INSOMNIA THEATER: PENN STATE PROFESSOR SUPPRESSES STUDENT ARTWORK ON TERRORISM, CALLING IT “RACIST” – Tonight I’d like to share a FIRE video from several years ago that tells the story of artist and former Penn State grad student Joshua Stulman whose Portraits of Terror art exhibit, which satirized radical Islamic terrorism, was censored by his professor and school administrators. While this decision was reversed by the school’s president, Stulman’s work was never displayed at Penn State. Later on, Stulman made plans to showcase his work at Gratz College in Philadelphia, however the event was canceled for fear of a terrorist attack against the institution.

This strain of censorship is not new. At the time of the release of this video I wrote an extensive blog about the many cases we’d already seen of students getting in trouble for being critical of radical Islam, or even of Hezbollah and Hamas. All these years later, the risks are greater than ever. You can even expect people who rely on free speech, like cartoonist Gary Trudeau, to take the murder of other cartoonists as an opportunity to chastise those of us who believe free speech means nothing without the right to offend.