When a picture of Washington University – St. Louis students depicting the heroism of Navy Seal Team 6 when viral, we reported that the campus Muslim group was “outraged”.

And what do campus administrators do about ginned-up activist outrage? Cater to it, of course!

One by one, Muslim students and their peers passed the microphone to discuss past experiences with racism and Islamophobia.

For many of them, these memories resurfaced when a Halloween photo of students costumed in military garb in what some argued was a depiction of Osama bin Laden, others as a stereotypical Muslim at gunpoint, surfaced on Facebook last Wednesday.

An open solidarity forum hosted by the Muslim Students Association on Thursday offered students the chance to share their experiences with racism and discuss ideas for future prevention of acts that could be considered inflammatory.

The photo, which some students defended as a depiction of Navy SEAL Team 6 and Osama bin Laden, went viral Wednesday night and kicked off a discussion about how the University handles incidents students may find racially or otherwise offensive, an issue that the Mosaic Project was and is intended to address.

“The gravity of this matter extends much beyond the photo itself,” MSA president and senior Ishaq Winters said. “The ensuing, oftentimes hateful comments of fellow students expose wider concerns…the silence on the part of the administration and majority of our student body speaks to the systemic nature of the challenges to our university’s principles of inclusion and equality, challenges that we must address moving forward.”

The event, held in Tisch Commons, was hugely attended by members of MSA, other students and administrators.

Winters, along with Jenni Harpring, program manager for the Gephardt Institute for Public Service, served as moderators for the event. They stressed that it was meant to center on the larger context of the photo and the University’s response to it rather than the costumes themselves.

Several students from the MSA shared stories of discrimination from their childhoods and from their time at Washington University post-9/11. Some mentioned bullying, hateful comments and actual violence directed toward them and their families.

Freshman Imran Mumtaz said that he didn’t find the photo particularly shocking after growing up in the South and facing Islamophobic tension for much of his childhood but saw it as an indication for the need for more frequent discussion.

I might suggest students who appreciate the Navy Seal Team 6 costumes that sparked this outrage host an “American Military Appreciation” event. It would likely have more participants.