I woke up Wednesday morning to find a boisterous letter written by Tai Khandaker (Wednesday, Oct. 23), President of the Muslim Student Association, making demeaning comments on my credibility as a knowledgeable student of worldly affairs. Do not make statements which label me as a "misinformed or lying" individual when you cannot back with examples because you do not know me.
I do not know nor did I make generalized statements about Mr. Khandaker or the Muslim Student Association, "Islamic meetings" or their "Jummah prayer services." My voice in Dena-Kay Martin's article, "Anti-Semitism Prevalent On Campuses, ADL Says," (Monday, Oct. 21), plainly gave my opinion of what I had witnessed as a student at the university. I gave one and only one example of a meeting I had attended in the Student Union theatre where an author of a recently published Islamic text, discussing the impact of religion on Middle Eastern issues, led a forum.
To clarify what I had witnessed, as not to leave the reader to make assumptions, the meeting was more of an indoctrinating sermon, but luckily I had a chance to speak with four Islamic activists afterwards. As if the speech was not radical enough, these four individuals went even further to justify the terrorism experienced by Russians in Chechnya, Indians in Northwestern India, Europeans in southern France, Britain, and Germany and Americans in New York, to name a few current events. They unsympathetically said that Islam had no connection to the hundreds of thousands of members who committed these terrorist acts and for the thousands who have lost their lives, although it is known that ultra-orthodoxy religious leaders are training and backing these organizations.
If there is something I learned from this meeting, it is that there are many different views on the issue at hand. Unlike those students from the SU theatre, who may not represent the Muslim and Islamic community, I would never justify the death of any race, ethnicity, or religion. I am concerned when a fellow student makes public statements like "611 Jews" in comparison to "1,625 Muslims" to substantiate the fact that Jews are being murdered. First off, I would never use numbers so freely when referring to the deceased as if 611 is miniscule; if two-thirds of the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust had survived, then would that have made the genocide more reasonable? One life is just as important as another; one Jew and one Arab murdered by the other is as horrible as a hundred or a thousand. Understand this before you respond: in a four-paragraph op-ed, just as in a two-passage interview excerpt, words are sometimes misprinted and taken out of context, and I hope this entry helps take my words and juxtaposes them with my earlier entry in Dena-Kay's article.
My compliance with Dena-Kay was merely a favor for a friend, and Mr. Khandaker has risen this argument to another level. The only hypocrisy I see is from Oct. 23's "Feedback" column, and that is one student's incompetence to allow me to speak my mind, in response to Dena's questions, and to educate the readers of this paper to hear what occurs behind closed walls. However, I am not trying to indoctrinate Spectrum readers, I do not lie to myself, nor do I ignorantly make general statements about a reader, the Islamic religion or the Arab nations and communities of the world. Let us leave it at this, that I am writing a letter with my opinion on anti-Semitism's prevalence on this campus and not the history, nature or statistics of conflicts in the Mid-East.
Photo: Meredith Forrest Kulwicki
