Anyone see a problem here?
Reason.com has the story here:
The University of Michigan’s Center for Campus Involvement canceled a showingof American Sniper after 300 students protested, saying the film
not only tolerates but promotes anti-Muslim…rhetoric and sympathizes with a mass killer. Chris Kyle was a racist who took a disturbing stance on murdering Iraqi civilians…watching this movie is provocative and unsafe to…Muslim students who are too often reminded of how little the media and world values their lives.
This is (or was, anyway) a college, right, where learning and uncomfortable ideas are occassionally encountered?
At least the proactively offended students at least made a gesture toward intellectual freedom and free speech:
Although we respect the right to freedom of speech, we believe that with this right comes responsibility: responsibility of action, intention, and outcome….
As U of M students, we ask you to please reconsider showing this movie in order to be a welcoming place to students of all backgrounds, ethnicities and religions. The University of Michigan should not participate in further perpetuating these negative and misleading stereotypes.
An immediate question arises: Why do the signatories assume that the audience will simply absorb whatever is presumed to be the offensive message of the movie’s producers? The assumption that the audience is a lump, or a blank screen upon which an agenda in projected, goes unstated but is wrong and offensive. Audiences have minds of their own. For starters, wouldn’t it be more interesting and effective to push for a viewing and a discussion of the film’s apparent intentions and the audience’s responses?
