Of cowardice, genital mutilation, and crickets

The Wall Street Journal publishes the speech Asaan Hirsi Ali would have given at Braneis University, had not the university's president cowardly rescinded the invitation for her to speak.

We need to make our universities temples not of dogmatic orthodoxy, but of truly critical thinking, where all ideas are welcome and where civil debate is encouraged. I'm used to being shouted down on campuses, so I am grateful for the opportunity to address you today. I do not expect all of you to agree with me, but I very much appreciate your willingness to listen.

The motto of Brandeis University is "Truth even unto its innermost parts." That is my motto too. For it is only through truth, unsparing truth, that your generation can hope to do better than mine in the struggle for peace, freedom and equality of the sexes.

Read more here.

Roger Simon writes at PJ Media

Brandeis University was established as a Jewish secular institution in 1948, three years after the liberation of Auschwitz. Only decades later, it has banned someone who has done more than anyone I can think of to liberate women in the Third World, a woman who was herself victimized by clitoradectomy as an infant in Somalia and has done more for women in a real way — opposing honor killings and genital mutilation under Islam — than Gloria Steinem squared. (Come to think of it, where are Gloria Steinem and her “sisters” in all this? Crickets.)

Read more here.

Simon also writes here that

President Lawrence should resign immediately from his post as president of that university. The rescinding of the invitation to Hirsi Ali to appear at their commencement is among the most immoral and reactionary behaviors in my lifetime by an American university. Not only is it a desecration of the American founding principle of freedom of speech, it is unconscionable for a Jewish institution to have done this on the eve of Passover, the festival of freedom..