A University of San Diego college professor and students are protesting Islamophobia by doing something incredibly offensive to Jews: wearing yellow Jewish star badges with the word “Muslim” and a crescent moon.
The Washington Free Beacon reports that professor Bahar Davary, who teaches theology and religious studies at USD, held the protest with her students to speak out against “anti-Muslim rhetoric.” There were at least 100 students and faculty members wearing the offensive badges.
Davary defended the protest and said through a university spokesman, “This is a class/campus project to raise awareness against Islamophobia. It is not intended to make an analogy between the current situation of Muslims in the U.S. to that of Jews in Germany and wider Europe before the Shoah [Holocaust].”
The professor also said that wearing the badge is for people to realize the dangers of “marking any group of people as the ‘other.'”
“We realize that it is a stark symbol that carries a lot of weight and meaning today not only for Jews but for humanity. That is as it should be, if we are to learn anything from our collective history,” Davary said. “The yellow Star of David with the word Muslim written on it is a symbol that my students and I wear with utmost respect for the memory of the Jewish lives lost.”
Davary and her students are insulting the Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the Free Beacon that the professor’s use of the yellow Jewish star badge was not appropriate:
“When we talk about the yellow star, let’s remember who instituted it,” he said. “You had to wear it under penalty of death.”
While the Jews of Europe “constituted no threat whatsoever to the German state” in the 1930s, the subject of radical terrorism is real, he said.
“When you invoke that symbol you have to also not just use it superficially,” Cooper added, noting that, unlike Muslims in America, Jews of Europe were given no choice. “It wasn’t any crime anyone was guilty of. It was the accident of their birth.”
Jewish Virtual Library describes the yellow stars that Jews had to wear a year following Kristallnacht as “one of the tactics used to isolate Jews from the rest of the population … it enabled the Nazi government to identify, concentrate and ultimately murder the Jews of Europe. Helmut Knochen, chief of Security Service & the Security Police in France and Belgium, stated that the yellow badge was ‘another step on the road to the Final Solution.'”
The U.S. government does not have any plans to round up Muslims into concentration camps, so for Davary and her students to use the yellow Jewish star badges to protest Islamophobia is not only a false analogy but also incredibly offensive to Jews.
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