[ April 19, 2024 ]
For years, leftist and Muslim academics have ensured that all college and university courses about Islam and the Middle East were essentially vehicles for dawah, Islamic proselytizing, and that they covered up any connection between Islam and the jihad terrorist violence committed in its name and in accord with its teachings. H0wever, Nicholas Damask of Scottsdale Community College stepped off the reservation, and now Hamas-CAIR is determined to destroy him for it. And note how they’re doing it: telling the truth about Islam and jihad, about how terrorists justify their actions from Islamic texts and teachings, is “poisoning the minds of students.” Damask used the work of counterterror analyst Walid Phares, and so Hamas-CAIR invokes its previous smears of Phares to suggest that he is not a reliable authority, and only the deceptive Islamic apologists who lie about Islam are to be consulted.
This suit should be thrown out immediately on the grounds of academic freedom and the freedom of speech, in addition to the fact that everything Damask taught was accurate. But the left so dominates the courts these days that this suit may well succeed.
“Muslim student sues Scottsdale Community college and professor over Islam quiz questions,” by Lorraine Longhi, Arizona Republic, June 3, 2020:
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A local Islamic group filed a lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court against Scottsdale Community College and one of its professors for teaching material that it says condemns Islam.
A student and the Arizona chapter of the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) filed the lawsuit, asking that SCC and professor Nicholas Damask stop teaching the materials in question until they “do not have the primary effect of disapproving of Islam.”
The lawsuit comes after the student, Mohamed Sabra, posted three quiz questions from a world politics class to social media last month, igniting a firestorm of online criticism that caused the college’s interim President Christina Haines to apologize for the “inaccurate” and “inappropriate” questions.
Haines also said Damask would apologize to the student and remove the questions from his curriculum. Damask pushed back, saying he had no intention of apologizing and that his academic freedom was being threatened.
The chancellor of Maricopa Community College District, of which SCC is a part, stepped in and said the questions posted on social media were taken out of context and fell within the scope of the course. Chancellor Steven Gonzales said he would launch a Committee on Academic Freedom and pursue an investigation into how the controversy was handled.
David Chami, an attorney representing CAIR, said the group filed the lawsuit to prevent Damask from “continuing to poison the minds of students.”
“We have enough hate in this country. We have enough divide,” he said. “We don’t need our professors inflaming those seeds of hatred in students.”
Damask told The Arizona Republic Wednesday that he had not yet been served the lawsuit and had no immediate comment.
A spokesman for the district said they had not been served the lawsuit and could not yet comment on the allegations.
Controversy sparked by quiz questions
Sabra was enrolled in Damask’s online world politics course, which featured lessons on Islamic terrorism.
According to the lawsuit, Damask repeatedly condemned Islam as a religion that definitively teaches terrorism.
In May, Sabra posted screenshots from the quiz to social media, where they were quickly shared through social media by several influencers and Muslim community members.
The quiz included statements such as “Contemporary terrorism is Islamic” and “Terrorism is justified within the context of Jihad in Islam.” The quiz also asserted that Islamic terrorists strive to emulate the Prophet Muhammed.
The lawsuit says that Sabra answered the questions based on how Muslims practice their religion, but the answers were marked as incorrect.
“Mr. Sabra was forced to make a decision; either disavow his religion or be punished by getting the answers wrong on the quiz,” the lawsuit says.
The district-commissioned investigation details an email exchange between the professor and the student about the quiz questions.
Damask attempted to explain that the goal of the quiz was to discuss the motivation of terrorists, not whether something is right or wrong under Islamic doctrine, according to the report.
“The course may outline these beliefs but that doesn’t make it acceptable to teach this misinformation to other student[s] who aren’t fully educated,” Sabra responded. “Please review the questions I’ve attached and get back to me ASAP.”
By the time Damask responded the next morning, the student had posted the questions on social media, prompting backlash to the school.
Misinterpreting Islam?
The lawsuit says that Damask asserted in his course that peaceful interpretations of Islam were false, quoting Damask’s course material as saying, “Contentions that Islam does not promote warfare or violence cannot be supported on either theological or historical grounds.”
