A timely article in Notre Dame Magazine

Submitted by J Bond (United States), Jan 21, 2010 at 06:23

I read with interest your newletter announcing the Obama administration's decision to reverse its ban on granting Tariq Ramadan's entry into the US. As it turns out, in the latest issue of _Notre Dame Magazine_, the university's alumni publication, there appears an article written by R.Scott Appleby entitled "The Differences are Similar." In this piece, Mr Appleby, Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame, strives to point out the similarities between the charges leveled against Catholic immigrants as being part of an undemocratic, un-American sect and the similar charges being leveled against Muslims today. What is astonishing about this article, however, is in how many ways the purely formal similarities of the two situations are passed off as fundamental and the differences are passed off with a remarkably poor critical rigor. As an alumnus of that university, I find this deplorable.

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