<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Eric Giunta</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/author/eric-giunta/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 07:56:08 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>When Free Speech Wins</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/eric-giunta/when-free-speech-wins/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=when-free-speech-wins</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/eric-giunta/when-free-speech-wins/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:02:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Eric Giunta]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Administration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[david horowitz freedom center]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dean Weidner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[event]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Federalist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federalist society]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[flier]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[florida state university college]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[florida state university college of law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic jurisprudence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jyllands posten muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law students association]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lecture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[MLSA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mr spencer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mr. Robert Spencer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muhammad cartoon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[school]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[society]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tallahassee]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united-states]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=57307</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is Robert Spencer’s lecture at Florida State a sign of things to come?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/robertspencer.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-57309" title="robertspencer" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/robertspencer.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="263" /></a></p>
<p>As President of Florida State University College of Law’s Federalist Society chapter, I wish to extend a note of sincere gratitude to Mr. Robert Spencer for coming to <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/03/spencer-at-florida-state-university-school-of-law-march-30.html">lecture our student body recently on the subject of Islamic Jurisprudence</a>. I also wish to thank the David Horowitz Freedom Center for helping to fund the event with a very generous grant.</p>
<p>Several rumors have made their way around campus, and the Tallahassee community, since the publication of my last piece <a href="../2010/03/26/contra-sharia/">here in these pages</a>. It is claimed that Mr. Spencer and I have declared the “death of free speech” at the law school, and that we have accused the administration of threatening to censor Tuesday’s lecture.</p>
<p>Readers of FrontPage and of <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/">JihadWatch</a> know how baseless these charges are. Neither Mr. Spencer nor I ever accused the deans of threatening to cancel his lecture, or to censor the event’s controversial flier. We <em>did</em> report, accurately, that the Muslim Law Students Association had put pressure on the administration to have the event censored, that several of the fliers had been subjected to vandalism, and that the deans did put pressure on this writer to self-censor the offensive <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy">Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon</a> that was the fliers’ centerpiece.</p>
<p>There were, however, some very real and serious misrepresentations made by one student organization, and it was not the Federalist Society. The <em>Muslim Law Students Association</em> (MLSA) decided to orchestrate, in lieu of a counter-rally or a protest, an <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/03/the-argument-from-nice-debuts-at-florida-state-university-school-of-law.html">alternative lecture on Monday afternoon</a>, titled “The 1<sup>st</sup> Amendment and Professionalism in a Republic.” The official Facebook event announcement, before its first edit, included some very serious charges. After playing the typically mindless, and in this case irrelevant, “racist card”, my colleagues at the MLSA made clear their frustration that the deans could not and would not force me to take down my flier, but assured their supporters that this type of scenario would not repeat itself in the future:</p>
<blockquote><p>I spoke to Dean Weidner yesterday, and he assured me that after this very shocking, hateful, and disrespectful spur of events, <strong>the school is going to be developing a policy for regulating what goes up</strong>, so at least we&#8217;re growing out of it! <strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Unfortunately</span> though, [the deans] are not able to get the Federalist society to take down these fliers.</strong> {emphasis added}</p></blockquote>
<p>These remarks were later edited: Out went the baseless charges of racial hatred, but there remained this assurance:</p>
<blockquote><p>After speaking to Dean Weidner yesterday, it looks as though <strong>the school is going to be developing a policy for regulating what goes up on our campus</strong>. {emphasis added}</p></blockquote>
<p>It was not until Monday afternoon, after their event went on as planned, that any reference to future censorship was removed completely, and this because I shared with one of the law professors my serious concerns over the reported “assurances” from the deans to my Muslim colleagues. I was assured that no such future restrictions on free speech were being countenanced, and that no revision of school policy on this matter is forthcoming.</p>
