This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Jon Sanders, Research Editor and Policy Analyst for the John Locke Foundation.

Rumor has it that at UNC-Wilmington, English professors have to fill out a Special Request form in order to teach Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” This sets into motion an elaborate process to protect students.

First, the English class spends two class periods describing the nature of satire. Students’ pulses and breathing rates are monitored for any signs of distress. Then, prior to assigning the reading, the professor and specially trained school counselors institute a “buddy system” to keep students accountable and avoid the temptation to eat a child. Class lectures on Swift are accompanied by several minutes of counseling and debriefing. Students then are scheduled for several sessions with a campus mental-health professional. Those counselors are also subject to a rigorous screening process, ever since the unfortunate incident when a counselor misunderstood about a “patient” eating barbecued baby-back ribs.

The reason for all of that is simple: college students can’t be expected to understand satire if college leaders are flummoxed by it. And boy are they flummoxed. Just ask UNC-Wilmington criminal justice professor Dr. Mike Adams.

In late February, Adams heard about Dr. Julio Pino at Kent State University. Pino, who calls himself “the most dangerous Muslim in America,” was operating a Web site titled “Global War” with a header that proclaimed: “‘Are You Prepared for Jihad?’ IN THE NAME OF OBL. 2007: THE YEAR OF ISLAMIC VICTORY!”

Pino’s web site described itself this way:

We are a jihadist news service, and provide battle dispatches, training manuals, and jihad videos to our brothers worldwide. All we want is to get Allah’s pleasure. We will write ‘Jihad’ across our foreheads, and the stars. The angels will carry our message throughout the world.

In short, Pino’s Web site advocates mass murder of Americans. He also penned an ode in the school newspaper to a Palestinian suicide bomber. But when Adams reported this, the university rushed to Pino’s defense. Providing terrorist training and promoting mass murder of Americans and Jews simply doesn’t upset American academics so entrenched in seeing things through the lens of political correctness, where Americans and Jews are the main evils in the world.

So Adams turned to satire to help the academics see past Pino’s choice of the “correct victims” so that they could understand the inhumanity of advocating genocide. In the proud tradition of reductio ad absurdum argumentation, Adams took Pino’s ideas and changed one thing: the victims. Instead of all Americans, Adams changed the targets of Pino’s promotion of (1) global war, (2) mass murder, (3) videos promoting mass murder, (4) training videos for that global war, and even (5) a battle dispatch, to a single subset of Americans. And it wasn’t even an actual existing subset, it was “gay bath houses in San Francisco.”

Well, Adams’ column worked all too well. Suddenly, academics and leftists across America and even overseas realized that Pino’s promotion of genocide and mass murder against Americans (which do exist) was really bad – but only if the target was gay bathhouses in San Francisco (which don’t exist).

The UNCW community is beside itself. The student newspaper, The Seahawk, found an instructor from Southern Methodist University named George Henson to write an op ed denouncing Adams. Typical of leftists preparing to argue for limiting speech, Henson chose the I’m a strong advocate of free speech BUT lede. And he proceeded to accuse Adams of “intent … to incite violence, hatred and bigotry.” The Seahawk editorial board ascribed to Adams the earnest belief in launching a “global war on homosexuality” and “‘bomb[ing] gay bath houses’ on the West Coast.” (The Seahawk even widened Adams’ farcical “target group” to make his piece sound extra offensive and referred to his column as a “blog”).

Adams has responded in his column with the promise of a libel lawsuit. As he wrote:

Yesterday afternoon, I spoke with a writer for the UNCW Seahawk student newspaper. He was interested in doing an article on my recent column, “How to Bomb a Gay Bath House” – a satirical column whose point was that in America political correctness causes people to pay more attention to imaginary threats against minorities than the real threats Muslim extremists pose to all Americans.

My paraphrasing of words from the very website linked to Kent State’s Julio Pino should have helped The Seahawk staff understand the point. Unfortunately, they did not.

In another conversation with the editor of The Seahawk, I made sure he understood the satirical nature of the column. He gave no indications that he did not and assured me that the only thing the paper was running Thursday was a letter to the editor by a professor in Texas. I reminded him that it would be libelous to reprint any libelous statements by the professor.

But unfortunately, the editor was lying about his paper’s intentions.

Adams accuses the Seahawk of intentionally defaming him by deliberately misportraying his intent, which they knew was satirical, as an actual incitement to violence, and also intentionally distorting the facts. The problem is serious. They are deliberately misrepresenting Adams’ beliefs — which are decidedly against mass murder and genocide — with no other ostensible reason than to damage him.

Were there no responsible adults at UNCW — other than Adams, of course — who could have explained to the Seahawk what satire is? Must they learn about it in federal court?