Yes, Absolutely Shocking

"We’ve been warned by security that there are students with extremist views on campus, and that we should work with caution.

"One security guard handed us his card and said ‘keep this on you at all times'."
Faraz Elahi, spokesperson Ahmidayya Muslim Students' Association, York University

"My information was that the event was moved to accommodate the larger numbers than were earlier anticipated, so the original space would be over capacity."

Joanne Rider, York Media

"We’ve gotten both positive and negative feedback from students at York University. Positive because everyone wants to come to the event, and negative because some students have very unique views."
Razi Noman, AMSA executive member

"You'd be shocked to hear that there are students on campus who have very extreme views. So much so, that they question whether what ISIS is doing is right or wrong, and don't completely condemn their actions."
Anonymous AMSA member

Surprised? No, not really. York University campus is a hotbed of Islamic tolerance and civility. The Jewish students attending York are continually harassed and threatened. The students on campus with "very extreme views" don't at all mind expressing those views that turn on Israel and Jews and the persecution and victim status of Palestinians who are so Islamic-centric they become violent at the very thought of Jews praying at a site venerated by Muslims and Jews.

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Students’ Association at York University has planned an event meant to rescue Islam from the ongoing slights to its reputation as a religion of peace, good fellowship and toleration of other religions. They have invited guest speakers and anticipated that several hundred interested people would undoubtedly show up to take part in the overdue recognition that Islam has nothing to do with the jihadi terror that has been stalking the world for decades.

They cleverly named their event Stop the CrISIS. An appeal both to the faithful in Islam and those others who can find it in their innocent good hearts to sympathize with the plight of ordinary Muslims. The Ahmadiyya Muslims are not quite ordinary Muslims. They have always been considered to be outside of mainstream Islam, heretics, pretenders, insulters of Islam, by the two major sects, Sunnis and Shiites.

A bit of a complication arose when campus security evidently warned the AMSA that the topic could conceivably create a situation where those in attendance might face violence, from other students at York whose opinions are not quite the same as their own. So an emergency meeting was called and the event will move from its original venue to another, Curtis Lecture Hall, which can hold a potential thousand interested attendees rather than the several hundred originally visualized.

The AMSA president, Jari Qudrat had revealed the concerns of York security, speaking to him three times to express their concerns that some students with inflammatory adverse opinions might, just might, act inappropriately at a venue where Muslims reproach the uber-jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham for its atrocities, leading the world to construe their actions as Islamists, as representative of Islam. Heaven forfend.

Now, if the AMSA members really want to do credit to the kind of Islam that they insist their religion represents, of tolerance, mutual respect and accommodation, injunctions against violence, much less murder, it might consider hosting a night dedicated to condemning the actions of Arab and Muslim countries where they themselves are infamously persecuted, to protest their outlier status within the world of inclusive Islam.

And extend that protest to include a detestation of the declarations by terrorist groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Iran, not to mention Qatar and Turkey for defaming and threatening Israel, the nation of Jews where indeed pluralism is sacrosanct, and democratic freedoms of a type that the Ahmadiyyas enjoy in Canada are practised, along with equality for all citizens regardless of ethnicity, religion and culture.

That would be beyond refreshing, reassuring and representative of what they claim Islam to be all about.

In the interim, however, Stop the CrISIS is set to take place on November 13 at 6:00 p.m. with a keynote address, a video presentation and a question-and-answer session.
Let's hope nothing like the caricature below appears:
Al-Watan, January 6, 2006 (Qatar)