Omar Mahmood is a student at the
University of Michigan. He considers himself a political
conservative and a Muslim. And until recently, he enjoyed writing
for both of the campus’s newspapers: the institutional, liberal
paper, The Michigan Daily, and the conservative
alternative paper, The Michigan Review.
After penning a satirical op-ed for The
Review that mocked political correctness and trigger
warnings, The Daily ordered him to apologize to an
anonymous staffer who was offended and felt “threatened” by him. He
refused and was fired.
Last week, he became the victim of what The College Fix
has described as a “hate crime.” The
doorway of his apartment was vandalized in the middle of the night;
the perpetrators pelted the door with eggs and scribbled notes like
“shut the fuck up” and “everyone hates you you violent prick.” They
left copies of the offending column and a print-out picture of
Satan.
The column that caused such a controversy, “Do the Left
Thing,” was published in The Review last month. It’s a
first-person narrative in which Mahmood pretends to be a
left-handed person who is offended by the institutional patriarchy
of right-handedness. A sampling:
He offered his hand to help me up, and I thought to myself how
this might be a manifestation of the patriarchy patronizing me. I
doubt he would’ve said those violent words had I been white, but he
would take any opportunity to patronize a colored m@n or womyn.
People on this campus always box others in based on race.
Triggered, I waved his hand aside and got up of my own accord.
…The biggest obstacle to equality today is our barbaric attitude
toward people of left-handydnyss. It’s a tragedy that I, a member
of the left-handed community, had little to no idea of the
atrocious persecution that we are dealt every day by institutions
that are deeply embedded in society. So deeply embedded, and so
ever-present, that we don’t even notice them.
Satire is of course a perfectly acceptable—and particularly
important— vehicle for registering dissent with ideological
orthodoxies, especially one as pervasive as the culture of
political correctness at the modern university campus. Reasonable
people can disagree about whether this piece hits
home, but not about whether it’s a valid contribution to the campus
debate.
A staffer at The Daily who saw the piece was furious,
however, and complained to editors. One of Mahmood’s bosses at
The Daily told him that article—which ran in The
Review, remember—created a hostile work environment and made
the staffer feel “threatened.” Mahmood was asked to apologize,
which he refused to do.
Daily editors dug up the paper’s bylaws and found a
provision that forbids students to work for both papers without
prior permission from the editor-in-chief. He was told to resign
from The Review immediately. After he failed to do
so, he was sent a termination letter.
I can’t recall whether that rule was ever enforced during my
tenure as editorial page editor at The Daily in 2009. But
it does exist, and appears to give The
Daily just cause to fire Mahmood. But it’s difficult to
believe that his work at both papers is the root cause of his
termination, rather than the views he expressed.
As Susan Kruth of the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education
warned, The Daily‘s actions could end up stifling
student-journalism by making writers afraid to express contrarian
views:
Of course, independent student newspapers like
theDaily are not bound by the First Amendment, but
students who value unfettered debate and free expression do not
punish peers for saying or writing things with which they disagree.
Instead of forcing Mahmood to choose between writing satire and
reporting for the Daily, any editor who was offended
by his column should have offered his or her own counterpoint to
Mahmood.Instead, the Daily’s actions will serve to make
students reluctant to write further satire, confining their writing
either to the non-controversial or, perhaps, to less entertaining
forms.
That was the end of the story—until last week, when The
College Fix reported that Mahmood’s off-campus apartment
was vandalized. The four criminals wore hoods and baggy clothing to
disguise themselves; less brilliantly, they changed in full view of
the apartment complex’s security camera. They appear to be women of
unclear ages. The video footage is available here.
I spoke with Mahmood, who tells me the police are looking at the
matter. And I understand that some people have identified the women
in the video footage. I will publish an update when their
identities are confirmed.
The whole string of events is a sorry indictment of the rampant
illberalism of the modern, “liberal” college campus, where writing
something that offends someone else is considered threatening, but
censorship, vandalism, and actual threats are not.
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