University Professors Blame the West for Paris Terror Attacks

^{Originally published under the title, “Profs on Paris Attacks: Je Suis NOT Charlie!”}

University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole believes that the Paris terrorists were emulating the Bush administration.

Middle East studies professors responded to the attacks by Islamic terrorists in Paris earlier this month not with rigorous, informed analysis or even unadultered sympathy for those gunned down in the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a kosher market. Their reaction was instead precisely what one has come to expect from academics more concerned with shielding Islam from blame and shifting responsibility for its adherents’ actions to the West than with the disinterested pursuit of truth.

University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole accused the Bush/Cheney administration and the Iraq War of “radicalizing” terrorist brothers, Sharif and Said Kouashi:

Many academics are more concerned with shielding Islam from blame and shifting responsibility for the attacks to the West than with finding the truth.

In Cole‘s conspiracy-mongering imagination, attacking the magazine was “a strategic strike, aiming at polarizing the French and European public” by playing “into the hands of Marine LePen and the Islamophobic French Right wing,” provoking “European society into pogroms against French Muslims,” and bolstering “al-Qaeda recruitment.”

University of California, Riverside creative writing professor Reza Aslan claimed that an “anti-Muslim backlash” had created “tension among the Muslim population in Europe and non-Muslim population,” leading “a lot of young Muslims” to “feel angry, perhaps, threatened, enough to actually take up violence.”

University of California-Riverside professor Reza Aslan thinks the terrorists were responding to (not causing) “anti-Muslim backlash” in Europe.

Aslan’s equivocating caused the interviewer to stress, “in no way are you saying that violence is ever right in this particular situation; you are explaining the conditions that precipitated this.”

Omid Safi, director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, opposed treating “this as a freedom of speech issue” because, he argued, “French society, like many other European societies, is awash in a wave of anti-immigrant xenophobia.” He excoriated the French for using the “freedom to offend” to target “again and again communities that are marginalized and ostracized.” He then blamed colonialism:

True to form, Safi split hairs in objecting to the media’s use of the term “Islamists” to define the perpetrators: Islamic terrorism, however, is merely a means to the same end.

Hofstra University professor Hussein Rashid says that French Muslims feel “besieged” by the “bullying” satirism of Charlie Hebdo.

Other academics followed suit. Hofstra University Islamic studies professor Hussein Rashid, claiming that Muslims in Europe “feel like they are besieged” and view satirizing Islam “as bullying,” concluded that, “it is not so much about religious anger, as it is about vengeance.” Ingrid Mattson, who chairs Islamic studies at Huron University College in Ontario, tweeted that, “The attack on #CharlieHebdo is not about Islam vs the West. Many Muslims have had their heads taken off by fanatics who detested their views,” as if the Paris terrorists were motivated by Muslim-on-Muslim violence.

Meanwhile, Khaled Fahmy, a historian at the American University of Cairo who has taught Islamic studies at New York University, argued that religion was “just a veneer” for resentment against “colonial powers” and Western “Orientalist” condescension. “It is the nonviolence that needs to be explained, not the violence,” he asserted. Taking the willful blindness even further, M. Steven Fish, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley stated, “Is Islam violent? I would say absolutely not. There is very little empirical evidence that Islam is violent.”

Hatem Bazian, director of the apologetic Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project at the University of California, Berkeley, maintained that the attack “has nothing to do with Islam in general” and presented a laundry list of “racism, discrimination, bigotry, Islamophobia, [and] anti-Semitism” as the culprits. Claiming that, “it is utterly wrong to assign blame to Islam of old and assert that this is the pre-modern imposing itself on the modern world,” Bazian made an obscene charge against critics of radical Islam:

Mark LeVine, a history professor at the University of California, Irvine, joined the chorus of denial:

University of California-Irvine professor Mark LeVine blames the “world system” for “grinding down whatever decent values exist in Islam.”

Noting that “the Charlie Hebdo attackers are reportedly of Algerian descent and the third from Senegal,” LeVine declared, “Where does the story begin? Quite simply with colonialism.”

Muqtedar Khan, a political scientist at the University of Delaware, acknowledged the terrorists’ ideology, but made an intellectually vacuous argument of moral equivalency by referring to, “the twin threats to us all – Islamophobia in the West and Muslim radicalism everywhere.” Khan worried that “Muslims in the West, who live as weak and marginalized minorities, will now be confronted with more Islamophobic discourses, policies and hate crimes,” which, he predicted, “will lead to more radicalization, more despicable acts, and then another stronger backlash.”

University of California, Los Angeles law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl bemoaned the “radicalizing role” of France’s “particularly exaggerated racial and ethnic problem,” claiming that the “French government has an obligation to identify areas where people might be particularly vulnerable,” such as “artists, or at synagogues, or a mosque targeted by white racists.” Obfuscating further, he stated:

University of California, Los Angeles English professor Saree Makdisi objected to the “binary structure” and the “colonial and post-colonial conflict” allegedly “looming behind the whole Charlie affair":

Norman Finkelstein accuses Charlie Hebdo of “sadism” and equates it with the anti-Semitic Nazi weekly newspaper Der Stürmer.

Instead, he touted the platitude, “Every culture has its mix of tolerance and intolerance, right and wrong, freedom and its absence.”

Echoing President Barack Obama, Oxford University Islamic studies professor Tariq Ramadan employed the vague term, “violent extremism,” which, he claimed, is “not only a Muslim business.” Rather than express sympathy, Ramadan accused Charlie Hebdo’s editors of “target[ing] Muslims” for the purpose of “making money,” adding, “It has nothing to do with courage.”

Similarly, former DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein claimed that, “Charlie Hebdo is sadism. It’s not satire,” and equated it with Der Stürmer, a weekly newspaper in Nazi Germany notorious for its anti-Semitic caricatures:

Georgetown University history professor Abdullah Al-Arian held Western civilization responsible—"from Voltaire and the Enlightenment to the present"—for “anti-Muslim cultural production,” “the rise of a pervasive Islamophobic atmosphere,” and a “wave of anti-Muslim terrorism.” Ignoring centuries of Islamic aggression and supremacism, he maintained that “the abhorrent violence by some Muslims is a recent phenomenon.”

Columbia University Iranian studies professor Hamid Dabashi made an ahistorical analogy by likening “the current wave of Islamophobia in Europe” to “classical European anti-Semitism.” Denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s inclusion in the Paris unity rally following the attacks, Dabashi offered this odious comparison:

One might expect acts of unadulterated evil like the massacres in Paris to be met with unqualified condemnation from the American professoriate. But obfuscation, moral relativism, apologetics, and anti-Western bigotry are the strong suits of today’s Middle East studies establishment. Islamists seeking to forbid criticism of radical Islam and undermine Western law and culture can count on their allies in academe.