Campus columnist provokes Muslims at OSU
Barometer comments prompt rally today
By Tony Lystra
Gazette-Times reporter
Until that moment, it had been a relaxing evening after a tough day of classes.
Nada Mohamed, a junior at Oregon State University, was flipping through the university’s daily paper in the Corvallis home she shares with her parents. Then she settled on a piece headlined, “The Islamic Double Standard.”
“Tears were flowing out of my eyes as I was reading,” said Mohamed, a 20-year-old pre-pharmacy major and the vice president of OSU’s Muslim Student Association. “I felt like somebody was ripping my heart out.”
“My dad kept asking me what the problem was,” she recalled. “He kept telling me to calm down, but I couldn’t.”
The column, published Feb. 8 and written by an OSU microbiology student named Nathanael Blake, accused the Muslim world of expecting special treatment after a Danish newspaper published cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.
Riots over the cartoons amounted to “savagery,” Blake said. The 21-year-old columnist referred to the founder of Islam as a “pedophile prophet,” and said, “Bluntly put, we expect Muslims to behave barbarously.”
The piece, Mohamed recalled, amounts to an attack on her faith.
“It was amazing to me that they were allowed to publish this kind of stuff,” she said.
In Europe, cartoons had pitted Western freedoms against the outrage of the Muslim world. Now, a column about the matter had brought the same issues home to Corvallis.
In the past two weeks, e-mail and phone calls have poured into the Daily Barometer’s newsroom. Senior editors have met with the university’s Muslim Student Association. There have been calls for Barometer staffers to resign and for the university to clamp down on the newspaper, people close to the situation said.
“The pain that it caused ... did not subside with time,” said DD Bixby, the Barometer’s editor-in-chief. “It kind of just festered.”
Indeed, Mohamed’s parents, concerned about the tension on campus, have asked her not to walk alone at night. The shroud she wears, they fear, makes her too conspicuous.
On Wednesday evening, she had taken her 17-year-old brother with her as she visited the university.
“He’s here shadowing my every move,” she said, speaking from her cell phone near the OSU library.
Meanwhile, the Barometer’s staff, by its editor’s own account, has become gun-shy.
And editors have resorted to vetting copy through a Muslim organization. On Tuesday night, staffers e-mailed a paragraph from the next day’s column to the president of the university’s Muslim Student Association, just to gauge its offensiveness, Bixby said.
Editors opted to delete the paragraph, she said, because it added nothing to the column’s point of view.
“It just looks like we could piss people off,” Bixby recalled thinking.
“We felt uncomfortable enough that we weren’t willing to print it.”
Editors made the call amid a firestorm that, it appears, isn’t going away. Several Muslim and Arab student groups, as well as the Associated Students of OSU, will host a vigil from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. today in the Memorial Union Quad. The gathering, organizers said, is intended to protest both Blake’s piece and the Danish cartoons.
An e-mail that was circulating on campus Wednesday evening said another group planned to host a forum today, also in the quad, about “diversity, human rights, global issues, etc.”
In an interview Wednesday evening, Blake said he “expected a reaction” to his column. But “I didn’t expect it to be this prolonged or this strong,” he said.
He added that he would much rather see a silent, peaceful rally “than anything like what we’ve seen over in other parts of the world.”
Bixby said the past few weeks have been unsettling for a college newspaper staff raised in the ultra-homogenous Northwest.
“We’re all pretty much Oregon-type kids,” she said.
Nobody knew much about the Islamic faith, Bixby said, and nobody predicted how people would respond to Blake’s column, which, depending on how you read it, was also critical of the West.
But, on Feb. 14, Nada Mohamed’s brother, Aly Mohamed, who heads the university’s Muslim Student Association, fired back with an op-ed piece titled, “Whose double standard? A response on Islam, Muslims.”
“It is quite sad to see the Daily Barometer follow our less-than-civil European media outlets,” Mohamed wrote. “There is a lack of distinction between orthodox Islamic values and the actions of a minority of Muslims.”
On the same day, Bixby published a response to the ruckus, defending her columnist and the paper’s decision to publish the column.
“For me,” she wrote, “it would be journalistically irresponsible to only print columns with which no one disagreed.”
Reporter Tony Lystra can be contacted at 758-9548 or tony.lystra@lee.net.
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