Sexist Jokes are Graver than Terror Preachers By Charles Moore
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/society/11690094/Sexist-jokes-are-graver-than-terror-preachers.html
It’s alarming that a university is quicker to condemn an academic for an off-colour remark than a terrorist
On Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab blew himself up in an aeroplane bound for Detroit. Luckily the bomb, placed in his underpants, did not work properly, and hurt only him, but it was intended to kill all 289 people on board. Abdulmutallab had recently graduated from University College London (UCL), where he had been president of the student Islamic Society.
On June 10 this year, it was announced that Sir Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, had resigned as UCL’s honorary Professor of Life Sciences because of remarks he had made about girls in labs: “You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.”
When it was pointed out to UCL’s authorities that Abdulmutallab’s radicalisation might have had quite a lot to do with what happened when he was a UCL student and perhaps they should be more careful about the extreme speakers who addressed the Islamic Society, they vaulted on to the high horse of “academic freedom” and refused to intervene.
When Sir Tim, after half a century of the highest intellectual distinction, spoke a few off-colour sentences, UCL had him out within a couple of days. Its official reaction to Sir Tim’s resignation was that “this outcome is compatible with our commitment to gender equality”. It is a telling contrast.
In Bratislava last week, David Cameron explained eloquently how the rhetoric of Islamist extremists, not necessarily violent themselves, “paves the way for young people to turn simmering prejudice into murderous intent”. Yet it is more dangerous in some of our seats of learning to crack sexist jokes than to promote violent jihad. If one cannot interest the university in the idea that giving house room to pro-terrorist preachers is wrong, perhaps one could persuade them that apologists for al-Qaeda and the Taliban are markedly less committed to gender equality than poor Sir Tim.
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