After all my huff and puff about world peace last week, I am incredibly discouraged to have to write this. I hope a lot of you on campus have heard of Nonie Darwish, the speaker that Davis College Republicans have booked to speak tonight. I’ll keep this simple: She is an Egyptian woman who used to be Muslim, had a bad experience with Islam and now is traveling the country warning people on college campuses about Muslim Student Associations “recruiting terrorists;” jumping on the hater-bandwagon … as I always say.
She’s written a book called Now They Call Me Infidel, conveniently published right after Sept. 11, about how Islam always taught her to hate and now that she is Evangelical Christian she can finally love. By spreading hate that is. So she hates for love. Or is it love to hate? No, she hates loving hating? What the hell, IS SARA KOHGADAI GOING TO HAVE TO CHOKE A BITCH?
Tomorrow’s headline: “Islamic Terrorist Threatens To Choke Evangelical Woman on College Campus.” Never mind the fact that I’m hardly even Muslim. Whatever. I encourage everyone to check out a little website called terrorismawarenessproject.com. On its main page you should notice the organization’s focus on college campuses. The concern is that MSAs are funding and recruiting terrorists right in front of our very eyes. Through the facade of practicing religious freedom and representing a sector of students, MSAs are using school funding to support terrorist organizations overseas. Hmm. Tricky, aren‘t they? Could have fooled me. I mean with all the midterms, finals, papers, volunteer hours, office hours, letters of recommendations, work, charity events, extracurriculars, stressing out and partying, shit – I would have thought they were just normal college students.
Nonie Darwish is just one speaker, who happens to be attending our campus as part of a nationwide event called Islamo-fascism week. Nationwide! We can‘t even get people to vote nationwide, but as soon as there‘s someone to burn at the stake – oh how patriotic we are! Let me remind the public about the Salem witch trials, the Red scare with Communism, and Japanese Internment camps post World War II. These patterns of xenophobic behavior constantly resurface in American history. After a tragic event, hysteria strikes and everyone needs something to blame. Some people might not be able to make the connection between the discrimination against Muslims today and the aforementioned groups. The inequality might not be as blatant as it was years ago; there are no internment camps, but discrimination is discrimination. Accepting even the smallest degree of it justifies every degree of it. Get ready for some cheesy analogies. The PATRIOT Act is the barbed-wired walls segregating Muslims from the rest of American society; the wooden stake that Americans‘ liberties and rights are burning away at. Burning witches, hunting communists, interning Japanese, and now pointing the finger at Muslim Americans – the next step toward another irrational solution for an irrelevant problem.
Speaking of irrelevant: What motive does DCR have for inviting this woman to our campus? She has nothing to do with policy, nothing to do with politics, has nothing to offer that favors the Republican Party and yet DCR feels the need to endorse this woman. I‘ll make one last analogy as I reach my word limit. The Davis College Republicans are the terrorists of politics on campus. They are a minuscule portion of our society who claims to represent the larger sector with their baseless, irrational hatred. Just like there is a strong necessity to distinguish terrorists who kill in the name of God from Muslims, DCR needs to be differentiated from the rest of Republicans on campus. I do not agree with almost anything Republicans say in general, however I do not believe they are bad people and I refuse to even suggest that Republicans are racists or that they support people Nonie Darwish. Unlike the DCR I am critical enough to make this distinction and mature enough to admit it.
If you thought the use of the term “hater-bandwagon“ was ridiculous too, e-mail SARA KOHGADAI at sbkohgadai@ucdavis.edu so you can laugh it up together.
