If you thought waking nonsense would die out with the New Year, forget it. We went for another ride.
Can you believe an art history teacher in the United States was fired for daring to show an artwork that upset ONE of her students? And can you believe the college got on its knees to the student?
Left as it is, 2023 will be worse than 2022.
All it takes is a complaint
It happened in Minnesota. At Hamlin University, a lecturer lost her teaching position for showing 13th- and 16th-century paintings of the Prophet Mohammed. However, for certain strict Muslims, showing Muhammad is blasphemous.
At the beginning of the course, however, the lecturer had warned her students and offered them to go outside if they were offended by the sight of depictions of the Prophet. So the complaining student (chairman of the university’s Muslim student association) had heard this warning but decided to stay in class anyway.
The worst thing is that the university felt that the fact that the teacher was showing pictures of the prophet from the Middle Ages was, you understand that… Islamophobic!
No really, the worst part of this story is that the teacher in question… apologised!
I don’t know what is most shocking, most absurd, or most discouraging about this story.
1 – That you can no longer show artworks in art history class without losing your job, or 2 – That it only takes one person to complain, impacts the whole community (as with the episode of La Petite Vie, eh for the University of Ottawa, as for the word Negro on Radio-Canada’s radio…).
Just a few days ago, it was the seventh anniversary of the Islamist terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo: Men and women died because of cartoons of Mohammed. In 2020, it was Professor Samuel Paty who was beheaded in the middle of the street for showing caricatures of Mohammed. In the case of the Minnesota teacher, we’re not talking about cartoons. We are not talking about images that mocked or offended the Prophet. On the contrary, these images date from a time when people who worshiped Mohammed drew and painted him to pay homage to him!
By what distortion of meaning did we come to the conclusion 500 years later that showing these images was abominable?
What intellectual acrobatics does one have to perform in college to accuse a history teacher of showing her students an artifact of the past? Accusing an art teacher of showing her students a work of art?
WOKES OR ZOMBIES?
In a recent interview, Patrick Huard ridiculed the columnists who “demonize” the guards “as if they were a race of zombies! »
“What the word woke up to is inviting us to just stay awake to what’s happening around us,” he told La Presse.
I’m sorry Patrick, but I worry about teachers losing their jobs for nonsense.
When artists are affected, who laughs last?
