An actual terrorist attack upon its students did not elicit the same reaction from administrators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that other “hate crimes” of varying degrees of severity did.
“Despite the nature of the attack, Taheri-azar’s own statements to police, and the items found in his apartment, many are objecting to efforts to label this an act of terrorism,” UNC-Chapel Hill junior Kris Wampler wrote in The Carolina Review. “And UNC is doggedly refusing to do so. ‘The fact is, this is not the university’s call,’ Chancellor James Moeser said. ‘The U. S. attorney will determine whether or not this is an act of terrorism.’”
If that is Moeser’s attitude, it might be a first. Rarely do state university authorities regard Bush Administration officials as experts.
What Taheri-azar did was run his car into a crowd of students in the school’s “pit,” a popular converging point. Fortunately, none were killed as a result of the alum’s act.
“Rather, the chancellor missed an opportunity to stand with the Carolina community and rebuke what happened on March 3,” Wampler writes. “This is in stark contrast to the chancellor’s reaction last year when Thomas Stockwell, a gay student, was attacked near campus.”
“Moeser attended an anti-hate rally last year to deliver remarks. This year he didn’t even show up at a rally that expressed outrage at several students being run over by an Islamic extremist.”
To its credit, the campus Muslim Student Association denounced the Taheri-Azar attack. Some chapters of the MSA have been so extreme that federal investigators have reviewed the group’s finances.
“As a freshman in 2002, my class was initially required to read a pro-Islamic text, ‘Approaching the Quran,’” Wampler remembers. “The book glossed over the violent aspects of Islamic culture and gave Carolina’s first entering class since Sept. 11 a one-sided view of a complicated religion.”
“In February of this year, the Daily Tar Heel published a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad, which campus Muslims deemed offensive. This prompted a letter to the editor from two high level administration officials, Margaret Jablonski and Archie Ervin, condemning the cartoon,”
More true to form, the MSA condemned it as well. Other “People of the Book” do not have such juice at Chapel Hill.
“More blatant is the fact that the DTH published a cartoon in late November that depicted Catholics as Nazis,” Wampler reports. “But there were no letters to the editor from Jablonski or Ervin concerning these matters.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
