Julia Shearson, the executive director of CAIR-Cleveland, recently appeared on CNN to discuss Harvard's decision to ban men from a popular campus gym during certain hours after a handful of Muslim women had expressed discomfort at the prospect of working out in a mixed facility. School officials admit that the new guidelines have more to do with religion than gender.
"This isn't about excluding anybody," argued Shearson, a Harvard alumna. "This is about including everyone."
Really?
Robert Spencer critiques these updated standards for "inclusion":
The increasingly shrill demands in Western countries for accommodation of Muslim practices are not the latest manifestation of the push for equal rights for minorities. … Demanding a place at the table is not the same thing as demanding a separate table of one's own. In the civil rights movement, black Americans were working for full inclusion in the larger secular democratic culture, not trying to carve out their own enclave within it. If anything, they had that already, and that was the problem
By such thinking, he continues, "the Muslim Rosa Parks would insist on sitting in a separate place on the bus, and Muslim students would demand the right not to have to eat at infidel lunch counters."
Mark Steyn further exposes the irony:
Forty years ago, advocating separate drinking fountains made you a racist. Today, advocating separate taxi cabs or separate swimming sessions makes you a multiculturalist.
Indeed. Exclusion has become the new inclusion.
This episode offers merely the latest evidence that CAIR and its allies are unfit to claim the mantle of the civil rights movement, while elite institutions such as Harvard are all too willing to sell the classical notion of equality down the (Charles) river.