Last Tuesday night I joined a fairly full house at Emerson Hall at Harvard to see Daniel Pipes, Yaron Brook and Robert Spencer give a talk on "The Threat of Totalitarian Islam." Robert Spencer was ill and couldn't make it, which was unfortunate since he's a very good speaker and very good at responding to questions and I would have enjoyed seeing how the college crowd reacted to him.

Both Pipes and Brook opened with short statements of under ten minutes each, then the floor was quickly opened to questions. That part of the program ran well over an hour and formed the meat of the event.

Security was tight and no banners or disruptions were allowed. The audience ranged from polite to outright friendly, with challenging questioners receiving only a smattering of applause from the back of the hall while the responses from Brook and Pipes outdid the negativity. No protesters were on hand. I'm also guessing that the majority of the audience was from off campus.

This Objectivist blogger has a good review of the event. Pipes was careful and studied as always, and Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute and someone I've never seen speak before, wasn't quite as glib as one might expect considering the number of speaking engagements he performs at. Still and all, both did well.

Most questioners did well staying to concise statements before asking their questions, though one young Muslim fellow was shouted down by the audience into finally getting to asking a question. I was told he was spotted later complaining to the police officers on hand that his right to free speech had been violated -- hey, I just report what I heard. Our own Joachim Martillo was on hand to get his turn at the mic. When I post the video of the Q&A I'll let you guess which one he was.

Here is the video of the two opening statements. I will update this post with the much longer video of the Q&A when I have it ready, probably some time tomorrow -- uploading and encoding will take some time due to file size. [Update: Second video now up.]