The bellyaching over the Danish cartoons spreads faster than swine flu, I swear. One of the Muhammad caricaturists, Kurt Westergaard, is speaking today at the Clintons’ alma mater and the Yale Muslim Students Association is already passing around the tissues.
The Yale Muslim Students Association said in a statement that its members are “deeply hurt and offended” by the decision to invite Westergaard to speak, but the group will not protest at the event. MSA president Tariq Mahmoud ’11 said the group plans on attending the event and asking “critical and probing questions” during the question and answer session after the talk.
“As an institution purportedly committed to making our campus an educational environment where all students feel equally comfortable, we feel that by hosting Kurt Westergaard Yale is undermining its commitment to creating a nurturing learning environment by failing to recognize the religious and racial sensitivity of the issue,” the group said. “Certainly, it would be unlikely for a white supremacist or a holocaust denier to be a distinguished guest speaker at Yale; hosting individuals who propagate hate is not only a disservice to the minorities that hate is directed towards but to the campus community as a whole.”
I wrote about the Danish cartoons back in ‘ought five.