By Fabiha Khalid
Staff Writer
In this heated election season, when social ideals and ideas of foreign policy are polarized throughout the country, Hofstra has made an effort to create dialogue about pertinent issues such as Islamophobia. Different religious leaders gathered on Wednesday, April 13 in Axinn Library to discuss how the fear of Islam has been fueled, and how it’s modern commonality is due to a lack of an understanding and acceptance among the American public.
The panel, “Racism, Islamophobia and the 2016 Elections ‘A Deliberative Dialogue’” was hosted and conducted by Professor Emeritus of History Michael D’Innocenzo. The event was also cohosted by the Center for Civic Engagement, The Interfaith Alliance of L.I, the Honors College, the Peace Fellows Program at Hofstra and The Long Island Alliance for Peaceful Alternatives. People from all over the local community, including Nassau Community College, The Islamic Center of Long Island (ICLI) and attended the event.
Emilie Beck, a sophomore global studies and sociology double major said, “It is important for Hofstra to host discussions such as this because it facilitates an open and more tolerant environment. Hofstra’s campus can be used as a vehicle for sustainable change and growth and talks like these only help that progress us towards that goal.”
The event started with a five-minute speech from each of the four panelists, followed by a question-and-answer period and concluded with more intimate discussions among the people sitting at tables.
The first person to speak was Minister Natalie Fenimore. An advocate for peace and acceptance, Fenimore began her speech on how making minorities a scapegoat appears frequently throughout history. She said that all people of Abrahamic faith must learn to “come together and stand for one another” as they all are essentially “one spirit of life.”
Fenimore went on to say that we must speak out against hate and stand together to protect one another, no matter the race or religion of others.
The next person to speak was Santiago Slabodsky, a professor of Jewish studies. He started off by saying that even though he isn’t Muslim, “this topic is very personal to me because I come from a people that know what it’s like. You can’t hate or scapegoat the people you love.” As someone who has worked very closely with the Islamic community, he finds it outrageous that anyone would fear them.
Slabodsky recently went to a conference in Washington D.C. where all the presidential candidates were present, and he had something to say about the current GOP frontrunner, Donald Trump. “When Trump spoke, it was the first time in my life I was in the presence of a true demagogue,” he said. “The level of hate and bitterness, the absolute absence of any optimistic unifying principle was terrifying.”
Slabodsky described how demagogues appeal to desires and prejudices rather than rational arguments. He gave the example of the Holocaust, saying “the murder of the Jewish people by the Nazis was called the final solution to the Jewish problem in Europe.”
The third panelist was Seemi Ahmed, the Muslim Chaplin at Hofstra. Ahmed defined Islamophobia as a fear of Islam and a suspicion of Muslims. With time, this fear has been perpetuated due to the decline in economics and an increase in the number of immigrants entering the United States. She went on to say how Irish, Italian, German and other peoples were widely hated at some point in American history, but not feared.
Ahmed also highlighted the fact that “all Muslims are painted with the same brush,” and that isn’t fair in her opinion. “The fearmongering has just got to stop,” she said. She reminded the audience that just as the U.S. and other western nations are fighting off extremists, so has the Muslim community.
The last person to speak was Mark Lukens, a pastor at Bethany Congregational Church in East Rockaway. Lukens described how even though Islamic extremism definitely exists in society and the world today, Christian extremism is also a reality and is every bit evasive and violent.
With all of this hate in the world, much stemming from religion, Lukens asked, “What do we do?” He thinks that economics has a lot to do with the emergence of extremism. “It’s not enough to say that these people are lunatics because their lunacy is based in legitimate grievances,” Lukens said.
After the panelists were done speaking, Fatimah Mozawallah, a freshman biology major asked, “One of the panelists said how Donald Trump is gifted in spreading hate … how do you speak to the large number of people that support him and show them that this is not what it should be?” Lukens continued to talk about how economics has a lot to do with such feelings of hatred, while Slabodsky condemned such actions and said it’s our job as citizens to host such dialogues and continue to spread the right message to fight back.
Sara Ahmed, a freshman economics and political science major and a Peace Fellow, felt she learned how to better argue against hate speech. “People can benefit from these events because they have the opportunity to hear voices and views they might not be familiar with,” she said. “For example, as a Muslim-American, I’m used to hearing imams and other Muslim scholars tell me how we need to condemn terrorism done in the name of Islam, but it was also nice to hear other religious authority figures speak on the issues.”
