IS THIS WHAT WE SHOULD BE AWARE OF?:

Muslim Students at Penn Sponsor Nazi (Jonathan Calt Harris, October 9, 2003, FrontPageMagazine.com)

This week the University of Pennsylvania’s Muslim Student Association (MSA) is celebrating its “Islam Awareness Week.” For the keynote address on Thursday, October 9, the MSA invited “Reverend” William W. Baker, a former chairman of a racist and anti-Semitic organization, the Populist Party.

Baker, the founder and director of Christians and Muslims for Peace (CAMP) will be one of two invited speakers and the first non-Muslim ever invited to speak at this annual week-long event.

Baker’s selection as speaker is bad enough, but the use of university funds to pay for it is a scandal; the Office of the Chaplain and the Office of the Vice Provost for University Life helped MSA come up with nearly $5,000 for the week-long program. [...]

Baker promotes himself as an “inter-faith leader” but his inter-faith work seems to be limited to a close relationship with Ahmad Kuftaro, the grand mufti of Damascus and a functionary of the Assad regime who parrots its line. (Kuftaro, for example, called the war in Iraq an “American, British, and Zionist aggression” and called on all forms of “resistence” from Muslims, “including martyrdom operations.”)

Islam Awareness Week co-chairman, UPenn junior Anjum Cheema, stated recently, “The main purpose is to get a big non-Muslim audience to come out and hear what Islam is all about,” he said. Baker’s purpose would seem to be quite different: misrepresenting both Christianity and Islam in an effort to build an anti-Semitic alliance.

That would seem sub-helpful.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 11, 2003 5:59 AM