<p>It is testamentary to the respect I <em>had</em> for my colleagues at the MLSA that I (along with Mr. Spencer and hundreds of concerned citizens around the nation), that I took seriously and at face-value their representations of what the administration had told them. I do not know which to find more disturbing: a) That in such sensitive circumstances the MLSA would so blatantly and disgustingly impugn the integrity of their law school’s administration, calling into serious question the commitment of the faculty to principles so fundamental to a liberal-democratic polity; or b) that the MLSA considered the prospect of future involuntary censorship to be something <em>salutary</em>!</p>
<p>It goes without saying that no organization speaks for all its members, but their reaction to this entire incident cannot but call into question the commitment of the Muslim Law Students Association, its officers and its members, to the principles which undergird the United States Constitution, and explicated in the Declaration of Independence. This is a textbook-case of just the kind of tactics Mr. Spencer documented and expounded upon in his <em><a href="http://www.regnery.com/books/stealthjihad.html">Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs</a></em>. I do not accuse any one of my colleagues of being willing “stealth jihadists,” but I do believe it important to call attention to behavior that is consistent with, and plays into the hands of, those who would like to see our constitutional system subverted and changed for the worse.</p>
<p>Which is <em>precisely</em> what our flier’s Danish Muhammad cartoon was intended to call attention to: no group of persons is beyond criticism, and no organization is without its institutional flaws and deficiencies. In Islamdom, this seems to be a consistent and suffocating oversensitivity to criticism, whether artistic, literary, or scholarly. <a href="http://soundpolitics.com/MuhammedCensorship.jpg">The controversial cartoon in question</a> <em>truthfully</em> satirizes the barbarities of sharia law, <em>truthfully</em> satirizes the justifications its proponents put forward for implementing it, and <em>truthfully</em> satirizes the origins of these barbarities: the life and teachings of Muhammad, as they are contained in the Koran, the <em>hadith</em>, and the <em>sira</em>, as they were implemented by Muhammad&#8217;s immediate successors the Rightly-Guided Caliphs, and as they have been codified in <em>every</em> major school of Islamic jurisprudence.</p>
<p>Yes, our Federalist Society chapter clearly intended that the cartoon be provocative. But any student reaction should have been informed not <em>only</em> by what the original artists intended by their satire of five years ago, but by the international reaction to these cartoons: the fact that the artists now live in fear for their lives, that violent riots were sparked all over Europe and the Islamic world, that over 100 people died as a result of these, and that plenty of media outlets refused to reproduce the cartoons for fear of violent reprisals. As I wrote in my earlier piece, <em>this</em> is what <em>should</em> offend the sensibilities of any <em>truly</em> “moderate” human being who sees these cartoons, especially those who reap the benefits of a liberal-democratic constitutional system by studying at a public law school.</p>
<p>I am grateful for all who wrote me, and the law school, to express their support for Mr. Spencer’s lecture. His talk was such a rousing success that many of my colleagues are doing their best to downplay this victory for free speech and education of the dangers of Muslim radicalism. About 100 students and supporters showed up for Mr. Spencer’s lecture, which was sponsored by our Federalist Society chapter <em>alone</em>. About 30 students attended the follow-up Q&amp;A session.</p>
<p>By contrast, despite having been sponsored by <em>seven</em> student organizations, a Halloween-coalition of Muslims and committed leftists (including, rather ironically, the school ACLU and homosexualist OUTLaw chapter), Monday’s rival lecture only brought in some 220 students, a paltry <em>30</em> for every sponsoring organization.</p>
<p>One hopes the success of Mr. Spencer’s lecture is a sign of things to come: Americans everywhere are challenging politically correct orthodoxies, and these challenges are forcing ideologues of all political stripes to engage one another, and fine-tune the public discourse. In stimulating some much-needed discussion on such a taboo subject, the conservatives and libertarians of the Federalist Society have once again shown themselves to be the legal profession’s true vanguard of diversity, dialogue, and open-mindedness.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,539331,00.html">Cartoon-jihad intimidation</a> is <em>so</em> 2009!</p>
<p><strong>[Note: The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies does not necessarily endorse the contents of this article, or of Mr. Spencer’s lecture.]</strong></p>
<p><em>Eric Giunta is a Juris Doctor Candidate at Florida State University College of Law, where he serves as President of that school’s premier conservative-libertarian debate society. He has written for LifeSiteNews and RenewAmerica.com. He maintains a blog, “Confessions of a Liberal Traditionalist,” at <a href="http://lexetlibertas.wordpress.com/">lexetlibertas.wordpress.com</a></em></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/eric-giunta/when-free-speech-wins/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>17</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Muslim Law Students&#8217; War Against Free Speech</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/eric-giunta/contra-sharia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=contra-sharia</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/eric-giunta/contra-sharia/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Mar 2010 04:25:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Eric Giunta]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Administration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Advisor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cartoon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[event]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Faculty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federalist