America’s Least Wanted

We’re still looking for a college-level Mid East Studies program that is not dominated by apologists for Hamas and even Al Queda. The former group incites terrorism in the Middle East. The latter has exported it directly to the United States.

These morally equivalent professors are the folks who tell you that you have to understand why terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D. C. on September 11, 2001.

What we have found are professors who offer novel reasons to blame America and Israel for terrorist acts committed against those two countries. Here, respectfully submitted, is what might be called a list of some of America’s Least Wanted college professors:

Jean Abi Nader, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University cannot bring himself to call the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)’s Yasser Arafat a terrorist. Dr. Abi Nader did, nonetheless, offer this insight on the jubilant reaction of the PLO to the September 11 attacks on the United States to Christianity Today Online:

“We think it’s the irrational response of a people who live in an irrational environment. They don’t understand. They see death every day of their own people. They can’t find any satisfaction in dealing with Israel. And so this gives them the opportunity to say, It’s God’s will—what’s happening in the United States.”

When Dr. Hatem Bazian called for an Intifada in the United States on his home campus at the University of California at Berkeley, the talk got some national attention. Less widely noticed were the thoughts he delivered to a Canadian audience:

“The Iraq occupation has more to do with ushering in a new American empire. The empire has to be resisted both internally and externally. The Iraqis resisted and we must also resist, as it subjugates people around the world.”

For his part, Dr. Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University sees “disturbing but superficial similarities in that suicide bombers apparently motivated by Islam were involved in both” attacks upon the United States and Israel. Dr. Khalidi nevertheless criticizes what he sees as overdone American media coverage of the latter group of assaults and lists Iran as a thriving democracy in his new book, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East.

Professors in other departments than those that focus directly on the Middle East have weighed in on the 9-11 attacks and the war on Iraq. For example, Dr. Mahmoud Mamdani, from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia, blames the attacks on the Reagan Administration, engaging in some relativism that hopefully even the greatest critics of the late president will find immoral.

“In another decade, the center of gravity of the Cold War shifted to Central America, to Nicaragua and El Salvador. And so did the center of gravity of U. S.-sponsored terrorism,” the good doctor writes. “The Contras were not only tolerated and shielded by official America; they were actively nurtured and directly assisted, as in the mining of the harbors.”

And then, in a class by himself, there’s the legendary left-wing historian Howard Zinn. Dr. Zinn taught at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia and at Boston University. He counts Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, among his pupils.

His A People’s History of the United States is still widely used in schools. We recently learned that it is assigned as supplemental reading in an Advanced Placement History class at Folsom High School, near Sacramento, Calif., to juniors. On the other side of the country, our correspondent at Southwest Missouri State University tells us that Dr. Zinn told the audience there recently, “Saddam Hussein is no longer a danger because he’s been captured but President Bush is because he hasn’t been.”

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines sedition as “incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.” Didn’t we used to have laws about such things?