Before You Ask Anyone To “Explain The Difference”…

Every once in a while, I see the picture above posted with a challenge by perhaps well-meaning liberals or leftists to explain how the two women posing in photos with very similar themes are in any way different.

I see this comparison reposted frequently enough to know those who post it don’t really care to understand the difference but want to conflate the two in the most ignorant and ham-fisted ways possible for the sake of virtue-signalling.

After all, they are both women, standing in front of flags which represents something about who they are and what they believe.

They both bear what appear to be semi-automatic rifles and religious texts of their choosing.

The woman on the left looks like the kind of person who is probably a Christian conservative, clinging to her bible and gun as President Barack Obama derisively and dismissively characterized small-town, working-class people in flyover country.

The woman on the right is similarly decked out with a rifle and holy text only she looks more…how shall I say, “battle-ready”?

As similar as they look, the question placed before the viewer is “what could possibly be the difference here?”

Well, there is a difference and while both women are presumably religious, this Christopher Hitchens atheist is more than happy to explain the difference.

The woman on the left is Holly Fisher, who took that photo to troll critics of her open support for the Hobby Lobby decision.

The woman on the right is Reem Saleh Al-Riyashi, a terrorist affiliated with the armed wing of Hamas, the Brigades of Izel Dein Al-Qassam, who blew herself up at an Israeli army checkpoint, wounding 10 people and killing four at the Erez Crossing on the Israel/Gaza border.

One riposte might be to point out Fisher’s infidelity.

I don’t particularly care because I have fun anytime social conservatives get caught with dirty laundry in their bedrooms.

Fisher’s personal failings aside, the idea behind “Explain The Difference…” is to project the notion that there isn’t any difference, that just because the two women look very much the same, and that they’re both presumably religious they must be very much the same regardless of what they actually think or believe.

To those who slap this photo in a Facebook post yelling “checkmate!” there is no substantive difference between a woman with the “incorrect” opinions about whether a privately owned business should be forced to provide a product it’s owners find morally objectionable versus a religious fanatic who blew herself up, killing others in an act of terrorism, in the name of wiping an entire people off the face of the planet.

In their attacks against Christians, the politically-correct left, which wallows in the worst excesses of identity politics, embraces the worst, most repressive, and most illiberal aspects of Islamism no matter who will be harmed as a result, while they simultaneously  object to expressions and aspects Christianity which are affronts to human liberty.

In other words, they’ll shit on Christians as much as the day is long, but when it comes to condemning Islamists and jihadis, the sounds of crickets chirping are as damning and as deafening as the #RegressiveLeft‘s silence; the challenge to “explain the difference” is an empty-headed false equivalence symptomatic of a broken moral compass.

So the next time someone asks you to “explain the difference”, know that the difference is as plain and clear as the difference between night and day.

 

Is the Case of Steven Salaita Relevant to Free Speech and Academic Freedom?

Recently a friend on Facebook, who, noting my concern for the sorry state of free speech in academia despite not being in academia, challenged me to share the story of Steven Salaita, a controversial former professor of American Indian studies at Virginia Tech, as noted somewhat in CounterPunch.

The article does a poor job of describing what the case against Steven Salaita exactly was, save for a brief mention of his criticism of the “Support our Troops” slogan in a 2013 article he wrote for Salon (because of course), and a vague reference to some mean tweets by him.

