A student panel discussion on Islamic extremism that included a display of the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed degenerated into a chorus of name-calling as one speaker branded Islam an "evil religion" and audience members nearly came to blows.
Organizers of the panel, which included one Muslim speaker, had said that unveiling the cartoons was part of a larger debate on Islamic extremism sponsored by the College Republicans and The United American Committee (UAC), a fledgling conservative group not affiliated with the University of California, Irvine, where the event was held on Tuesday.
`Hate speech'
But the forum drew hundreds of protesters, including members of the Muslim Student Union, who said the event was continuation of a campaign of hate speech disguised as freedom of expression.
Inside the nearly packed 424-seat auditorium where the panel discussion was held, a UAC moderator displayed six cartoons, three depicting Mohammed, including one with the prophet wearing a bomb-shaped turban, and three anti-Semitic cartoons he said appeared in Middle Eastern newspapers.
Brock Hill, vice president of the College Republicans, said his group had a constitutional right to display the cartoons and noted that the panel included a Muslim speaker.
"We're not going against Islam whatsoever," he said. "This is about free speech and the free marketplace of ideas."
But later, panelists were cheered when they referred to Muslims as fascist and accused mainstream Muslim-American civil rights groups of being "cheerleaders for terror."
"I put out a call to Muslims in America: put out a fatwa on [Osama] bin Laden, put out a fatwa on [Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi," said panelist Lee Kaplan, a spokesman for the UAC. "Support America in the war on terror."
The Council on American-Islamic relations, which boycotted the event, described the UAC as a "fringe group."
Escalation
Tensions quickly escalated when one panelist, the Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, repeatedly said that Islam was an "evil religion," and that all Muslims hate America. Peterson, the founder and president of the conservative Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, later said that he did not believe that all Muslims were evil.
At one point, campus police removed two men, one of them a Muslim, from the audience after they nearly came to blows.
Osman Umarji, former president of the Muslim Student Union, equated the organizers' decision to display the drawings to the debasement of Jews in Germany before the Holocaust. He said earlier that none of the Muslims who protested outside the event would attend if the drawings were displayed.
Mohamed Eldessouky, 20, a criminology student who attended the discussion, said he was disappointed because he felt the panel and the audience were biased against Islam.
"I entered it with an open mind, but I thought it was totally biased. I thought the panelists would be more balanced. I think it did more harm than good," he said.
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