Yale Daily News - Anti-Muslim posters shatter cultural illusions
Yale junior Altaf Saadi reacts to caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad on the Yale Campus.
But the feelings of safety and comfort evaded me on the morning of Nov. 15, when, walking out of class, I was greeted by a hurried collage of blatantly racist, bigoted caricatures of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. It seemed, in those two seconds in which my mind went from the conjugation of the subjunctive in Espanol to the absolute shock of realizing that the tidal wave of anti-Muslim sentiment had hit home, that I was alone in a campus of thousands. Was this really happening? At Yale? Do I really live among and attend classes with students who think this? That a place as forward thinking as Yale would harbor such inconspicuously racist attitudes was appalling to me.
Saadi criticizes the posters not only for misrepresenting the Prophet, but also for their anonymous posting. In a refreshing reaction to the posting, the Muslim Students Association, which Saadi says stressses openness and inclusiveness on compus, is sponsoring an open forum to discuss the posters. Clearly, Saadi recognizes the fundamental truth that the answer to offensive speech is not suppresssion or censorship but more speech. And yes, I think the Daily News should have run a picture of the offending posters so that its readings could (a) see what kind of material was being posted on their campus, and (b) judge for themselves the degree of its offensiveness.