On Wednesday, October 26, Virginia Tech students gathered for a lecture on “Radical Islam and Sharia Law Unveiled.” The lecture was hosted by Elizabeth Campbell, a 2016 summer fellow at the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, and co-sponsored by CBLPI and YAF.
The speaker, Nonie Darwish, was born in Cairo, Egypt, and raised in the Muslim faith. She knows first-hand what it is like to be a woman in a Muslim country and speaks out about Sharia law across the U.S. and in her books.
Despite Nonie’s first-hand experience, student snowflakes tried to shut out her criticisms of Islamic ideology. Apparently too fragile to hear her point of view, students protested the event beforehand and organized a safe space to take place during the event.
Nonie began her lecture with this important caveat: In criticizing Islam, she is criticizing the Islamic ideology in the same way as those during 20th Century world conflicts criticized Germany’s Nazi ideology and Soviet Russia’s Communist ideology. It is not a criticism of the Muslim people, any more than earlier criticisms were of the German or Russian people. Nonie has consistently asserted, in her books and speeches, that the governance principles of Islamic Sharia law and the governance principles of American Constitutional law are wholly incompatible and as irreconcilable as American democracy was/is to Nazism and Communism.
During the lecture, one man in particular took offense to Nonie’s words. The president of the Islamic Society of New River Valley confronted Nonie during the Q&A, calling the lecture “one of the most inaccurate descriptions on a topic I’ve ever heard in my life.” He and Nonie exchanged heated words before he stormed out of the room, slamming the door and threatening that the University president would hear about the event.
This is a video clip of that confrontation.