More change. After years of accepting advertisements from the David Horowitz Freedom Center aimed at combating Israeli Apartheid Week on campus, the Daily Pennsylvanian says that henceforth it will reject the ad. Horowitz’s ad is here: “Faces of Islamic Apartheid,” which uses a gun-scope image over the faces of alleged victims of Muslim extremists. It was placed in seven campus newspapers earlier this month.
After it appeared in the Daily Pennsylvanian recently, it created a lot of pushback. Here and here, for instance.
The policy change was announced by Daily Pennsylvanian editor Jennifer Sun, who cites the mounting campus pressure. Though she nowhere speaks of Islamophobia, she does grant moral authority to the ad’s critics– and she says they were nice.
For several years now, we’ve published David Horowitz Freedom Center advertisements in the print edition of The Daily Pennsylvanian. With each Horowitz ad we’ve received and published, the campus response has shifted from denouncing the Horowitz Center to wondering why the DP continued to publish these advertisements year after year, when such a vocal part of campus disapproved of them….
As a fellow student, I’ve been grateful for how diplomatic student leaders from the Muslim Students Association and PRISM [Penn’s Interfaith Student group] have been when they approached us with their concerns. This advertisement hit hard, but the last intention we have is to insult or offend our fellow classmates.
We’re glad you stood up and spoke out and, as always, we hope you’ll continue to do so in the future.
I read this as a kind of subtle vindication of multiculturalism: Jennifer (presumably Chinese-American) Sun taking favorable notice of the “diplomatic” manners of the Muslim (and likely West Asian) students who approached her about an affair of a Philadelphia university. For a long time I’ve had fairly nativist views on immigration, but always knew there were good counter-arguments. This–a sort of West Asian-East Asian- American
entente among elite students in favor of civility towards Muslims –is a kind of special example of how immigration is or at least might be changing the country for the better.
“This–a sort of West Asian-East Asian- American entente among elite students in favor of civility towards Muslims”
To me it looks like decent people coming to a decent agreement.
I don’t quite see what it has to do with multiculturalism. That seems to be a form of apartheid.
Wasn’t Horowitz one of the former left wing socialists who weirdly converting to NeoConism, likely due to his stance on the main issue that we discuss practically everyday here on Mondoweiss?
schools need no excuse to nix that ad! what if they allowed the exact same thing with “Jewish” instead of “Islamic”? they’d be sued. imagine: “Jewish Apartheid Week” on campus, complete with “expert” speakers on judaism!!
but the funniest part is that the Horowitz ad and web page are missing the biggest example of oppressive sharia law, Saudi Arabia, and the US is shipping record-breaking amounts of weapons there. where’s Horowitz’s protest signs, “STOP ARMING SAUDI ARABIA” and “DON’T LET SAUDI ARABIA GET NUKES”?
gee, that might be too consistent with “STOP FUNDING ISRAELI APARTHEID”.
I’m sure their “expert” speakers will ALL agree that US military intervention in Iran is called for, however US military intervention seems to be overturning secular governments in favor of sectarian civil wars and fundamentalists everywhere…. hmmmm. Islamophobe week sounds like a riot. wish I were there!