Professor Bennoune Interviewed on HuffPost Live
Professor Karima Bennoune was interviewed on HuffPost Live as part of a discussion of an attack by Muslim fundamentalist gunmen in Garland, Texas at a cartoon contest in which participants were challenged to "Draw Mohammed."
Professor Bennoune said that the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which was attacked in Paris in January, should not be compared to the organizers of the Texas event. Where Charlie Hebdo and its contributors were and are satirists who lampoon a wide range of political and religious figures, the Texas event and its organizers singled out Muslims and Islam. She noted, however, that as offensive as it might be to some, the right to freedom of expression does include the right to engage in speech that others consider blasphemous. The organizers of the Texas event had the right to hold their event, Bennoune said, and she condemned the attack on it. She talked about the need to "break this cycle of violence and hatred through tolerance and teaching."
Professor Bennoune also said that as a person of Muslim heritage, she felt a special responsibility to speak against violent acts by Muslim fundamentalists. "I want to raise my voice in such a way that perhaps new converts to Islam, as allegedly one of these shooters in the Texas attack was, will hear a different voice and will understand that in fact acts like this actually dishonor the religion they want to convert to and have nothing to do with the tenets of that religion the way that most Muslims actually practice and believe," she said. "I do feel that when we speak out against this violence we can make a very significant difference."
Karima Bennoune is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab-American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. She recently was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism, now available in paperback from W.W. Norton & Company.