A group of Harvard students have started a petition calling on the University to sever ties with Subramanian Swamy, a Harvard Summer School economics instructor who wrote an op-ed against Islamic terrorism that many have called offensive and inflammatory.

With Islamophobia on the rise in the US and Europe, has Canada set a different example by electing that country’s first ever Muslim mayor?

Thirty-eight-year-old Naheed Nenshi, a Harvard-educated professor of Indian descent, won in the western city of Calgary, considered to be Canada’s conservative bastion.

This honor will come in the form of a $650,000 fund that the Department of Social Studies is creating in Peretz’s name — a nice celebration for a man with a sordid history of bigoted comments, mainly (though not entirely) against Arabs and Muslims.

Harvard academics and students are demanding that the university rescind a plan to honour the editor-in-chief of a leading Washington political magazine this week after he wrote that Muslims are unfit for the protections of the US constitution and said that “Muslim life is cheap”.

As born out by the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy, it is a fellowship of hate and of fear, a fellowship we once would have spurned because Americans, by self-definition, believe in religious freedom, in religious pluralism, in multicultural identities, in a nation up built by the immigrant experience.