Fort Hood and the Academic Apologists
Winfield Myers • November 16, 2009 • Uncategorized
My Campus Watch colleague Cinnamon Stillwell has looked into what some of the more notorious professors of Middle East studies are saying about the murderous rampage of Nidal Malik Hasan. To no one’s surprise, she finds a reluctance to link Hasan’s actions with radical Islam, reams of evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Whether it’s John Esposito of Georgetown or Muqtedar Khan of the University of Delaware, the apologias for terrorism keep flowing in.
Cinnamon’s essay was published yesterday at American Thinker, a site that has rocketed in the ratings this past year as editor Thomas Lifson has increased the number of daily articles from three to seven, eight, or more (see the post just below for Candace de Russy’s excellent essay that appears at AT today).
Cinnamon begins:
In the wake of the horrific attack at the Fort Hood military base in Texas earlier this month, and the mounting evidence that the shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was motivated by Islamist beliefs, the media has turned to Middle East studies “experts” for enlightenment. Instead, what the media, and, by extension, the American public, has received is the moral relativism and obfuscation that too often meets any effort to address Islamism or jihadism in an intellectually honest manner.
The result of this intellectual dishonesty, as she puts it in her conclusion, is dire and, as we saw at Ft. Hood, deadly:
Instead of explaining events like the Fort Hood shooting to the American public, all too often Middle East studies academics refuse to state the obvious and choose to obfuscate rather than clarify the events at hand.
But there’s much more inbetween; to read the remainder of the essay, please click here.
Comments
Leave a Reply
