NYC: Racist Warmonger Gets Pied

NYU students disrupted a university event this evening featuring Robert Spencer from "Jihad Watch" and Elan Journo from the "Ayn Rand Institute for Individual Freedom." Students called out the panelists for their Islamophobic, warmongering hate-rhetoric, shouting and launching pies at the speakers. One student was detained, and several were escorted out of the building.


The event, entitled "The Jihad Still Threatens America," encouraged viscous Islamophobia and promoted aggressive military intervention in majority Muslim nations. Speaker Elan Journo actively promotes devastating attacks on Iran, claiming that "victory in World War II required flattening cities, firebombing factories, shops and homes, devastating vast tracts of Germany and Japan.... Victory today requires the same:
smashing Iran's totalitarian regime and thus demoralizing the Islamist movement and its many supporters, so that they, too, abandon their cause
as futile." Fear-mongering comments such as these promote the expansion of US imperialism, and contribute to the wave of anti-Muslim hate that is
sweeping our nation.

The pieing came on the heels of an anti-hate sit-in hosted by the Islamic Center at NYU. The event was a response to NYU professor Tunku Varadarajan's recent article entitled "Going Muslim," a new term he has coined in the vein of "Going Postal" (article available at <http://search.forbes.com/search/colAr...aradarajan>).

While it is disturbing to see hate being expressed on such institutional levels on our campuses, the students' refusal to be silent is an inspiration to us all.