Hurt feelings are more important than academic freedom: With this argument, an American university dismissed an allegedly Islamophobic art historian. The case sparked nationwide protests.
Dangerous masterpiece: The prophet Mohammed receives his first revelation from the angel Gabriel. Illustration from The Illustrated History of the World by Rashid al-Din, 1307.
Actually, Erika López Prater did everything right. Before her online course on art and world religions, she warned her students that she would show them historical images of the Prophet Mohammed. If you feel uncomfortable doing this, turn off the screen. But all these precautionary measures did not help her. As the “New York Times” (“NYT”) reported at the weekend, the art historian was fired from Hamline University in Minnesota – after Muslim students and interest groups had sparked a storm of indignation.
The incident happened in early October, but has now triggered a national debate because of the New York Times’ reporting. According to research by the American newspaper, Erika López Prater did not show her students obscene caricatures, but paintings from the 14th and 16th centuries that are meant to honor the prophet. One is from the Illustrated World History by the Persian vizier Rashid al-Din. Although not all Islamic cultures have a ban on images and nothing of the sort can be derived from the Koran, many fundamentalist Muslims consider pictorial representations of Mohammed to be sacrilege.
Hitler comparisons and an indictment in tears
In any case, one student of Erika López Prater claimed after the course that, as a Muslim, her feelings had been hurt by the pictures, that she had been excluded and treated with disrespect. “I thought, that can’t be true,” she told the student newspaper Hamline Oracle. What followed was drama in an environment of activists and diversity bureaucrats, where accusations can ruin careers. Erika López Prater apologized to the student, but she called in the university management and organized a forum about Islamophobia with like-minded women.
There she asked, according to the “New York Times” in tears, what one should do at 8 a.m. “if someone insults your religion”. Other students also complained that they felt discriminated against by the university. The lawsuits worked. Students demanded more “interventions,” and those responsible for social justice at the university suggested that all faculty members undergo anti-Islamophobia training. A spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations – one of the most important Islamic organizations in the USA – said that such controversial “stuff” should not be taught at the university. You could just as well teach the students “why Hitler was good”.
Feelings are more important than academic freedom
The fact that not all Muslims see it that way impressed the university management little. Instead of defending academic freedom, she sided with the religious activists on behalf of all Muslims. The Vice President of the Diversity and Inclusion Office informed all university employees that there had been undeniably “disrespectful and Islamophobic” incidents in an online seminar.
University President Fayneese S. Miller signed an email with the message that respect for Muslim students outweighs academic freedom in this case. Erika López Prater was informed that her courses would be discontinued in the future. The university has not yet responded to a request from the NZZ.
It could be dismissed as a provincial farce, the problem of a petty private university cowering in front of extremists. However, it is about a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly widespread in Anglo-Saxon countries. Company employees, professors, journalists and even students must expect to be accused by activists of the worst thought crimes for trivial reasons. Performances are canceled as a precaution so as not to hurt feelings. In Toronto, the school board canceled a reading with Yazidi and Nobel Prize winner Nadia Murad in 2021 because the woman who had been raped and enslaved by jihadists could arouse Islamophobic feelings.
Memoirs of the murder of Samuel Paty
Since Islam is considered the religion of a collectively oppressed race in the “progressive” world view, even religious fanatics can now count on being classified as victims of racism. This can also be seen in Europe, where left-wing students have tried several times to disrupt or prevent courses given by allegedly Islamophobic lecturers. In France, two professors had to be placed under police protection after a left-wing hate campaign in 2021 because they rejected the term “Islamophobia”, which is all too often misused by extremists.
The fact that the case of the fired art historian Erika López Prater was scandalized by the New York Times of all places is not without a certain irony. For one thing, the newspaper recently fired two editors on fabricated allegations of discrimination and racism. On the other hand, when dealing with Islamism, it often maintains an appeaseric attitude. This could be seen, among other things, after the murder of the French teacher Samuel Paty in 2020.
Paty had shown his students cartoons of Muhammad from the satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo” to explain the principle of freedom of expression to them. He, too, had warned his students and given them the choice not to look. Islamists nevertheless covered him with hate messages on social networks. Instead of educating their audience about Islamist activities, left-wing leading US media such as the NYT preferred to criticize “Charlie Hebdo”, French laicism or President Emmanuel Macron, who was portrayed as a kind of anti-Muslim Joseph McCarthy because of his measures against political Islam.
“Islamophobic Hate Speech”
The fact that Islamism poses a threat to any free society, and not just in the form of terrorism, has so far been ignored in New York’s editorial offices. In the case of Erika López Prater, too, the NYT fails to shed light on the political background of those activists who call for censorship and apologies in the name of hurt feelings.
The student who initiated the charges against Prater is president of the local Muslim Students Association (MSA) – a student organization traditionally close to the Muslim Brotherhood and to this day pursuing an Islamist agenda. Among other things, MSA branches in the USA have invited a preacher who advocates stoning. Emmanuel Macron accused students after Paty’s murder of spreading “Islamophobic hate speech”.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which in the López Prater case operates with comparisons to Hitler, warned against traveling to France after the Paty murder. This is not because of Islamist terror, but because of the government, which is “stoking up the flames of Islamophobia”. According to Islamism researchers such as Lorenzo Vidino, the Council is also associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. In contrast to terrorists, these formally moderate Islamists are officially against violence. Instead, they try to enforce their religious goals in the West with victim narratives and accusations of racism.
Thanks to media coverage, this tactic could now prove counterproductive. Because the dismissal of Erika López Prater caused a lack of understanding even among moderate Muslims. The American PEN Club senses one of the “most outrageous violations of academic freedom”. Even left-wing commentators speak of a cancel-culture case that the conservative star moderator Tucker Carlson could not have invented more beautifully. A petition against the dismissal is running on the Change.org platform, and by Tuesday noon more than 10,000 people had signed it.