Damask also presented several statistics that did not contain citations to academic material, according to the lawsuit. One of those statistics cited in the lawsuit compares killings by Islamic terrorists to slayings by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, saying, “Islamic terrorists kill on average more people every 90 days than the number of blacks killed by the Ku Klux Klan in its entire 120+ year history.”
Damask never included any discussion of the Ku Klux Klan, Nazis, militant fascism or neo-conservativism and their “scripture-based terrorism” against minorities in the United States, according to the lawsuit.
“It is an unquestionable fact that the Ku Klux Klan espoused Protestant Christian ideologies to wage terror in the United States in an attempt to create their own nation-state, and even believed that Jesus was the first Klansman,” the lawsuit read. “However, none of this material is discussed in any of Defendant Damask’s modules, despite its impact on national and international politics.”
CAIR said the course’s only reading material came from articles written by anti-Islam extremists, including an excerpt from the book “Future Jihad” by Walid Phares.
Phares has served as a commentator on terrorism for Fox News and as an adviser to Mitt Romney and Donald Trump during their presidential campaigns. Phares was a high-ranking official in a religious militia that was responsible for massacres during Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, according to an investigation by Mother Jones.
In 2012, the New York Times reported that Phares “regularly warns that Muslims aim to take over American institutions and impose Shariah, a legal code based mainly on the Koran that can involve punishments like cutting off the hands of a thief.”
In its lawsuit, CAIR calls Phares “a known Islamophobe who openly promotes anti-Muslim ideologies.”
“Don’t you think you should have disclosed that to your students or put a disclaimer?” Raees Mohamed,an attorney representing CAIR, said. “What we see is an utter lack of true academic discussion.”…
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42 Comments
3 years ago
CAIR needs to be declared what it is: A TERRORIST GROUP! And all of them forcibly removed from our country.
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3 years ago
Get out of our desert!
3 years ago
here are some more quiz questions the professor should add. which muslim country see an influx of non-muslim immigrants? answer: none. which muslim country does not hate jews and does not agree that israel should be wiped off the map? answer: none. how many americans are glad when a muslim family moves in next door? answer: none. how many people in america want a mosque built near them? answer: none.
3 years ago
Reply to
tituspullo
Increasingly the Islamo-fascist scum teaching in our “institutions of higher learning” encourage hatred of Jews and advocate destruction of Israel.
Defund leftist colleges, not the police.
3 years ago
Reply to
tituspullo
To carry that line further – close down EVERY mosque in this country..Until muslims agree to open a Christian Church and or Jewish Synagogue on a one for one basis with all of its adherents absolutely guaranteed safety in a predominately muslim country – no not France or England –
3 years ago
Reply to
tituspullo
While I cannot dispute the accuracy of what you conclude is the answers to your questions posed, I believe this lawsuit is unmeritorious, for if the issue is what is the true history of the teachings of Islam, and what conduct follows that teaching, it is a subject for discussion and debate in the classrooms, not the courts. Concededly, I am an admitted Islamophope, though I know peaceful Islamic believers; yet, because of the promotion of violence against all non-Muslims by this belief system, I continue to fear them! I for one would never be against a civil classroom discussion of the impact of religion on society, and the courts should reject this lawsuit as beyond there jurisdiction; afterall, the teaching does not affect ones right to practice their religion, even if it objectively points out that the belief system preaches and promotes violence as its way of forcing their beliefs on others who are non-believers or believers of other faiths.
3 years ago
Reply to
tituspullo
There may be a teaching job opening soon at Scottsdale Community College…if you’re interested.
3 years ago
F’ing muslums slaughtered 6 million kafir in the 20th century ALONE. The KKK never slaughtered a million people in the entirety of its existence and doesn’t commit any terrorism in the 21st century at all. I believe the last instance of KKK terrorism was in the 1960’s — the last gasp of the KKK. To compare muslums and their death cult to the KKK is an argument of false equivalence writ large. Any objections Latrine?
3 years ago
Reply to
MuhamMUDTheFakeProphet
I noticed that she’s been back. Her Make-Believe “Korean” wife must be talking to her again.
3 years ago
Reply to
MuhamMUDTheFakeProphet
Just think, if latrine hadn’t married him, he’d still be a nobody.
3 years ago
They should be declared a terrorist group (they are part of the Muslim Brotherhood, of course).
3 years ago
Reply to
AlgorithmicAnalyst
Exactly AA.
