Intellectual Assault

AuthorHouse

Chapter One

"Why, why, why? Don't tell me there is no justification for such an act."-Michael Sells, Haverford

In the aftermath of 9/11, academics and mainstream Americans were alike in one respect: we were all asking the same question-Why did they do it? But in answering this question, the two groups parted company as starkly as possible.

For the vast majority of Americans, certain things were very clear. First, the people who hijacked the fuel-laden jumbo jets and piloted them into office buildings filled with civilians were evil. America is, in essence, a religious nation, and most Americans believe in the existence of good and evil, which are defined by divine law and judged according to its tenets. These citizens might disagree on what, specifically, constitutes evil, but there was no hesitation in labeling the calculated mass-slaughter of 3,000 innocent people, evil. If such an act is not evil, nothing is. Given the choice then between non-judgmental "understanding" of the terrorists and their putative grievances, and naming the killers evil, Americans, en masse, chose the latter. But as we will see in this chapter and in others, the existence of evil was demonstrably not a part of academia's calculus when it came to explaining 9/11.

One of the scant few exceptions to this rule was MIT's Harvey M. Sapolsky, who, in his comments about 9/11, characterized America's foreign policy as "arrogant, dangerous, foolish and even a bit evil...." But this rhetoric of evil, in the rare instances it was advanced, was never directed at Osama bin Laden and his minions. Rather, the target of choice was the United States.

The second point of departure between mainstream Americans and their educators was to be seen in the identification of the immediate factors which compelled the murderers to commit their acts of terrorism. In addition to the innate evil noted above, most Americans saw and continue to see 9/11 as a flashpoint in the collision between two expansionary and mutually incompatible civilizations, the Islamic and the Western. Moreover, and although they are chary of voicing these beliefs in polite company for fear of causing offense, the majority of Americans view the Islamic world as intolerant of different social systems and beliefs, and as hostile toward the West. As they see it, this culture of intolerance and belligerence combined with messianic, religiously-sanctioned aggression in the form of jihad, inevitably gives rise to fanatics who are willing to kill themselves in an attempt to annihilate a society they view as standing athwart Islam's ultimate triumph on earth. This, in short, is a rough approximation of how typical Americans, without Ph.Ds or eyes on the provost post, viewed and continue to view 9/11. Note that this explanation places blame squarely on the shoulders of the murderers and the society that all too often fetes them.

Academics, on the other hand, all too frequently lionized the Islamic world in 9/11's aftermath, and shockingly, charged the United States with a vast constellation of crimes that allegedly catalyzed the 9/11 killers. And these "crimes," to a large degree, also excused the 9/11 atrocities.

In short, academia asserted almost univocally that America's democratically elected leaders had long been guilty of acts equally vicious as 9/11 (but without mitigating predicates), and that 9/11 itself was the bitter fruit of their sins. Lisa Sideris, a professor in Indiana University, provides us with a statement that pithily encapsulates the academic view that the United States is responsible when others slaughter Americans, "The terrorists are like capricious, angry gods and we are left to ponder what we have done to incur such wrath."

The University of Pennsylvania's retired professor Edward S. Herman does not state specifically what America did to provoke the terrorists, but he does make clear that it was incalculably bad, "One of the most durable features of the U.S. culture is the inability or refusal to recognize U.S. crimes. The media have long been calling for the Japanese and Germans to admit guilt, apologize, and pay reparations. But the idea that this country has committed huge crimes, and that current events such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks may be rooted in responses to those crimes, is close to inadmissible."

Note that Herman implicitly compares American society to Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, two of the most malevolent in modern history, and America's "huge crimes" to those of the principal Axis powers. Now the Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking surely trump 9/11 in any reasonable assessment of comparative evil, and it is to those sorts of monstrosities that Herman yokes American actions. According to Herman, therefire, the 9/11 attacks were a relative pittance in the returned coinage of U.S-authored geopolitical misery.

Another Ivy League professor, Princeton's Richard Falk, echoes much of what Herman states, and also praises academia for its willingness to indict the United States for its allegedly wretched behavior, "I agree that the US's foreign policy is one of the motives behind such atrocities, however it is necessary to understand that this view is completely missing from the American response-by the political leadership, Congress, the media and by the general public. There is no willingness to question why the attacks occurred except on a local level, such as at universities. At the national level there has been war rhetoric successfully orchestrated by the political leadership and by the media and there is not that kind of critical questioning about our own responsibility for generations of hostility and hatred."

In other words, only those who blamed America for the savagery enacted against it bothered to question why 9/11 occurred. And if the American people and their leaders had deigned to engage in the "critical questioning" so typical of academia, we would not have bombed the apparently blameless Taliban into oblivion. Falk's conceit that introspection and intellection occur only in academia is, alas, a common one.

A pair of political scientists, Roger Paget of Lewis and Clark College, and Stephen Smith of Winthrop University, are two more professors who castigate the American people for their refusal to blame themselves in a manner befitting the good academic. Says Paget, "Our enemy, if our government's public assessments are correct, has cells in 50 or 60 countries dispersed among all the populated continents; is simultaneously highly organized and remarkably decentralized; enjoys high intelligence, extraordinary patience, and professional practicality; knows us intimately; and is fanatically focused on our demoralization and destruction. This inventory of capabilities should, at the very least, cause us seriously to examine our own record, on the possibility that allegations of our turpitude have a basis in reality." Presumably then, Paget would contend that the Jews and kulaks should also have flagellated themselves based upon the efficiency of their Nazi and Bolshevik murderers.

Smith likewise urges a salubrious dose of deep introspection upon American citizens, "... it is many times easier to jump on the bandwagon denouncing the crimes of others than to learn and think critically about the policies, actions, and, yes,...