Berkeley Professor of ‘Islamophobia’ Claims ‘the Muslim Is Presumed Guilty’ on U.S. Campuses

My latest in PJ Media:

Hatem Bazian, director of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender, offered a startling revelation recently to Religion News Service (RNS): Muslims at American colleges and universities are suffering through a horror show of hatred, bigotry, and discrimination. “The Muslim is presumed guilty” on American campuses, Bazian declared, “and as such, (they) experience verbal harassment, bullying, even physical attacks. But the assumption is that the Muslim is the instigator.” Considering the large number of fake “Islamophobic” hate crimes, this claim is dubious at best, but RNS runs with it at face value. There are powerful people in the United States today who very much want you believe this sort of thing.

Bazian is not alone. The California chapter of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) claims that “nearly 40% of the Muslim students experience harassment or discrimination, based on their religious identity, from peers, campus administrators and other personnel.” As evidence, RNS offers a recent graduate of San Diego State University, Amna Omar, who claims she was told that she was “oppressed” during a classroom discussion about her jilbab, a full-body covering. The student who told her she was “oppressed” also told her to “go back home,” and neither the professor nor any other students rushed to defend her.

This is a far cry from Bazian’s nightmare scenario of verbal harassment and physical attacks. In fact, it hardly amounts to anything at all. There are rude classroom exchanges every day, and for the most part, they aren’t trumpeted as evidence of a deep and systemic racism or hatred. But there is clearly an agenda at play here, as there is virtually everywhere these days. “Experiences like Omar’s,” RNS reports solemnly, “are compounded by constant slights such as the lack of spaces to pray, a deficit of chaplains as well as meal and exam schedules that don’t accommodate Muslims’ religious needs.”

Those things may be true, but they are less evidence of a deep bias against Muslims than they are an indication of the fact that the Muslim presence in the United States is relatively recent, such that colleges and universities are relatively new targets of Islamic advocacy groups’ demands for accommodation. However, “some students and their advocates are now pushing for recognition that anti-Muslim bias is as much a problem as discrimination against other ethnic or racial groups and needs to be addressed in similar ways.”

There is more. Read the rest here.