society for law and public policy studies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[florida state university]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[florida state university college]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[florida state university college of law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[judicial fiat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lecture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[legal tradition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[libertarian perspectives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[MLSA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[morality and social justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mr spencer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mr. Robert Spencer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[personal morality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[public policy issues]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[school]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united-states]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=56032</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What happened when one student invited Robert Spencer to Florida State.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Hoyer.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-56033" title="Hoyer" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Hoyer.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="359" /></a></p>
<p>Florida State University College of Law is rather moderate as far as law schools go. Sure, nearly all the faculty are committed leftists, but they tend to be fair in their instruction, and are always willing to engage a conservative or libertarian constructively. The student body’s a mixed bag ideologically. Most of the student organizations are oriented leftward, the campus Republicans exist in name only, and the most visible, and best-attended, student organization is our chapter of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, for which I serve as President.</p>
<p>The Federalist Society is the nation’s premier fellowship of law school conservatives and libertarians. We are a diverse coalition, united by our commitment to an originalist jurisprudence. Known in some circles as “right-wing extremism,” originalism is a legal hermeneutic whose guiding principle is that laws retain their original public meaning until they are legally rescinded or amended. This contrasts with the predominant leftist hermeneutic, which considers the law to be a “living” instrument – not in the sense that it is open to amendment, but in the sense that laws promulgated at one moment can take on different meanings in another, by judicial fiat. The “living constitutionalist” believes judges are charged with reinterpreting the law in light of what is believed to be a legal metanarrative reflected in the broader legal tradition; the letter of the law is not so important as its spirit, a spirit which just so happens to accord with whatever leftist notions of personal morality and social justice happen to prevail at the time of adjudication.</p>
<p>The Federalist Society is a nonpartisan organization. We do not take stances on the controversial social and public policy issues, but we do foster debate and discussion of these issues from conservative and libertarian perspectives. Whatever the personal views of members and officers, the Society does not endorse the ideas presented by invited speakers.</p>
<p><strong><em><span style="text-decoration: underline;">(By extension, any and all ideas presented in this article are my own, and not that of the Federalist Society.)</span></em></strong></p>
<p>On Tuesday, March 30, my FSU Law chapter will be honored to have Mr. Robert Spencer lecture on “Introduction to Islamic Jurisprudence: What You Need to Know.” The flier for the event is simple enough: the aforementioned title, suspended above one of the controversial Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons. The cartoon I chose for the event is the one that features a fearsome Muhammad, his eyes shielded by the censor’s black bar, flanked by two women in dressed in black <em>niqabs</em>, with a clear bar leaving room only for their eyes.</p>
<p>The <em>approved</em> fliers were put up around campus on the evening of March 24<sup>th</sup>. By the following morning, almost half of them were taken down, and at least one remaining one defaced with “This Is Racist!”. The fliers were unlawfully removed by members of the newly founded chapter of the Muslim Law Students Association (MLSA) and various leftist fellowships on campus. They conveyed their offense to administration, and I was invited to meet with three of the deans that afternoon, along with the professor who acts as faculty advisor to both the MLSA and ACLU chapters. (As of this writing, the torn-down fliers have not been replaced by the administration or the MLSA.)</p>
<p>The faculty conveyed to me their concern that several students considered the cartoon to be offensive to Arabs. I quickly replied that a) Islam is <em>not</em> a race, b) <em>most</em> Muslims are <em>not</em> Arab, c) <em>most</em> Arabs in the United States are <em>not</em> Muslim, and d) Spencer himself is of Middle Eastern ancestry. (Interestingly, <em>I</em> may be as well. Both my parents are from Sicily, and my mother’s maiden name, <em>Scianna</em>, appears to be Arabic in origin.)</p>
<p>To their credit, the administration is not asking me to cancel Mr. Spencer’s lecture, is not compelling me to take down or edit the fliers, and have assured me that no counter-rally/protest will be permitted to disrupt the event as scheduled. They <em>have</em> asked me, with considerable rigor, to <em>self</em>-censor the aforementioned political cartoon, and have conveyed to me their impression that the image is gratuitously offensive, that my publication of it discredits the Federalist Society and the conservative movement, that the prestige of the law school is at stake, and that I will be (at least in part) <em>morally</em> responsible for any violent reaction and hurt feelings which occur as a result. I was also warned my professional reputation would suffer, both during and after law school.</p>
