Fortunately, they canceled it, which has, naturally, got the campus Muslim Students Association all pissy and up in arms (and you know what THAT means). In that sense, I don't pity Duke at all, because they brought it on themselves for not having told the MSA to go hump camels in the first place.
The First Amendment doesn't require a university to cater to the whims of a particular religion; "....nor prohibit the free exercise thereof" is a general reference to not impeding those whims from being exercised. Of course, it also prohibits the federal government from interfering with religious expression and freedom of worship; States are free to interfere, or not, as much as they want within their own boundaries per their own State constitutions. But I digress.
Duke was, of course, free to indulge Muslim students' whims if they so chose. And if there was an on-campus mosque, I imagine the calls to pray to Satan would have been going on for quite some time now. But this prayer deal was recent, and the loudspeakers were set to blare the screeching from the university (heretofore Christian) chapel. That's what I would have had a problem with. If there are enough Muslims at Duke, let them privately finance their own on-campus mosque, and then their loudspeakers can bray at sundown all they want. But to effectively surrender (or at least sublet) a Christian house of worship to our LORD's self-declared archenemies ought to be completely unacceptable.
The Dukies appear to have belatedly realized that after the ensuing uproar from their little sublet arrangement, but even then they could be neither honest nor avoiding insulting evangelicals yet again in their mea culpa:
A “credible and serious security threat” was a primary reason that Duke University officials on Thursday abandoned plans to allow Islamic students to start broadcasting a weekly call to prayer from the Duke Chapel tower, a spokesman said.
A "credible and serious security threat"? From whom? Since the Muzzies were getting what they wanted, it wouldn't seem to have issued from them, unless the thought was to attract more of them to Duke to where a jihadist cell or cells were more likely to be established. And I can't picture leftwing university poobahs engaging in such flagrant "Islamophobia". That leaves the implicit charge that the "security threat" was coming from Christians. Or at least that's how I interpret it. Which is not only insulting and Christophobic but downright silly, as there is none, zero, zip, nada, bupkis evidence of the incipient "Christisnism" that the Left is always claiming is "just about the break out," and apparently has been for decades without every quite manifesting itself.
My guess is Duke didn't want to take any public criticism for blatantly pandering to Islamic Fundamentalists, so they feinted toward double-crossing them on this prayer deal and justified it on the grounds of nebulous "security concerns" so that the inevitable Muslim victimist push-back would provide them PR cover to reinstate it.
And, sure enough:
Khalilah Sabra, executive director of the Muslim American Society in Raleigh, called Duke’s reversal “a terrible shame,” saying it’s unfair for Graham and others to blame all Muslims for the violent acts of a few.
“Duke took a coward’s way out and cannot pretend to be advocates of diversity. This was primarily because it caved into the fallout nourished by racism,” Sabra said in an email to WRAL News. “A huge gap could have been bridged; now it may remain broken.”
Expect a reversal of this reversal in the very near future.
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