Pace University Mindcrime Thread 3

Sun, Jul 29, 2007 at 1:12:30 pm PDT

The case of Stanislav Shmulevich, charged with two felony counts for dunking a Koran in a toilet at New York’s Pace University when he was a student there, has really caught people’s attention. More than a thousand comments have been posted today already, so here’s another thread to discuss it.

I want to point out again what I think is a very important aspect of this case—the university only referred the incident to the NYPD’s hate crimes unit after Muslim student groups and the Council on American Islamic Relations applied pressure to the school to make an example of Shmulevich. From yesterday’s Newsday article:

Muslim activists had called on Pace University to crack down on hate crimes after the incidents. As a result, the university said it would offer sensitivity training to its students.

The school was accused by Muslim students of not taking the incident seriously enough at first. Pace classified the first desecration of the holy book as an act of vandalism, but university officials later reversed themselves and referred the incident to the New York Police Department’s hate crimes unit.

Another interesting question raised by one reader: at many universities, Muslim student groups make copies of the Koran freely available, for da’wa purposes (proselytization). We’ve been assuming that the Korans in question did not belong to Shmulevich; but what if they were free handouts?