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 are the moral relativism and obfuscation that too often meet any effort to address Islamism or jihadism in an intellectually honest manner.
Writing for the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” blog, John Esposito, professor and founding director of the Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, extends his long tradition of issuing apologias for radical Islam by conflating Hasan’s actions with “extremists” of all religions. In the process, he professes ignorance as to why there might be suspicion directed towards Islam in the wake of 9/11, the worst Islamic terrorist attack in U.S. history:
Why this common tendency and double standard towards Islam and Muslims post-9/11? We judge the religion and majority of mainstream Muslims by the acts of an individual or an aberrant minority of extremists. Yet, when Jewish fundamentalists kill a prime minister or innocent Palestinians or Christian extremists blow up abortion clinics or assassinate their physicians, somehow the media is capable of sticking to all the facts and distinguishing between the use and abuse of a religion.
Esposito continues the moral equivalency and non sequiturs in a later “On Faith” post:
No major faith, including the five major world religions I have studied and taught, threatens the safety and security of the U.S. or its citizens. Religious extremists of any faith are a threat but they should be treated as any other extremists, religious or non-religious.
Ingrid Mattson, professor of Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations, director of the Macdonald Center for Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary, and president of the Islamic Society of North America, is well-known for expressing her own Islamist sympathies. This may be why, in a November 8, 2009 New York Times article, Mattson made this clumsy attempt at obfuscation:
I don’t understand why the Muslim-American community has to take responsibility for him. The Army has had at least as much time and opportunity to form and shape this person as the Muslim community.
If not for the politically correct environment created by apologists such as CAIR, Mattson, and her academic cohorts, the numerous warnings from Hasan’s colleagues about his predilection for fanatical and threatening commentary might not have gone unheeded or been met with naïveté and incompetence. When people are afraid to speak the truth for fear of being branded racists or “Islamophobes,” it can have dire consequences.
Then there’s UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, who has his own problematic history of dismissing concerns about Islamic terrorism, opposing counterterrorism efforts, soft-pedaling jihad, and promoting sharia law. In the same New York Times article, El Fadl, claiming to have “counseled Muslims conflicted about enlisting” in the military, elaborates:
In the Koran it says that war is to end the state of oppression and to uplift the oppressed. Is it an army that defends the oppressed, or have you slipped into becoming the oppressor? People from the military who contact me, that’s what I find they’re torn up about.
Muqtedar Khan, Director of Islamic Studies at the University of Delaware, takes the claim of victimization a step further. Khan echoes El Fadl and lends backhanded support for the belief that motivated Hasan and which is a canon of Islamist ideology: that the U.S. is at war with Islam. In a guest article for the Washington Post’s “On Faith,” Khan claims that Hasan:
... was in an army that was at war with his co-religionists and he had difficulty dealing with that. He was frequently taunted and harassed for being a Muslim by his own colleagues. After years in the military and after years of caring for soldiers as a doctor, he did not feel as if he belonged and perhaps that was the key to why he could turn on his own.
In the same article, Khan laments the coming mythical wave of “Islamophobia” -- a wave that has never manifested despite endless claims by Islamism’s apologists. As he put it:
... this episode will once again provide fodder for talk shows and websites, which exploit such isolated events to ratchet up Islamophobia.
Americans must not allow this isolated event to fall back on stereotypes about Islam and resuscitate the prejudices that all of us have worked so hard to curb.
Despite these efforts at dissemblance, the facts in the Hasan case speak clearly to a jihadist agenda. Americans rightly concerned about the culture of political correctness and willful blindness towards Islamist ideology that has infected the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, and so many other institutions need only look to the denizens of the Ivory Tower for an explanation. 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. The rush to judgment against those who express valid concerns about Islamism only adds to the self-censorship that was in large part responsible for allowing Hasan to remain in the military and murder his fellow soldiers in cold blood.
Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.
