A political conservative and a practicing Muslim at the University of Michigan has become the victim of a campaign of harassment by university feminists who are upset at him for having written for a school newspaper a satirical article slamming political correctness and “trigger warnings.”
The student, Omar Mahmood, wrote the op-ed titled “Do The Left Thing,” a piece attacking the concept of “trigger warnings” and ridiculing the overly sensitive nature of minorities that see “white privilege” everywhere they look.
Mahmood’s satire was written from the perspective of an aggrieved left-handed person who saw slights perpetrated against him by every right-handed person he met.
Saying that society needs to “do the left thing,” Mahmood wrapped up his piece with the following satirical proclamation: “No longer will I persevere in patience. No longer will I suffer in silence. I am a left-handyd individu@l, and my humanity needs be respected! The next time someone tells you to Do the right thing! turn around and flick them off with your left middle finger.”
But as soon as the piece was published in the Michigan Review, an unidentified staffer from the school’s official paper, The Daily, claimed that she felt “threatened” by the op-ed and demanded that Mahmood apologize for his piece.
Mahmood refused that demand. Daily agitators next found an obscure provision in their bylaws that maintained that no one could write for both the Daily and another paper, and since he had also written for their paper, they used the bylaw as a weapon to force Mahmood to resign from the Review. He refused that demand as well but was summarily thrown off the paper’s staff anyway.
But that wasn’t all that befell this Muslim student. In a continuing campaign of harassment, feminists vandalized the door of his off-campus apartment with vile graffiti. The door was also pelted with eggs. Mahmood has since suffered a constant stream of threats against his personal safety from the women who claimed they had felt “threatened.”
The College Fix, the school’s conservative-themed paper, proclaimed the graffiti a hate crime and, in its coverage, detailed some of the vile epithets scribbled against him. In the graffiti Mahmood was called a “dick,” he was called “scum,” and told to “shut the f**k up.”
Security video of the incident shows that the vandalism was committed by four females dressed in hoodies to hide their identities.
As Reason.com’s Robby Soave wrote, “The whole string of events is a sorry indictment of the rampant illberalism of the modern, ‘liberal’ college campus, where writing something that offends someone else is considered threatening, but censorship, vandalism, and actual threats are not.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter: @warnerthuston. Email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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