No
Jihad Here: Middle East Studies Profs on Chattanooga Shooting
Obfuscation,
Equivocation, and Denial
by Winfield Myers
FrontPage Magazine
July 23, 2015
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Less than one week after the slaughter in Chattanooga,
Tennessee of four U.S. Marines and one sailor by Mohammod Youssuf
Abdulazeez, a Kuwaiti-born Islamist who grew up in suburban Chattanooga,
a pattern has emerged in Middle East studies scholars' analyses of the
shooting: obfuscation of any Islamist or jihadi
motives accompanied by efforts to depict Abdulazeez as one among many
troubled killers whose recent actions have shocked the country. No
specialized knowledge of the Middle East is required for such politicized
and misleading analyses, and none is evident in the examples that follow.
The title of University of Michigan history professor Juan
Cole's article at truthdig reveals his desperation to deny any
religious
motivation: "Four Marines Dead: Semi-automatic Assault Weapons
Are a Security Problem for the U.S." Cole lumps the latest chapter
of jihad in America with non-sectarian mass murders committed by
psychopaths:
The mass murder of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in
Newtown, Conn., or the theater massacre in Aurora, Colo., both in 2012,
were insufficient to spark a serious national legislative debate about
this threat. Now that four Marines are dead at the hands of a civilian
armed with such a weapon, can we discuss again a ban on those weapons, of
the sort enacted in the Clinton administration?
Cole never considers Islamist beliefs, the possible influence of ISIS
or others, radicalization via the Internet, or overseas meetings with
pro-jihadi individuals or groups as possible motivations for Abdulazeez's
actions. His effort to label the deliberate targeting of U.S. military
personnel as a symptom of insufficient gun control is simply willful
blindness masquerading as scholarly commentary.
Omid
Safi, director of Islamic studies at Duke, took to his Facebook page to
claim a moral equivalence between the accidental killing of civilians by
U.S. drones and premeditated mass murder—again, with no mention of jihad
or Islamism:
I see people suffering in #Chattanoogashooting,
victim of another crazy act of suffering, yes by a Muslim . . . a pot-smoking,
drunk-driving/arrested Muslim. My heart and prayers go out to the
families of the victims, who loved their babies as much as anyone,
including the victims of American drones.
Because in Safi's hyper-politicized mind, long used to cloaking Islamist
sentiments in the florid language of sentimentalism, the events he cites
are the same. As for the killer's pot smoking and drinking, offered as
evidence that he wasn't a true Muslim, the 9/11 hijackers sought out strip
dancers in Las Vegas bars the summer before their heinous acts.
Lascivious living and terrorism, it seems, go hand in hand.
Safi continues:
My heart is heavy because immediately the shooter was labeled a
domestic terrorist, while Dylann Roof killed 9 people in a historic black
church, and MSM media (and a bunch of politicians) resisted using the
T-word. . . . My heart is heavy because another day, another black person
dies in police custody.
Would Safi have had a lighter heart had Roof been labeled a
"domestic terrorist," like Timothy McVeigh? How about a more
accurate label still: Islamist terrorist, which denotes the affiliation
that, for many federal agents, bureaucrats, and the president himself,
dare not speak its name.
In an interview
with PRI, Safi misapplied Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel's famous quip
that, "Few are guilty, but all are responsible" to the
Chattanooga shooting in order to spread the blame:
I take that same approach when it comes to the Charleston shooting or
police brutality. We want to hold the individuals who are responsible for
these horrific acts accountable, and then to step back and ask the
question about how all of us [are]... responsible?
Speaking to a crowd in Vancouver in the immediate
aftermath of the Chattanooga shooting, UC-Riverside creative writing
professor Reza
Aslan denied that Abdulazeez's actions amounted to terrorism:
Just hours after an American Muslim gunned down four US Marines in
Chattanooga, Tennessee on Thursday, Reza Aslan had harsh words for anyone
describing it as a terrorist attack. "Terrorism," he said, is
"an absolute bulls#@t and meaningless term."
According to the reporter, Aslan stayed on theme by conflating
international jihad with far-right militias in the U.S.—a convenient
strategy to avoid any analysis of the unique dangers jihadis like
Abdulazeez pose to the West:
Perhaps most striking take-away of the evening was Aslan's casting of
violent Muslim jihadism in the same mold as what the West now experiences
as libertarian militia and sovereign citizen movements, commonly
associated with anti-government white supremacist ideology.
We're now at a point in the history of Middle East studies wherein
"scholars" of the region deny the obvious, ignore the infamous,
and offer apologias in their never-ending effort to protect Islamists
from the consequences of their actions while blaming the West for all the
world's ills. Just when the West most needs insightful policy advice
guided by expertise, it receives instead propaganda in the guise of
scholarship to support its enemies. Seldom has any academic discipline so
failed its duty.
Winfield Myers is director of academic affairs and director and of
Campus Watch at the
Middle East Forum.
This
text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an
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author, date, place of publication, and original URL.
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