On April 13, 2015, The Massachusetts Daily Collegian, a student paper at the University of Massachusetts, published a column titled Deal with Iran is a bad one. The piece was written by a conservative student attending UMass Amherst, and it explains why the recent framework of a deal with Iran is potentially “a dangerous one with disconcerting historic parallels.”
Soon after publishing, it came to the attention of Nicholas Pappas, the author, that the edits made by the Collegian staff weren’t simply grammatical, or done in a way to make the writing flow better. “Someone who read my article on another outlet pointed out that the words militant Islam were edited out of the piece,” Pappas told Truth Revolt.
The original version of the column was published with no edits days beforehand on a conservative media and entertainment site that Pappas also writes for.
The original sentence in question read: “While President Obama has been called the new Chamberlain, others have made the comparison that Bibi is the Winston Churchill of our time, warning about the dangers of appeasing Militant Islam.”
The version published in the Daily Collegian reads: “While President Obama has been called the new Chamberlain, others have made the comparison that Netanyahu is the Winston Churchill of our time, warning about the dangers of appeasing a dangerous state.”
“Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see any grammatical or contextual reason for the words to have been swapped out,” Pappas commented. “I can’t say for sure, but I feel it was done in the name of political correctness. Many people are uncomfortable calling certain ideologies by their proper names.”
The article was written as part of the lead-up to an event hosted by the UMass Republicans, of which Nicholas Pappas is a member. Charles Krauthammer will be speaking on campus at the end of April. He will be tackling Islamic extremism and President Obama’s many foreign policy blunders head-on. The event is titled America in Retreat: UMass GOP Presents Charles Krauthammer.
David Kaufman, the President of the UMass GOP, told Truth Revolt that the politically incorrect message of his club and their speakers have been met with silencing and censorship before. “I hope that the campus sticks to its roots and is "liberal" and accepting of ideas that may be foreign to them . . . I can only hope the crowd we get this year for Krauthammer is less ignorant, and more willing to hear these ideas than the audiences we've had in the past."
Previous speakers the club has brought include John Ashcroft and Karl Rove. Both were silenced by left-wing hecklers.
Originally posted at TruthRevolt.org