Moreover, CAIR is a front group for the terrorist group Hamas.
3 years ago
This is Muslim Lawfare terrorism. Damask should counter sue CAIR. The Thomas Moore law Center handles problems like this pro bono.
CAIR, a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, should be designated a domestic terrorist group, just like Antifa.
3 years ago
Reply to
Fidei defensor
Since Egypt and other Arab countries have designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, one does question why the US hasn’t also.
3 years ago
Reply to
Beverly
I have often asked myself that question:
The question is why the coverup and no response to Jihadism by the Media, Government, Clergy and Academe. I can only think of three reasons.
1) political correctness
2) they have been paid for their silence
3) they are stealth converts to Islam
We have been living a lie everyday post 9-11 and fortunately it is now coming to light with the collapse of the deep state and the coming of the Age of Trump.
If you want to learn about Academic and Government cowardice in action regarding Islam and the surrender to the Jihad, from the Clinton administration through the Obama administration, read Andrew McCarthy’s “Willful Blindness”, the story of his prosecution of the Blind Sheikh who was responsible for the 1st Trade Center Bombing. Also read Philip Haney’s book “See Something Say Nothing”. Haney was one of the original founders of DHS and was fired because he got too close to the Obama Admin’s efforts to block any investigations into Muslim terrorism domestically.
Ironically, Haney was murdered in California in February. The initial report says it was a suicide, but it’s starting to look otherwise. Sound familiar?
People close to Haney say he was working on a followup to his book and had proof that Obama was actively working to increase Islamic hegemony in the U.S. Case in point Obama was the Drone King. He ordered dozens of attacks through JASOC and killed plenty of Jihadis, including bin Laden and al-Awlaki. At the same time he was importing Somali Muslims by the bushel
I am currently reading both books and the approach to Islamic terrorism during the Clinton Administration regarding both Trade Center attacks and al Qaeda in general, and the approach to the same under Obama, a virtual whitewashing of all things Islamic Terror related at DHS, CIA and the FBI, speaks volumes about the crushing weight of political correctness and our inability and unwillingness to solve any of these issues.
Additional worthwhile reading would be Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower”….the story of the events during the Clinton Administration that led up to 9-11….specifically Khobar Tower, the US Embassy bombings in Africa and the USS Cole.
The patterns are obvious.
3 years ago
Reply to
Fidei defensor
I have read a lot about the Clintons and Phil Haney. I was sorry to read abut Phil Haney’s death, and I do believe it was murder.
The Clinton Administration has a lot to answer for including not killing Osama bin Laden when he a clear shot at him.
I am hoping after the election that Trump will declare the MB a terrorist organization. He would receive a lot of back lash because CAIR has provided financial support for some politicians in the House. I don’t know if the Senate received financial support from CAIR but wouldn’t be surprised to learn it has.
3 years ago
Reply to
Beverly
You are definitely on the right track. We know where Antifa is getting it’s money….I don’t know their Muslim connections yet. I do believe BLM is up to their necks in the MB. BLM is big into the BDS movement, too.
Terror Inc in this country has metastasized. The cancer is now the Democrat Party and the RINO globalists. It’s all very interwoven. The shock troops are Antifa and BLM
I hope Trump has started a counter-intel operation against Antifa now that Project Veritas has released multiple videos that expose the Portland Rose City Chapter and their leader Nick Cufino along with their recruiting and training methods.
3 years ago
If Professor Damask has substituted the false neologisms “islamist” and “islamism” in his course material would that have been acceptable to CAIR? It’s evidently completely acceptable in the enemedia, where such lies are foisted on a regular basis without the benefit of an emetic.
3 years ago
The usual taqqiya and kitman; lies when answering the quiz questions and lying about what is in the Koran etc. Then, the witch hunt but under a different name:
“The district also plans to form a Committee on Academic Freedom to champion academic freedom education and training and to resolve academic freedom disputes in the hope of ensuring this fundamental academic value is better understood and realized alongside our longstanding commitment to the value of inclusion,” Gonzales said.“
3 years ago
The only thing needed to prove the evil that is islam is to hand someone a copy of the koran.
3 years ago
Reply to
old white guy
@owg; Just asking; Which edition of the MULTIPLY EDITED VERSIONS of the ‘koran and supporting’ books are you referring to?