<p>The faculty advisor went further to accuse Mr. Spencer of radical extremism. When I pressed him to name a single extreme idea of Spencer’s, the only thing he would point to is Mr. Spencer’s endorsement of our flier. After the deans alerted me to the fact that the FSU police department would be preparing security for the event, and I remarked how shameful it was that such a measure was deemed necessary, I was assured that this was the same treatment that would be afforded a guest speaker who was a <em>neo-Nazi</em>. Further comparisons ensued: the cartoon was compared to the advertisement, some years ago, of a “Pimps and Hos Party” by some students at the law school– indeed, the MLSA faculty advisor did not know whether that party was <em>as</em> offensive as the cartoon! The cartoon was also compared to a pornographic display, or an anti-Semitic caricature.</p>
<p>Various colleagues have expressed similar sentiments to me, some more rationally than others, and I feel the various accusations deserve a response. It is being claimed that the Muhammad cartoon(s) bears no relationship whatsoever to Mr. Spencer’s upcoming lecture, and has no relationship to anything relevant to we living in the United States.</p>
<p>I vehemently disagree.</p>
<p>Let me take this time to school my colleagues, and those others on the political left, or the cowardly right, who share a fundamental disrespect for religion, and so for religious distinctives. Ideas are not all equally valid, nor do they all equally withstand intellectual scrutiny, whether that criticism is conveyed artistically, literarily, or scholarly. And this is true of <em>religious</em> ideas as it is of any “secular” conceit. To answer one of the deans’ comparisons, it does not stand to reason that because usurious money-lending is not intrinsic to Judaism, that therefore violence and subjugation of women/gays/non-Muslims is <em>not </em>intrinsic to traditional Islam. The best defense one can ever give to the charge of libel or slander is <em>Truth</em>, and any truth-claim that a reasonable person can defend is a legitimate object of political satire.</p>
<p>Secondly, I assured my esteemed elders that I agree with them, in principle, that one ought not to <em>gratuitously</em> offend the religious sensibilities of one’s fellow man. But as with any precept of the moral law, the principle is more readily agreed to than the application. I do believe the aforementioned cartoon is legitimate satire, cleverly contrasting the treatment sharia law affords to images of Muhammad with what it mandates for women (among others). And it is a <em>fact</em> that Muhammad was a conquering warlord who wielded a scimitar. These inconvenient truths are no more sacrosanct than the priestly sex-abuse scandals and subsequent episcopal cover-ups, which have been, and still are, legitimate subjects for satire.</p>
<p>Not only does the image speak to the subject of sharia law, but it does so in a way that reflects current events and the current political climate. Just a couple of weeks ago, two American Muslim women were arrested for plotting to assassinate a Swedish cartoonist who drew similar caricatures of Muhammad. And the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the United Nations’ largest voting block, has been at work for years trying to convince the non-Muslim world to incorporate sharia-inspired anti-blasphemy laws into their legal systems.</p>
<p><em>That</em> is what should offend my esteemed colleagues at the Muslim Law Students Association: The fact that there are men <em>fearing for their lives</em> over the publication of a political <em>cartoon</em>, and not in some Talibanic theocracy, but in one of the most “liberal” environs on the planet! Where were my Muslim colleagues, and their useful idiots on the left, when just last week well over 500 Christians and their families were massacred by Islamists in Nigeria? Where were they when news broke that one Mr. Arshed Masih, a Pakistani Christian who would not convert to Islam, was burned alive and his wife raped while their two children were forced to watch? Why weren’t they staging rallies on the FSU Law campus demanding accountability from the international community for these outrages against human rights? Why does it take the publication of a reasonably defensible political cartoon to arouse their moral indignation, when every month <em>hundreds</em>, if not <em>thousands</em>, are butchered (and <em>millions more</em> subjugated) in the name of the religious system which these cartoons supposedly misrepresent?</p>
<p>No, I do not believe in going out of my way to offend reasonable persons. But there is nothing in the flier advertising Mr. Spencer’s event that should offend the sentiments of a <em>reasonable</em> person, even a reasonable Muslim moderate. I cannot possibly be expected, and nor should anyone else, to cater to the morally retarded sensibilities of an oversensitive minority.</p>
<p>I am proud to stand in solidarity with the Jyllands-Posten cartoonists, Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Lars Vilks, Geert Wilders, Brigitte Gabriel, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, the late Theo van Gogh, and all others who are resisting modern academia’s imbecilic canons of self-censorship. I <em>hope</em> I can say the same for many of my colleagues, in Tallahassee and abroad. I <em>wish</em> I could say the same for my professors.</p>
<p><em>Eric Giunta is a Juris Doctor Candidate at Florida State University College of Law, where he serves as President of that school&#8217;s premier conservative-libertarian debate society. He has written for LifeSiteNews and RenewAmerica.com. He maintains a blog, &#8220;Confessions of a Liberal Traditionalist,&#8221; at <a href="http://lexetlibertas.wordpress.com/">lexetlibertas.wordpress.com</a>. He welcomes any offers and suggestions which would refute his professors’ grim prognostications for what this incident bodes for his professional career!</em></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/eric-giunta/contra-sharia/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>86</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 465/468 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 07:16:34 by W3 Total Cache -->