Academics nowadays can’t tell colonialism from a hole in the ground. |
Given that “academics today are obsessed with colonization, empire, and cultural hegemony,” one might expect that there’d be a significant number of professors and university programs studying Iran’s increasingly aggressive imperialism in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
However, Campus Watch fellow A.J. Caschetta observes at National Review that “almost no academics are writing about one of the world’s most obvious and bloodiest colonizing projects even as it plays out right under their noses.”
But where are the clarion calls from the ivory towers? Are all the anti-Orientalists busy stigmatizing the West, privileging victimhood over achievement and finding new ways to use “other” as a verb (perhaps at UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute)? Where are the conferences, symposia, and special-issue journals on Iranian imperialism? The Council on Foreign Relations hosted an event dedicated to Iran’s imperial foreign policy in February, but if any similar event occurred at an American university in 2019, it wasn’t advertised and remains well hidden.
The 21st century began with a frenetic deluge of articles and books decrying a new American “imperialism” in the Middle East that had begun after 9/11. But books decrying the rise of Iranian imperialism have not even come in a trickle.
