Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The closing of the academic space

It's sad to hear that Harvard University has changed its gym policy to accomodate the demands of its Islamic Society. Abe Greenwald quotes a local student paper as saying some athletic facilities now bar men at certain hours in order to cater to the sensibilities of Muslim women.

Men have not been allowed to enter the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center during certain times since Jan. 28, after members of the Harvard Islamic Society and the Harvard Women’s Center petitioned the university for a more comfortable environment for women.

Harvard Islamic Society’s Islamic Knowledge Committee officer Ola Aljawhary, a junior, said the women-only hours are being tested on a trial basis. The special gym hours will be analyzed over Spring Break to determine if they will continue, she said. ...

Harvard junior Nick Wells said he believes the women-only hours are inconvenient for the residents that live near the facility and discriminate against men. "It is unfair to impose a stringent policy that inhibits [students] from using their own facility in order to further a useless policy that doesn't have any real effect," he said.

Students have a right to use common gym facilities at all the hours they are open. If the Islamic Society is uncomfortable using the gym facilities in the time-honored manner they can always raise money to build their own private, Muslim-only gym.

Multiculturalism has become its parody, Balkanization.




22 Comments:

Blogger newscaper said...

Funny how there'd be hell to pay if *women* were being blocked for "men only" time.

2/26/2008 01:11:00 PM  
Blogger PeterBoston said...

A pox on the Harvard administration. Every Muslim attempt to receive special treatment from any and every institution, no matter how reasonable or how innocuous it may seem at the moment, must be resisted, denied, impugned, and thrown back in their face.

2/26/2008 01:15:00 PM  
Blogger PeterBoston said...

Washington-APA. US Senate approved a resolution on Kosovo’s integration into NATO and Euro-Atlantic institutions. The resolution says that, US support the participation of Kosovo in summit of NATO to be held in Bucharest in April. The document covers that, US has recognized the independence of Kosovo and intends to support this country’s integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions.

Madness. Sheer madness. The same destructive mindset as Harvard's new gym policy.

2/26/2008 01:25:00 PM  
Blogger gdude said...

Wait. You mean women are going to have unrestricted access to that facility at all times? So much for equality. Where are the women's lib'ers?!? Oh, that's right, Monica ended that charade.

And, the Separation of Church and State crowd (you know, the Just Say No to ROTC at Harvard because of Don't Ask, Don't Tell) are awfully quiet here, too. I guess you're okay as long as your religiion of choice is NOT Christianity.

Shows that perhaps the whole house of cards built on the Rights of Man is reaching its logical breaking point as the rights of one group clash with those of another as society becomes less and less homogeneous.

2/26/2008 01:40:00 PM  
Blogger newscaper said...

Whenever apologists and/or idiots say that strict Muslims have a valid objections to the way the West has too much blatant sexuality, this is my reply:

Which is worse?
a) a woman being presumably "exploited" as a stripper, and being paid good money by Western men to ogle her lustfully 9and nothing more)
or...
b) the same woman's profession being taken as reason for unrelated Muslims to justifiably rape her, or for her father/brother/boyfriend to kill her.

2/26/2008 01:45:00 PM  
Blogger Fred said...

peterboston,

I share your thoughts on the matter. I haven't driven down to Harvard Square in a few years, now that amazon.com works just as well as those bookstores down there once worked (and since I live in New Hampshire I don't have to pay the Massachusetts sales tax), and now I am definitely getting a more rounded impression of Harvard U: it is falling in line with the role of the dhimmi, now that Edward Said's tendentious screed puts a crimp in how they respond to Islamic aggression.

Why is it that the Ivies, Stanford, and U. Cal at Berkeley are leading the race of the lemmings over the cliff of civilizational suicide? How is it that such gatherings of minds more superior than mine are blind to what the Qur'an and ahadith command?

2/26/2008 01:55:00 PM  
Blogger Nomenklatura said...

This sort of decision by academics is interesting. It is unlikely they would have conceded the same thing to any other ethnic group, and at the same time it's not the sort of issue on which a refusal would currently have provoked a violent response.

It's as if leftists believe that the Muslim community ought to be induced in the direction of indulging their most base and illiberal impulses, via a trail of rewards planted deliberately, offering reassurances each step of the way that escalating demands will be rewarded.

One might almost think that the agenda is "if we can't get the whites or the blacks round here to riot and recreate the heady days of 1968 for us then maybe we'll just have to try the Muslims".

2/26/2008 02:03:00 PM  
Blogger Mr X said...

I think that, if things keep going this way, Islam will eventually rule the west or at least a great part of it, not because they are particularly competent, but because western elites are decadent and completely suicidal. They will give welfare to polygamous marriages, accept muslim requisits to special prayer rooms, beach space, gym space, no pig images, no mohammed images, wll give them millions of dollars, give them Kosovo, give them Palestine, give them Andalusia... All in the hope that the requests will one day end. Guess what? They'll never end. It never ends. Either you fight or pay the dane-geld forever and ever and ever.

2/26/2008 02:17:00 PM  
Blogger david leaner said...

Harvard would do well to go just a tad further by instituting a dress code to match its academic and politico-philosophic by strongly suggesting/mandating on pain of ostracism black, unwieldy, modest and suffocating fabric tents for Muslim women and ~whatever~ for men. Let our best universities give women the freedom of exercising lifestyle restrictions imposed upon them by the men who have the right to fashion women-only rules and sensibilities.

