Destroy Israel" and declare "Jews are Sons of Apes". This our college administrators tell us is "free speech". However, you have no right, even in private, to demean a book if it is the Koran. If you do, you go to jail. This is a form of expression unallowable -- perhaps America's only remaining prohibition.

Last week, a student at Pace University in New York was formally charged with a felony for stuffing a Koran in a commode. CAIR, a Muslim organization, filed suit, claiming it constituted a hate-crime. Was this hate directed at a person? No. Was it painted on the walls of an institution where people of a specific race congregate? No. Was anyone threatened? No. It was simply one person's rejection, in a physical way, of a philosophy. People do it and have done it, all the time, with the Christian Bible, the Constitution, our flag, the Republican Platform. When was the last time you ever heard of someone in America possibly going to jail because he flushed some pages of a book down a toilet?

This case is important not only because an American is going to be criminally charged for an act that, while not nice, is simply not criminal but because, in the name of political correctness, we are changing centuries of legal definitions in order to appease bullies who are now telling us what we can do and what we can't. Worse, they are making us submit to a double standard where what is allowable for them is not allowable for us. For example, people can burn the Christian Bible but not soak a Koran. While American museums can display depictions of Mary in dung and Jesus in urine, one is prohibited from demonstrating disapproval and horror regarding verses in the Koran. Somehow it is not a hate crime when young and middle-aged Moslems publicly call for the deaths of our children and raise signs on our streets threatening a Holocaust, here, against non-believing "infidels".

This whole country is based on equal justice under the law, not special justice and more rights for one group over the rest of us. This is not simply the capitulation of a legal system but our own willing complicity in the destruction of everything we have heretofore believed in and died for. At stake is our very civilization and our morality. Centuries of developed wisdom are being thrown out, discarded. It is happening because of a suicidal, self-hatred among our elites for the Judeo-Christian ethos that early-on made our ancestors and shaped our parents and because those that lead our institutions are afraid.
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