{"id":10327,"date":"2010-06-20T10:46:38","date_gmt":"2010-06-20T17:46:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=10327"},"modified":"2010-06-20T10:46:38","modified_gmt":"2010-06-20T17:46:38","slug":"uci-suspends-muslim-student-union","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=10327","title":{"rendered":"UCI Suspends Muslim Student Union"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m embarrassed that I didn’t hear about this until last night, especially since my husband attends the very campus in question. (In my defense, I was in the mountains for most of last week.) In response to Muslim students’ protest<\/a>* of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s visit to campus, the UC Irvine Muslim Student Union has been suspended for one year.<\/p>\n

Whether the students’ choice of direct action was wise is a debate of its own – and one that I’m not interested in having on this thread – but the university needs to realize the deeper ramifications of its decision. It’s almost impossible to imagine a Jewish or Christian group being punished this way for the actions of Jewish or Christian students; I’m assuming that the Muslim protesters were members of the MSU, but it must be noted that they didn’t act on behalf of the organization<\/em>. The message the university is sending, whether it means to or not, isn’t that some forms of protest are unacceptable. The message it’s sending is that Islam is not as legitimate as other religions at UCI.<\/p>\n

The MSU is appealing the decision<\/a>; check their website<\/a> for updates.<\/p>\n

Via the Debate Link<\/a>.<\/p>\n

ETA: According to the LA Times,<\/a> the office of student housing claims that the MSU organized the protest with plans to deny it later. At this point the evidence seems shaky, though.<\/p>\n

*David Schraub points out the following in the comments<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The MSU was not suspended for \u201cprotesting\u201d Ambassador Oren\u2019s appearance. They were suspended for disrupting the appearance \u2014 trying to make it impossible for Ambassador Oren to present at all via, in essence, continually shouting him down. Particularly since there are many out there who suspect that any protest or critique against Israelis or Israeli policies will be met with \u201cmuzzling\u201d, this is not a trivial distinction, and is extremely important to make it. Students should be absolutely free to protest, but universities have every right to prevent actual disruption of educational events.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m embarrassed that I didn’t hear about this until last night, especially since my husband attends the very campus in question. (In my defense, I was in the mountains for most of last week.) In response to Muslim students’ protest* … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-free-speech-censorship-copyright-law-etc","category-palestine-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}