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Arizona: Muslim Students Threaten to Kill Prof for Suggesting Islam Is
Violent
By Robert Spencer May 08, 2020 2:14 PM EST
Muslim protesters display a large flag with Arabic writings that read:

"There's no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger" during a rally
in Jakarta, Indonesia, Friday, Oct. 26, 2018. Organizers of an
Indonesian movement to promote a moderate brand of Islam canceled a mass
rally after its youth supporters burned the flag of an outlawed
hard-line Muslim group, sparking allegations of blasphemy. (AP
Photo/Achmad Ibrahim)

This will teach those Islamophobes that Islam is a religion of peace: a
professor is facing death threats for suggesting otherwise. Nicholas
Damask, Ph.D., has taught political science at Scottsdale Community
College in Arizona for 24 years. But now he is facing a barrage of
threats, and his family, including his 9-year-old grandson and
85-year-old parents, is in hiding, while College officials are demanding
that he apologize – all for the crime of speaking the truth about the
motivating ideology behind the threat of Islamic jihad worldwide.

Damask, who has an MA in International Relations from American
University in Washington, D.C., and a Ph.D. in Political Science from
the University of Cincinnati, says he is “to my knowledge, the only
tenured political science faculty currently teaching in Arizona to write
a doctoral dissertation on terrorism.” He has taught Scottsdale
Community College’s World Politics for each of the 24 years he has
worked at the school.

Professor Damask’s troubles began during the current Spring semester,
when a student took exception to three quiz questions. The questions were:

Who do terrorists strive to emulate? A. Mohammed
Where is terrorism encouraged in Islamic doctrine and law? A. The
Medina verses [i.e., the portion of the Qur’an traditionally understood
as having been revealed later in Muhammad’s prophetic career]
Terrorism is _______ in Islam. A. justified within the context of
jihad.

Damask explained: “All quiz questions on each of my quizzes, including
the ones in question here, are carefully sourced to the reading
material. On this quiz, questions were sourced to the Qur’an, the
hadiths, and the sira (biography) of Mohammed, and other reputable
source material.” And indeed, the three questions reflect basic facts
that are readily established by reference to Islamic texts and teachings
and numerous statements of terrorists themselves.

Despite this, the student emailed Damask to complain that he was
“offended” by these questions, as they were “in distaste of Islam.”
Damask recounted: “Until this point, notably, the student had expressed
no reservations about the course material and indeed he said he enjoyed
the course.”

Damask sent two lengthy emails to the student responding to his
complaints, but to no avail. A social media campaign began against
Damask on the College’s Instagram account. Damask notes: “An unrelated
school post about a school contest was hijacked, with supporters of the
student posting angry, threatening, inflammatory and derogatory messages
about the quiz, the school, and myself.”

At this point, College officials should have defended Professor Damask
and the principle of free inquiry, but that would require a sane
academic environment. Scottsdale Community College officials, Damask
said, “stepped in to assert on a new Instagram post that the student was
correct and that I was wrong – with no due process and actually no
complaint even being filed – and that he would receive full credit for
all the quiz questions related to Islam and terrorism.”

On May 1, Damask had a conference call with Kathleen Iudicello,
Scottsdale Community College’s Dean of Instruction, and Eric Sells, the
College’s Public Relations Marketing Manager. Damask recalls: “I was not
offered to write any part of the school’s response, and there was no
discussion of academic freedom or whether the College was even
supportive of me to teach about Islamic terrorism. The very first point
I made with them on the call (and virtually the only input I had) is
that I insisted that the College’s release was to have no mention of any
actions to be required to be taken by me personally, I was very clear
about that.”

Predictably, Iudicello and Sells ignored that. They issued an apology to
the student and to the “Islamic community,” and stated on the College’s
Instagram page that Damask would be “required” to apologize to the
student for the quiz questions, as the questions were “inappropriate”
and “inaccurate,” and would be permanently removed from Damask’s exams.

Damask also had three phone calls with Iudicello, who gave him a bracing
introduction into today’s academic funhouse world, where if someone is
offended by the truth, it’s the truth that has to be deep-sixed. “During
one call with Iudicello,” Damask recounts, “she stated that my quiz
questions were ‘Islamophobic,’ that before continuing to have any
further class content on Islamic terrorism I would likely need to meet
with an Islamic religious leader to go over the content, and that I
would likely need to take a class (perhaps at Arizona State) taught by a
Muslim before teaching about Islamic terrorism.”

“The irony here,” says Damask, “is that literally during this phone
call, I and my wife were tossing socks and jammies and our nine-year-old
grandson’s toys into a suitcase to get the hell out of the house because
of the death threats made by Islamic commenters on the College’s
Instagram page.”

College officials took no public notice of the fact, but the posts on
its Instagram page discussing the incident had begun to fill up with
threats against Damask, including these statements: “if he is still
around I suggest the students take action to make sure he isn’t”; “drop
the professor’s address I just wanna talk”; “what’s the instructor’s
name and address, I just want to say ‘hi’”; “I wish everything bad on
these kuffar” [unbelievers]; “I hope he suffers.”

According to Damask, “there are literally hundreds of posts like this.
There have been death threats, at least one call for a school shooting,
and at least one call to burn down the school. Again, all of these
threats are still on the College’s Instagram page.” When he asked school
police to shut down the social media posts in light of these threats,
they told him the posts were being monitored. Yet the threats were not
taken down.

On Sunday night, the school sent Damask the apology that he was to make
to the offended student. It is full of the expected embarrassing
groveling: “I know,” Damask is supposed to inform the student, “a simple
apology may not be enough to address the harm that I caused but I want
to try to make amends.” He promises the student: “I will be reviewing
all of my material to ensure there’s no additional insensitivities.”
(Apparently politically correct academics cannot be bothered to
internalize basic rules of grammar.)

“It goes without saying,” says Damask, “that I will not apologize for
anything, that it is perfectly appropriate to discuss Islam, Muhammad,
the Quran, the hadiths and any other matter related to Islamic
terrorism. Incidentally: there has been no official complaint, no due
process for me, just a mad scramble by the school to appease Islam.”

Damask’s introduction to the new Leftist academic world in which
identity trumps truth has been bitter. “The College,” he says, “has
displayed an appalling lack of respect toward my rights; it has
essentially engaged in defamation by terming my course material
inaccurate, insensitive and that I have violated the College’s values;
has denied my civil rights through waiving any and all due process
procedures; violated my First Amendment rights by demanding I make an
apology to the student; and violated my First Amendment and civil rights
by demanding I alter my course material. Further and perhaps worse, I
believe the school has effectively encouraged and permitted these
threats to be made against me when the school could have immediately put
a stop to them, which is tantamount to allowing mob threats against me.”

It’s a terrible story, but there is one silver lining: at least we all
know now that Islam is a religion of peace.