The professor was unjustly fired for displaying an image of the prophet Mohammed during an art history class. After years of ridiculing warnings that an alliance with Muslims would require them to enforce sharia law, liberals did just that at Hamline University. And this time their targets weren’t white men, but a minority (Hispanic) woman and a historical Islamic painting.
FOX News Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told Fox News Digital. “This is an exceptionally bad articulation of academic freedom. There’s absolutely no reason that an art history professor shouldn’t be able to show a historical masterpiece in class.”
Erika López Prater, a former adjunct art history professor at Hamline University, was reportedly fired last month after a Muslim student complained about historical images of the founder of Islam in her art history course. She issued a syllabus warning students that the class would contain images of religious figures, including Muhammad and the Buddha, and students were told they could contact her with any concerns about the course material, according a report from the New York Times.
Prater also reportedly warned students that a painting containing an image of Muhammad was going to be displayed a few minutes ahead of time, giving anyone who might be offended by such imagery an opportunity to leave the classroom.
Despite all this, she was fired anyway.
“In the case of private schools like Hamlin, where they’re making First Amendment-type promises, they are committing to not affect institutional punishment on people who say things that some would consider hate speech,” Morey continued. “We’ve got a student who says that seeing a picture of 14th-century masterpiece of the prophet Mohammed in her art class is both hate speech and offensive speech, but that kind of stuff is protected under our laws.”
Despite the multiple warnings, a senior student in the class later complained to administrators about the Muhammad image and picked up support from Muslim students who were not in the class, resulting in Prater not being welcomed back to the school and setting off national controversy surrounding academic freedom. Hamline University doubled-down on their position, according to a statement from Faynesse Miller, Hamline University president.
Daniel Greenfield Erika Lopez Prater, an adjunct at Hamline, showed a Persian painting of Mohammed to her class. Aram Wedatalla, a president of the Muslim Student Association, objected. The MSA rallied to denounce her, along with its advisor, Nur Mood: the college’s Assistant Director of Social Justice Programs. The Latina professor was dumped and condemned as an Islamophobe. Jaylani Hussein, CAIR-Minnesota’s director came in to hold a session on Islamophobia. The MSA and CAIR have both been linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Islamic extremists were never interested in “diversity”. What they wanted was for everyone to respect Islamic laws. In the name of tolerance, liberals became theocrats and Islamists used the grammar of diversity to eliminate any diversity. Confronted with objections, Hamline’s Islamic extremists resorted to equating Shiite pictures of Mohammed with Hitler or the ‘N-word’.
Liberals found it very easy to support Islamic supremacism when it was a matter of banning conservative protesters from burning the Koran or mentioning that Mohammed was a child molester. But that was just the camel’s nose creeping into the tent. The rest of the camel requires that America be reordered thoroughly in line with Islamic law in every possible detail.
While liberals see a distinction between a defaced Koran, a Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Mohammed and a historical painting of Mohammed, to the Muslim Brotherhood there is no difference. And the Democrat political establishment and the leftist cultural affiliates that surrendered to the Brotherhood’s front groups have to decide where to draw the line.
Not only all of that, but CAIR National made a public statement in essence supporting academic freedom, but never said anything about their man in Minnesota being a major contributing factor in Hamline University’s decision to let Erika Lopez-Prater go. –