3 years ago
Reply to
Laddyboy
There is only one and ask any imam how many there are he will probably take your head off.
3 years ago
Reply to
Laddyboy
I’d recommend the 19th century translation into English by the original Sir Richard Burton, who spoke and read fluent Arabic.
3 years ago
Libturds and muslims are the same…they both live by the doctrine of HATE and they hate the truth and facts the most as they make their tiny brain cell explode! Sue all you want but you can’t stop schools from educating people about the truths of islam!!!!
3 years ago
We are at war.
Every day there are fresh Islamist atrocities. Every day authorities conceal or excuse them or pretend ignorance regarding motive. Those who are being paid to protect the public and enforce the laws turn a blind eye when they can. Our politicians openly collaborate with Muslim Brotherhood front groups – CAIR and others – to undermine our Constitution, starting with the 1st and 2d Amendments.
The quislings controlling the Karl Marx Safe Space Education Gulag welcome advocates of Sharia to schools for “Cultural Enrichment” (recruiting) sessions. Over time the brainwashed students move to other institutions of Western Civilization, especially schools, spreading the corruption.
Just because Jihadi murderers aren’t yet blowing nerve gas through your city, breaking down your door, killing your dog, burning your books & art and raping your family members, don’t deceive yourself.
This is war. The supine inaction and accommodation of the Islamic invasion by our elected public officials and those who voted for them puts them squarely in the enemy camp.
3 years ago
Reply to
Daniel FX Dravot
@DD; You happen to be talking about “l. lynch” and many others in OUR government who have tried to pass laws that OUTLAWED stating true facts about i-slamic law. They should be arrested and charged with attempted COUP against America.
3 years ago
3 years ago
I must agree with this comment from this verbose lawyer; “We have enough hate in this country. We have enough divide,” he said. “We don’t need our professors inflaming those seeds of hatred in students.”—- Thus sayeth the lawyer for the ‘hamas’ HATE affiliated group called ‘cair’. ‘hamas’ IS a known TERRORIST organization of I-slamic origins. It is also a court FACT that ‘cair’ IS a FRONT GROUP of ‘hamas’. ‘cair’ MUST be labeled a HATE filled TERRORIST organization and EXPELLED from America along with its organizers and supporters who follow its death wish for none i-slamer tenents.
3 years ago
These muslims will affect some mush brains in college and the kids will eventually agree with them.Keep the law suits coming Get CAIR out of this country
3 years ago
“Mr. Sabra was forced to make a decision; either disavow his religion or be punished by getting the answers wrong on the quiz,” the lawsuit says.”
.
Punished by getting the answers wrong?? The correct answers are very clear. If you fail to see the truth of the correct answers, you are not punished, you fail.
.
This lawsuit should be tossed out on its rear – there is substantial objective evidence within the ideology of islam to support that the correct answers are spot on.
.
3 years ago
CAIR is a terrorist muslim front. Damask should counter sue.
3 years ago
CAIR “…can’t handle the truth.” Phares knows of which he speaks because he lived and participated in terrorism earlier in his life. Counter sue them.
3 years ago
More of the poisonous fruit of ” multiculturalism ” let everyone in regardless of their beliefs –
3 years ago
Islam is pure unadulterated EVIL! It is not a religeon and should be outlawed in this nation and all practicianers of this evil deported!
3 years ago
My guess is that the majority of the black rioting leadership are prison converts to Islam!
3 years ago
Cair is a muslim.islamic terrorist group and history teaches us from 911 and many other historical events that there is a very violent part of islam that some evil people follow.
3 years ago
Does anyone remember 911?
3 years ago
ordinary muslims
3 years ago
Islam: Socially engineered society with its own laws and customs that seriously conflict with American law
Islam Is Not A Religion, It Is Foreign Law and thus is not protected by the First Amendment or any other part of the Constitution.
https://canadafreepress.com/article/islam-is-not-a-religion-it-is-foreign-law
3 years ago
I do not care for this “he said, she said” arguments. I am sure the student is going out of his way to be offended, and so is CAIR. To keep apologizing to these groups is forcing us further and further away from our founding principles. I would really like to see the questions that “offended” him so much. Just remember that it is considered honorable among muslims to lie to promote islam.
