Published Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Conference unites students, leaders
Yale University
BY CHARLOTTE MARTIN
Staff Reporter
A crowd of
students and community members gathered at the Yale Law School
Monday for a videoconference dialogue between leaders and students
around the world, focusing on the role of youth in the future of
relations between Muslims and Western countries.
Major topics of discussion included freedom
of expression and the responsibilities that come with such freedom
in the global, multicultural community. The videoconference
connected students at six universities in the United States, Africa
and the Middle East with leaders who were stationed at the Brookings
Institution's U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar. The purpose
of the conference, which attracted about 20 audience members, was to
promote dialogue between current and future world leaders, said Seth
Green LAW '07, the moderator of the Yale group and the founder and
chair of Americans for Informed Democracy.
"[The organizers] were interested in opening
up a summit to leaders of the future," he said. "It's important to
break down stereotypes, particularly in this time."
The panelists, who each represented
different organizations dealing with the relationship between Islam
and democracy, began the videoconference with a discussion on the
recent controversy over cartoons initially published in a Danish
newspaper, which some Muslims have said are offensive to Mohammed.
They expressed concerns about the cartoons' content and the
international media's portrayal of the response in the Muslim world.
"The prophet and all other prophets before
him have faced insult," said Salam Al-Marayati, executive director
of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. "This is an issue of injustice
and dehumanization," he said, adding that the "blasphemous" cartoon
was an irresponsible use of freedom of expression.
The panelists expressed concerns about the
release of the cartoons in Denmark, a country in which it is illegal
to deny the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide and where Muslims
are not able to own their mosques but must rent spaces.
Freedom of thought is one of the main tenets
of Islam, but individuals should also have a right to freedom from
insult, said Islamic thinker Gamal Al-Banna of the Fawziyya and
Gamal El-Banna Foundation for Islamic Culture and Information.
Each school had the opportunity to ask two
questions, and most of the queries focused on the response of the
Muslim world to the cartoons and the media's coverage of the
controversy.
When a student at Georgetown University
asked about how the Muslim response became violent, the panelists
were quick to respond that the Western media's representation of the
protests has focused too much on the relatively few violent
outbreaks, rather than on the peaceful discussions about the
cartoons.
"Good news is not sexy," said Amina Rasul-Bernardo,
lead convenor of the Philippine Council for Islam and Democracy and
a former member of the Philippine Cabinet.
The rest of the discussion focused on the
need for understanding and communication between peoples of
different religious and cultural backgrounds.
Participants said they thought the
conference succeeded in presenting them with perspectives they would
not have otherwise considered.
"The most significant thing was that before
the conference I thought that the Danish newspapers had the right to
publish the cartoons with freedom of the press," Hitesh Sharma GRD
'09 said. "After, I could see why Muslims took so much offense and
why there were so many protests."
Although Sharma enjoyed the discussion, he
said he would have preferred for more students to have had the
opportunity to personally enter the dialogue. Others said they were
impressed with how the leaders included students in the discussion.
"I don't remember my opinion being sought
that much in the '70s, when I was in school," said Pua Ford,
secretary of the League of Women Voters of Connecticut.
Ford also said she would have liked to
listen to the views of the offending cartoonist, who might have been
able to explain why he drew the cartoon, though others said that
they did not think that was essential for this particular
conference.
The videoconference was organized by the
groups Americans for Informed Democracy, Layalina Productions and
America Media Abroad. Other participating schools included
Georgetown University, the University of Jordan, Hunter College, the
Cote d'Ivoire Distance Learning Center and the Georgetown School of
Foreign Service in Qatar.
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