Stanford ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Panel: Je Suis Ferguson?

Shahzad Bashir

What does the Islamic terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January have to do with the 2014 police shootings of African-American men in Ferguson, Missouri and Long Island, New York; San Francisco’s troubled Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood; and the Occupy Wall Street movement? In the latest Campus Watch research, Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene report on a panel discussion at Stanford University, “Terror, Freedom, Blasphemy: Reflections on Citizenship in Our Times,” in which speakers used the connection between the struggles—both real and imagined—of minorities in the U.S. and those attributed to Muslims worldwide to deflect attention from Islamic radicalism in the West. Their article appears today at Jihad Watch:

Sponsored by the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the afternoon discussion took place in a Center for International Security and Cooperation conference room with a long, narrow table in the middle, at the head of which sat the panelists. Approximately forty people—a mixture of students and locals, many of them eating lunch—were seated at and around the table, some spilling out into the hallway. . . . In his introduction, Shahzad Bashir, Lysbeth Warren Anderson Professor in Islamic Studies, explained that:

The idea for this event came from a discussion between myself and [fellow panelists] Robert Crews, [and] Aishwary Kumar, and grew out of a general frustration about the state of the world.

According to Bashir, the latter included such disparate subjects as:

[T]he torture information that came out of the U.S. Senate; what’s happening in Iraq and Syria; what’s happening in Ferguson, Missouri and Long Island; events in Nigeria, and what happened in Paris most recently. . . . We wanted an occasion where we could draw the connections between these events.

To read the entire article, please click here.
Cinnamon Stillwell analyzes Middle East studies academia in West Coast colleges and universities for Campus Watch. A San Francisco Bay Area native and graduate of San Francisco State University, she is a columnist, blogger, and social media analyst. Ms. Stillwell, a former contributing political columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has written on a wide variety of topics, including the political atmosphere in American higher education, and has appeared as a guest on television and talk radio.
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