I had to search elsewhere to learn that the University of Illinois board of trustees voted 8-1 to withdraw a job offer to Salaita over a series of tweets about Israel one would-be colleague criticized as “sophomoric, bombastic, or anti-semitic“:

Salaita condenses boycott-divestment-sanctions wisdom into a continuing series of sophomoric, bombastic, or anti-Semitic tweets: “UCSCdivest passes. Mark Yudoff nervously twirls his two remaining hairs, puts in an angry call to Janet Napolitano” (May 28, 2014); “10,000 students at USF call for divestment. The university dismisses it out of hand. That’s Israel-style democracy” (May 28, 2014); “Somebody just told me F.W. DeKlerk doesn’t believe Israel is an apartheid state. This is what Zionists have been reduced to” (May 28, 2014); “All of Israel’s hand-wringing about demography leads one to only one reasonable conclusion: Zionists are ineffective lovers” (May 26, 2014); “Universities are filled with faculty and admins whose primary focus is policing criticism of Israel that exceeds their stringent preferences” (May 25, 2014); “‘Israel army’ and ‘moral code’ go together like polar bears and rainforests” (May 25, 2014); “Keep BDS going! The more time Israel spends on it, the fewer resources it can devote to pillaging and plundering” (May 23, 2014); “So, how long will it be before the Israeli government starts dropping white phosphorous on American college campuses?” (May 23, 1014); “Even the most tepid overture to Palestinian humanity can result in Zionist histrionics” (May 21, 2014); “All life is sacred. Unless you’re a Zionist, for whom most life is a mere inconvenience to ethnographic supremacy” (May 20, 2014); “I fully expect the Israeli soldiers who murdered two teens in cold blood to receive a commendation or promotion” (May 20, 2014); “Understand that whenever a Zionist frets about Palestinian violence, it is a projection of his own brute psyche” (May 20, 2014); “I don’t want to hear another damn word about ‘nonviolence.’ Save it for Israel’s child-killing soldiers” (May 19, 2014); “I stopped listening at ‘dialogue’ ” (May 27, 2014). The last example here presumably advises BDS students how interested they should be in conversations with people holding different views.

More recently he has said “if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anyone be surprised” (July 19, 2014) and “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say anti-Semitic shit in response to Israeli terror” (July 18, 2014). The following day he offered a definition: “Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948” (July 19).

The author, Cary Nelson, also explains why he thinks this is not an issue of academic freedom:

I should add that this is not an issue of academic freedom. If Salaita were a faculty member here and he were being sanctioned for his public statements, it would be. But a campus and its faculty members have the right to consider whether, for example, a job candidate’s publications, statements to the press, social media presence, public lectures, teaching profile, and so forth suggest he or she will make a positive contribution to the department, student life, and the community as a whole.

I’m not convinced by this reasoning because the first point of attack enemies of free speech seem to turn towards is to target someone’s livelihood, to get them fired or blacklisted because of an opinion they share. “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of consequences” the enemies of free speech say, which I hate as it’s a least clear to me that threats of poverty and starvation are an end run around free speech rights and a degradation of a free speech culture which is necessary to human liberty. The most sinister form of this sentiment are the squishy, thinly veiled justifications for the Charlie Hebdo murders.

Apparently Salaita has no problem with doing what he can to make sure Israeli scholars are kept out of academia in the US. For that, there is certainly some schadenfreude in knowing he’s so incensed by what I’m sure he and his supporters undoubtedly see as a violation of his academic freedom, that he’s suing the university in federal court. Of course what some may see as a “misplaced”, “liberal obsession” with “academic freedom” (palpable air quotes courtesy of the Harvard Crimson) suddenly becomes an unwavering bedrock principle the moment someone they like faces retaliation for voicing an opinion they like. Academic freedom for me, but not for thee, it seems.

But despite Salaita’s double standards, I hope he wins because free speech is a foundational component of academic freedom and should be seen as a non-negotiable bedrock principle for the pursuit of knowledge and the open exchange of ideas, especially on American universities. This includes people who say things which might upset or offend people. However stupid I think of what he says, I don’t have to defend what Salaita says to disagree with any retaliation he faces for it.

I strongly defend free speech rights even for those I loathe, such as the authoritarian, regressive ultra-leftists who seem to have struck a sort of Hitler-Stalin pact with Islamist extremists, anti-Semites, and Holocaust deniers.

Yes, the case of Steven Salaita is relevant to free speech and academic freedom.