Our post on the NYPD’s spying on Muslim students elicited a letter to the editor from Marion D.S. Dreyfus:

I have attended MSA meetings. They are not ecumenical, they are not inclusive, they are not unharmful. They surrounded me when they saw i was taking notes. Imams came in and began spouting shariah-filled  homilies that put the lie to the  supposed  way they run their  ship–they were all about conversions and trickery; they held the (largely ill-educated student body) assembled with the promise of hot, free food at the end; they denied all the stuff we know to be true–taqqiyyah in action. (Audience members questioned stoning the raped woman as if she were an adulterer; people wondered about forced genital cutting for children; amputation for minor crimes was denied–all of the public face of these ‘students’ in the muslim outreach infiltrate community were suspect, unfriendly, hostile to the knowledgeable, and frankly scary.) No equivalent exists for Christian groups or students, and Jewish groups parallel simply don’t exist–Hillel parties have no congruency whatsoever to these unattractive conspiratorial attempts to co-opt the unaware, unknowing, gullible and poor.

marion ds dreyfus

There are a few things in here that I want to respond to briefly.  While I obviously can’t speak to the particular MSA meetings that Ms. Dreyfus has attended, the description she offers is pretty far from anything I’ve ever experienced.  The reason David put up the original post is a) it’s news about students, which is what we’re here for, and b) as members of a religious minority that’s been subject to a great deal of discrimination and hatred in the past, we’re particularly sensitive to the notion that practitioners of a particular religion are inherently less trustworthy or more dangerous than others.

Lastly, the commonly-held belief that Muslims are responsible for a hugely disproportionate share of terror attacks is absolutely false.  Who says?  The FBI.  Here’s a nice summary of their data from Loonwatch.com:

According to this data, there were more Jewish acts of terrorism within the United States than Islamic (7% vs 6%).  These radical Jews committed acts of terrorism in the name of their religion.  These were not terrorists who happened to be Jews; rather, they were extremist Jews who committed acts of terrorism based on their religious passions, just like Al-Qaeda and company.

Only an anti-Semite would look at the FBI’s data and conclude that all Jews are dangerous terrorists whose religion compels them to destroy the Gentiles.

We’re always interested in hearing from readers.  Talk to us at editor@newvoices.org.

Update: this post was revised to reflect a lightly edited version of the submitted letter and a slight correction to the author’s name.