Have you heard about the Stanford teacher who made Jews stand in the corner of a classroom? This really happened and his name is Ameer Hasan Loggins. Stanford suspended him. I’m as close to a free speech absolutist as one can be, a stalwart defender of academic freedom, but telling a people based on their ethnicity to stand in a corner is unacceptable. It is not protected speech. It’s discrimination—invidious discrimination. No teacher can be allowed to single out students on account of ethnicity, gender, race, religion, sexuality—whatever—and humiliate them. Let every university and college know what this man did and avoid him like the plague.
Loggins is listed as teaching civic and liberal education at Standard. This is what he said to his students to justify his actions: “This is what Israel does to the Palestinians.” So that makes it okay to do it to Jews in America? No. Of course not. He’s a moral simpleton. But is this claim even true? There are approximately 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, comprising about 20 percent of the total Israeli population, and while, especially according to the rhetoric of antiracism, they face institutionalized discrimination and exclusion, they have the vote and participate in political life. How, then, is this man teaching civics and the principles of liberal education at Stanford? Was this a diversity hire?
Loggins earned a bachelor’s degree in African American Studies, a masters in African American Studies and a doctorate in African Diaspora Studies from UC Berkeley. Here’s his page at Medium to help you get a sense of whether these degrees are serious or whether Loggins was just moved through the system (one can imagine he is difficult to deal with and maybe a little scary). The unseriousness of the man becomes plainly obvious within seconds of readying his essays, each one more absurd than the next. (Are the editors at the Guardian embarrassed that he writes for them? Are the editors over there ever embarrassed about anything?)
See in particular this piece ( “Anti-Black Police Terrorism”), where Loggins claims that he knows what he saw: George Floyd was lynched. “There was no struggle,” he writes. “No sense of danger. Chauvin appeared to be at peace with his decision to lynch George Floyd.” Did Loggins actually watch the video? Or does he not have eyes to see? There was a struggle. Floyd was a known danger (during a home invasion he shoved a gun in a pregnant woman’s stomach). There was no lynching. I’m a minor scholar of lynching and I know that is a ridiculous assertion (see Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide, published in the Journal of Black Studies). Indeed, claiming Floyd was lynched does a disservice to the memory of actual victims of lynching.
Loggins asked his students, “How many people died in the Holocaust?” When a student answered, “Six million,” he said, “Colonizers killed more than six million. Israel is a colonizer.” After receiving Allah’s message from the archangel Gabriel in a cave, from his base in Medina, Muhammad and his army launched an invasion of Mecca. After massacring and subjugating the population there, he destroyed the temples and artifacts of other religions and forced the people to worship his god, Allah, a plagiarized version of the Jewish god Yahweh. After Muhammad’s death in the seventh century, the Islamic empire expanded through military conquests, leading to the establishment of Islamic rule over various regions in Africa, Asia, and Europe. This came with the spread of Islamic ideology and Sharia, a paradigm of clerical fascism. The Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates controlled vast territories, including parts of the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and Central Asia. The Ottoman Empire, which lasted from the late Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, was a powerful Muslim state that expanded its influence over much of southeastern Europe, western Asia, and North Africa. The Mughal Empire in the Indian subcontinent formed Muslim rule over a predominantly Hindu population.
Of the hundreds of millions of those whose lands were colonized by Muslims, how many millions did they kill? More than six million? A million Armenian Christians were murdered by the Ottoman Empire, so it is reasonable to suppose that the number of those killed over the fourteen hundred year history of Islam exceeds six million. Indeed, that estimate seems awfully conservative considering the brutality of Islamic colonization and its extent across the planet. And with the millions killed, many millions more were enslaved. In fact, Muslims established the modern slave trade the Europeans inherited and abolished. It was a common practice of Muslim invaders to castrate their slaves. Eunuchs have been found in different Muslim-majority regions and empires over the course of this history. George W. Bush and the neocons like to tell us that Islam means “peace.” The progressive allies of the Islamists out in the streets right now agree—even while the celebrate the massacre of Israeli civilians. Joe Biden opened our southern borders to them. In fact, the word is Arabic for “submission” or “surrender.”
For the record, Jews have lived continuously in what is now recognized under international law as nation-state of Israel for well more than three thousand years (possible as many years as four thousand)—several hundred years to a thousand years before the Arabic language appeared in its most primitive form. A people cannot colonize their homeland.
(For further reading, see Threat Minimization and Ecumenical Demobilization; Assert Your Right to Tell the Truth; Assert Your Right to Tell the Truth; Verse 4:34 of the Qur’an.)
freedom and reason 