Diversity Is The Reality

Many foreign students arrived at the University of Iceland early last month to the sight of Nazi stickers spread out all around the campus. Several foreign students, who live in the student apartments on Sæmundargata, complained that they had received brochures of Nazi propaganda through their mailboxes.

This university houses over 1,000 foreign students, and many students condemned this incident on social media, especially in the group International Students at the University of Iceland, where I’m an admin.

I am a foreign student and my name is Muhammed; these incidences reminds me of a terrifying past.

These flyers and accompanying ideology do not represent Iceland, nor the university, nor the general Icelandic population Nor do they in any way represent peace and consensus. These messages symbolise segregation, hate and extreme thoughts and misguided fantasies of a “utopian” future Iceland.

We must condemn these utterly disgusting acts through universal human values and the art of living together. We are in no way accepting this in or around the university, as this does not represent pure freedom of speech, but is a way of mobilising people into segregation, polarisation and violence. This does not represent us, but is a representation of ignorance and isolation from the social reality.

We live in a globalised world village, where people—no matter their ethnicity, religion or cultural background—live side by side, and where diversity is and has always been unavoidable. The tiny groups of losers from all corners of the Earth, who represent extreme ideologies and harbour fantasies of a glorified, segregated and polarised world, exaggerated through force and violence, shall never be representative of the common world population.

The world is how you make it to be, and you can only change the world positively by changing yourself.

Together we are and together we will be.