It's not even an ideology if you look at it that way but it is a state religion by design, that has various implementations depending on who's to benefit. It prescribes universal obligations which they have in common. Some other dogmas are subject to interpretation.
So the question needs to be cast in another light, sure. It's a hard problem that isn't solved by calling on an ideology.
Why are you assuming they are foreigners? Why do you assume these were not natives in their own country who held these feelings anyway? Do you observe and respect any festivities in the calendar at all? Christmas? Thanksgiving? Easter? Passover? Diwali? Why are these not "dumb superstitions", but other people's are?
You don't get to decide how somebody else is going to react to something, you only get to decide if you care.
You don't get to tell them to stop believing in Islam because they're in a country where that is a minority belief, you only get to decide if you care about offending them.
In this specific case, the lecturer clearly did care - she warned before the course and shortly before the lecture moved to showing that image. That's the issue here, not whether displaying the image was contentious or not: she showed due diligence and her faculty decided it was insufficient. So what would have been sufficient?
That we can have a debate about, but some BS about "western values" and a strawman argument about "submitting" to "superstitions" is not even worth me caring about, other than to call you out as making a statement completely typical of far right-wing xenophobes and racists. Please don't do that here.
Great response. I’m surprised to see xenophobia on HN.
This story is about overbearing administrators infringing on academic freedoms, not Islam vs Western Values. But a lot of people have the Islam v The West hammer, so they’re going to use it in this nail.
While the OPs comment is needlessly coarse, a charitable reading still gets at something important, something you evade addressing by repeating what are effectively tired liberal relativist platitudes about neutrality.
What this firing, and events like it, demonstrate is that there is a zero sum game where foundational beliefs are concerned. Here, the game is between liberalism and (this form of) Islam. If the professor isn’t punished, liberalism wins. If the teacher is punished, this Islam wins. You can’t accommodate both. An Achilles’ heel of liberalism is the notion that it can accommodate everyone, that liberalism is some kind of neutral absence of beliefs that can somehow accommodate fundamental differences and become the basis of a universal society of Man rooted in nothing. Vulgar consumerism has tried to fill that void, but appetite is no basis for a society, to put it mildly.
morby|3 years ago
qsort|3 years ago
posterboy|3 years ago
So the question needs to be cast in another light, sure. It's a hard problem that isn't solved by calling on an ideology.
NicoJuicy|3 years ago
Schools should be too ( only partial now)
PaulRobinson|3 years ago
You don't get to decide how somebody else is going to react to something, you only get to decide if you care.
You don't get to tell them to stop believing in Islam because they're in a country where that is a minority belief, you only get to decide if you care about offending them.
In this specific case, the lecturer clearly did care - she warned before the course and shortly before the lecture moved to showing that image. That's the issue here, not whether displaying the image was contentious or not: she showed due diligence and her faculty decided it was insufficient. So what would have been sufficient?
That we can have a debate about, but some BS about "western values" and a strawman argument about "submitting" to "superstitions" is not even worth me caring about, other than to call you out as making a statement completely typical of far right-wing xenophobes and racists. Please don't do that here.
janalsncm|3 years ago
This story is about overbearing administrators infringing on academic freedoms, not Islam vs Western Values. But a lot of people have the Islam v The West hammer, so they’re going to use it in this nail.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument
lo_zamoyski|3 years ago
What this firing, and events like it, demonstrate is that there is a zero sum game where foundational beliefs are concerned. Here, the game is between liberalism and (this form of) Islam. If the professor isn’t punished, liberalism wins. If the teacher is punished, this Islam wins. You can’t accommodate both. An Achilles’ heel of liberalism is the notion that it can accommodate everyone, that liberalism is some kind of neutral absence of beliefs that can somehow accommodate fundamental differences and become the basis of a universal society of Man rooted in nothing. Vulgar consumerism has tried to fill that void, but appetite is no basis for a society, to put it mildly.
themitigating|3 years ago
I'll be sure to ask the gays
fancybouncy|3 years ago