[with thanks, here in 2015, to geoffB for teasing this out of the archives]

Late to the party I am, but still. From the AP, “Hate-crime arrests in Quran desecrations at Pace University”:

A 23-year-old man was arrested Friday on hate-crime charges after he threw a Quran in a toilet at Pace University on two separate occasions, police said.

Stanislav Shmulevich of Brooklyn was arrested on charges of criminal mischief and aggravated harassment, both hate crimes, police said. It was unclear if he was a student at the school. A message left at the Shmulevich home was not immediately returned.

The Islamic holy book was found in a toilet at Pace’s lower Manhattan campus by a teacher on Oct. 13. A student discovered another book in a toilet on Nov. 21, police said.

Muslim activists had called on Pace University to crack down on hate crimes after the incidents. As a result, the university said it would offer sensitivity training to its students.

The school was accused by Muslim students of not taking the incident seriously enough at first. Pace classified the first desecration of the holy book as an act of vandalism, but university officials later reversed themselves and referred the incident to the New York Police Department’s hate crimes unit.

Burning the flag? An act of dissent. Dunking a cross in urine? A work of art. Leaving a book in the crapper? A “hate crime.”

Which means I’d better get the latest Pynchon novel and my Pottery Barn catalog out of mine, stat, before I’m arrested for offending postmodern ironists and people who pay way too much for teak furniture and throw rugs.

What is so disheartening is that here we have a university, with the help of law enforcement, turning an issue of free speech (and, to be fair, maybe vandalism or misdemeanor theft) into a double felony.

Which makes sense in a culture where butt-slapping thirteen-year olds are rapists and sexual predators, or where “torture” and “racism” mean so much that they no longer mean anything at all.

Or where musing over the holy spunk lands you a job with a presidential candidate…

Perhaps had Shmulevich issued his protest in a “free speech zone,” he’d have had better luck with the university. At any rate, a few years in the clink — and maybe some time in a re-education camp (the Pakistan mountain region has some fine facilities, I’m told) — will do this hater some good. Because as we know, there’s simply no excuse for tolerating intolerance.

More, from LGF:

The Council on American Islamic Relations is so ecstatic to see shari’a being enforced by US police that they’ve put up two articles about it:

“CAIR: Hate-Crime Arrest in NY Quran Desecrations”
“NY: Student Nabbed in Koran Dunk.”

For the record, I think Charles overstates the case a bit here, re: shari’a. What is being enforced is the left-liberal / progressive idea of free speech born out of multiculturalism and made manifest in speech codes that have transformed the idea of free speech into an idea “approved speech” — with approval coming from those who “own” a particular identity narrative and are therefore the only ones authentic enought to define the parameters of what is acceptable criticism.

Intolerance of criticism, under this neo-Orwellian drift, is a virtue — even though its application is quite selective, particularly when it involves the clash of two protected groups.

But then, intellectual rigor has been replaced by emotionalism and manufactured consent, so “rigor” is just another bourgeois construct designed to maintain the “status quo” (under which such other “constructs” — equality before the law, inalienable rights, Enlightenment humanism, equality of opportunity — hold insidious sway).

Burn it like the witch it is, I say. Only then can we project our egos onto the world and remake it in our own fallen image.

Good times…

****
update: Over at Slate, Christopher Hitchens asks, “Why are we so afraid of offending Muslims?”

Malkin has a copy of the complaint here, and echoes my examples of flag burning and Jesus swirlies.

Allah examines the legalities here.

I’ve been sounding the warning for these types of criminal eventualities for over a decade now — in my case, having watched my political views slowly take shape as I began to reflect on the lessons I learned from my studies on interpretation. I remain convinced that the “death of the author” (which took shape with the New Critics, but was perfected beyond formalism by post structuralists) — which “freed” texts from the “constraints” placed upon them by those who authored them — is, once adopted as the critical orthodoxy (and make no mistake, just about every school of interpretive theory since relies on a central destabilization of the grounds for determining meaning), the key moment in the long-running campaign by leftist academics to alter our culture’s underlying epistemology.

The fact that 5 members of our Supreme Court take such things as “diversity” seriously — given that it is on its face antithetical to the notion of individualism upon which this country is founded — is a testament to just how deeply insinuated has become this kind of pernicious thinking.

Worse yet is when I see self-styled conservatives or classical liberals giving cover to such nonsense (as they did during the Bill Bennett kerfuffle) [2015 note: or as they did when they tried to paint me as a thuggish, psychosexual faux-academic, then launched a campaign behind the scenes to “drive me off the internet” — all because they themselves so desperately wanted to retain the very power that comes with determining the meaning of others through linguistic sophistry, and because my aversion to such maneuvers, be it by those on the left or on the right, caused them great consternation, particularly when I began noting how such a throwing in with the Gramsci school and pomo linguistic populism was an example of putative “conservatives” aiding the leftist cause — in many cases unwittingly, but in some cases with dogged, nasty determination. You know who you are, too, you fucking weasels and newly-minted adepts of the “language matters” posse.]. We simply must reaffirm the grounds for meaning making — or, at the very least, make sure that people understand what it is they are doing when they determine meaning — or all is lost.

And with the left’s stranglehold on both the academy and the media, I don’t know how it’s going to happen.

Clearly, my repetition of the argument can provide little in the way of relief. I simply don’t have the circulation or the readership to make a difference — and the subject matter (hermeneutics) is the kind of thing that frightens people off to begin with. The average person, I suspect, thinks it’s something you pick up from a hooker with a cold sore.

Some days, I think I’d be better off just forgetting about it and jumping on the right wing bandwagon — highlighting the OUTRAGE without offering anything of substance as a counter.

It’s easier, for one thing — and both the traffic and the money is decidedly better. People do so love their mobs.

And hell, it might even get me a Corner link every now and then.

(h/t Tim P; lots more over at LGF. Just keep scrolling)

[first published in 2007]