Harvard- the elite, traditional institution of not necessarily America, anymore.

2/26/2008 02:53:00 PM  
Blogger herself said...

Harvard is doing more than catering to Islamic women. The whole curriculum is being revised and it appears it will have a Middle Eastern slant. Their outreach program http://cmes.hmdc.harvard.edu/
outreach/resources/kits
is also catering to early educators. Saudis have endowed the university with much funding. I believe a mosque is being built on campus, but I may be wrong.
I suspect that they are looking outside the US agressively for students who will not be so interested in the American ethos, since my son (here in Ireland)was sent an invitation to apply to Harvard with the guarantee of free tuition if he was accepted. They must have acquired his name and address through the College Board/SATs. I convinced him not to apply.

2/26/2008 03:08:00 PM  
Blogger Rudy said...

I am not going to give another dime to Harvard ... yes, a pox on them and on their administration.

When they get back around to treating all people equally, including those that look and think like me, they can let me know.

2/26/2008 03:33:00 PM  
Blogger PeterBoston said...

Think Harvard has it bad? How about minarets at Europe's most prestigious center of learning?

Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies

Notice that the mission statement is about Islamic "culture and civilization"? And you thought it was just another religion...

Can anybody come up with an historical example of when cultures and civilizations coexisted in the same space on equal terms.

2/26/2008 05:17:00 PM  
Blogger LifeoftheMind said...

peterboston said

Can anybody come up with an historical example of when cultures and civilizations coexisted in the same space on equal terms.

2/26/2008 05:17:00 PM


Yes, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and Atheist in the City of New York for the last several decades. Something precious and worth fighting for.

2/26/2008 05:58:00 PM  
Blogger Fred said...

If "lifeofthemind" does not see or know what makes Islam such a different "civilization" from the rest of his list, I guess there is no point in pursuing that avenue of inquiry, peterboston. We know the construct of his argument and have seen it hundreds of times in a hundred different places in our post-modernist culture. Multiculturalism has sunk deep roots into the Western mind. To the point that its practitioners are unable to analytically break it down and understand the premise and its components/corollaries.

That respondent needs a steady diet of jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch.org, and perhaps indulge an exotic curiosity for the Qur'an, if other cultures truly be his interest.

2/27/2008 07:24:00 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Jews, Christians, Buddhists and Atheists coexist in the City of New York not as different cultures and civilizations but as people with different world views within the American culture.

2/27/2008 09:11:00 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Major Coughlin is out and Islam is in again at the DOD.

We should put the federal government on suicide watch.

2/27/2008 09:13:00 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Apparently I am either peter or peterboston depending on how I sign into my Google account.

2/27/2008 09:14:00 AM  
Blogger PapaBear said...

One question: can self-identified "transgender" students with XY chromosomes use the gym during female times? If so, it opens amusing possibilities for any guys willing to show up wearing dresses and lipstick

2/27/2008 09:22:00 AM  
Blogger Mike H. said...

Peter, the problem is not Islam, the problem is England. Why the concentration on Islam, I don't know. The corrupt part is the undersecretary who seems to lean quite heavily on Islam.

2/27/2008 09:38:00 AM  
Blogger NahnCee said...

"We live together in one community, it only makes sense for everyone to compromise slightly in order for everyone to live happily," she said. "This matter is simple: Can't we just display basic decency and show tolerance and inclusion for people not a part of the mainstream majority?"

I just love this line of logic by a lady Muslim. I wonder if she's willing to show the same amount of tolerance and inclusion for cartoons making fun of Mohammad, or if she's willing to compromise slightly to eat bacon only one day a week.

We know she wouldn't, so why oh why do Muslims find nothing at all odd in demanding that the rest of us (the mainstream majority) bend over backwards to accommodate their various lunacies?

BTW, in a democracy, the definition of how it's done is by election, decided by the most votes; i.e., the mainstream majority. If you're a minority and can't live with those results then you need to either go some place else or shut up. You do NOT ask the whole entire society around you to pick itself up, hitch itself around 22% to accommodate itty-bitty minority you, and then plop back down again. For one thing, it's simply not fair.

When institutions with deep pockets like Harvard start doing these dumb things, it's an invitation to concerned citizens to start suing their asses to bring them back to heel to the letter of the law ... which is NOT any place in the United States of America to make exceptions for Muslims.

2/27/2008 12:52:00 PM  
Blogger Fred said...

peterboston,

This is absolute lunacy, re. the retention of Hesham Islam as Gordon England's secretary, and the boot given to Maj. Coughlin. The FBI has checked out Mr. Islam's associations with the Muslim Brotherhood, found that he is a member of the Brotherhood, and consequently considers Mr. Islam to be a dangerous character.

And so the Bush White House, the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon have made a judgment: the Muslim Brotherhood is not a threat to the country or to civilization.

Forget the suicide watch: DOA, sign the form at the bottom, and ship to the embalmer.

2/27/2008 01:11:00 PM  
Blogger NahnCee said...

Australian Muslim Students Want to Rearrange Classes

In Australia, Muslim students from Saudi Arabia want universities to reschedule lectures to fit in with prayer times, and establish separate areas for females ...

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23269447-12332,00.html

2/27/2008 02:38:00 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home


Powered by Blogger