A controversial film that has caused divisions at other schools recently was used to bring Jews and Muslims together in dialogue at NYU Wednesday night.
Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West was blocked from being shown at both Pace University and Brown University, which led the Middle East Sustained Dialogue Group here at NYU to sponsor a screening for more than sixty students.
“This film was blocked from being shown at Pace, blocked from being shown at Brown [and] if you tried to show this at Columbia people would come with flags, people would scream at each other — We wouldn’t even have been able to watch it,” said Jordan Dunn, the Jewish NYU sophomore and president of the dialogue group. “I think that it’s really a testament to our strength as a community,” Dunn added.
While the film repeatedly emphasizes that it is depicting a minority, radical group of Muslims, many Muslim students at the screening took offense at the portrayal.
“Of course not all Muslims are like that,” says Nonie Darwish in the film, adding “but we’ve been infiltrated.” Disclosures like this did not satisfy most at the viewing.
Immediately following the film’s conclusion, Dunn opened the floor to five students to express their opinions about “why the film is offensive to Muslims.”
The first to respond, Muslim student Nabeel Sheikh, expressed his anger at the fact that the film did not say anything about the positive contributions made by Muslims throughout the religion’s 1,400-year history. Another Muslim student suggested that the film was conflating different ideologies, because it included Hamas among its list of enemies of the West, and claimed that Hamas is a “secular” organization with no apparent connection to radical Islam. A Jewish student said that she understood the offense taken by Muslim students to the film, because she wouldn’t like to be compared to Jewish extremists in a similar fashion.
The event then involved a question-and-answer period with Robert Friedman, a volunteer representative from Obsession (the film’s distributors require that a representative be present at screenings to promote dialogue). While Friedman had hoped to defend the film’s premise against criticism, he was largely sidelined by an alternative set of dialogue leaders put together by the MESDG, consisting of the Bronfman Center for Jewish Life’s Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, NYU Islamic Center Chaplain Khalid Latif, and NYU graduate and Columbia University PhD student Haroon Moghul.
Moghul was the first to speak, and provided the major response to the film. He began attacking the film for treating groups with what he said were political gripes as acting out of adherence to a radical Islamic doctrine. Moghul opined that the film failed to properly distinguish between Muslims and Arabs, and at one point asserted that a source in the film, Daniel Pipes, “is a liar,” for describing radical Islam as between 10% and 15% of the Muslim population worldwide; Moghul said he’d once confronted Pipes about this estimation, and that Pipes had “basically said he made it up.”
Sarna opened by saying he felt like he was among friends, “and that’s the most important thing in being able to speak in a meaningful way.” He continued, “I feel like our role as students on a campus is not to be advocates — it’s to be EMT’s, it’s to bring healing to a situation which we have a responsibility to.”
Latif declared that “Some of the stuff that you just saw tonight is probably true — violence exists in any religion,” adding that, “the dangerous thing about scripture is that it can be interpreted in a format that yields violence, and this goes across faith-based communities.”
However, Latif asserted, “if that’s the only thing we focus on, we’re not going to build bridges like the rabbi said.”
There was only one voice other than Friedman’s that publicly expressed concern over the reality behind the film’s portrayal. “I don’t feel that just because there’s a problem that violence is a way to fight,” said Jewish student Julia Schafer, who spoke about her mother, an Egyptian Jew, being thrown out of Egypt for her religion. Schafer also said that regardless of the pain her family went through, as Jews they didn’t fight back with violence, which left her with a lesson: “As a Jew, I can’t see violence ever as a resort.”
Friedman said he was unsatisfied with the dialogue’s approach. “What I got here was just denial,” he told CampusJ in an interview afterward, wondering “Why is it so hard for [these students] to say jihad is genocide and that they’re against it?”
Informal discussion among speakers and students continued after the film, going on so long that janitors had to come and kick out fifteen or so students who stayed around, engaged in discussions about the film and what to do next.