The following passages are extracted from the article and highlight the twisted worldview of too many western 'intellectuals', that is the same people who are indoctrinating our children.
I have also observed the more general academic response to the crisis, which clearly represented a great challenge for academics, especially in the arts, humanities and the social sciences.
It was a chance for academics to demonstrate their capacity for rigorous, objective and fearless research, illuminating one of the most important issues facing the modern world. But it was a challenge that few academics revealed themselves prepared to meet, with far too many trapped in the left-wing postmodern intellectual monoculture that pervades university life. When academic voices were heard in connection with 9/11 it was usually to exploit the tragedy opportunistically to gain funding and to promote ideological or apologetic agendas, dominated by this radical orthodoxy.
According to the radical orthodox perspective, the world must be analysed exclusively in terms of “class, gender and race”, which leaves no room for any consideration of religious dynamics, such as the emergence of Islamism and jihadi terrorism. Consequently, these phenomena were assimilated to a simplistic and uncompromising secular narrative of generalised oppression, allegedly directed by a system of Western patriarchal and racist capitalism, dominated by “American imperialism”, and mobilised against “the Other”, the great mythic realm of victimhood, which, after 9/11, was quickly extended to include 1.5 billion Muslims, who were added to the select set of groups deemed worthy of special favour, advocacy and support.
To facilitate this, the new thought-crime of “Islamophobia” was invented. Accusing interlocutors of this new form of Western depravity makes it possible to silence debate about the activities of Islamists and other Muslim extremists, while also making anyone brave enough to raise their voices vulnerable to the various laws that have been introduced by the Left to suppress free speech.
Another semantic game is the insistence that “terrorism” has no real existence or cannot be adequately defined. This is an error, as the term is no more or less precise than any other concepts that seek to encompass dynamic phenomena, while history and current official usage confirm that terrorism is accurately defined as unlawful actions or threat of actions made by a non-state entity intended to harm, coerce, intimidate or interfere with the government or the public with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.
The radical orthodoxy seeks to invalidate the term, as it views its use as an intolerable affront to its favoured groups. It resorts instead to moral relativism and simplistic clichés (“one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter” and the like), so that concerns that the West is under terrorist attack can be rejected as attempts to negatively “label” these groups. Alternatively, reference in the definition to “non-state entities” is ignored, and terrorism is defined so broadly that it encompasses military action by sovereign states, making it possible to claim that the actions of Al Qaeda and other jihadi groups are no more immoral than those of American and Australian forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This self-imposed blindness, silence, confusion and moral culpability meant that many vital issues escaped scholarly attention in the aftermath of 9/11. For example, there was clearly a need to identify and explore the nature of the deep-seated crises within the Muslim world, and to explore the emergence and nature of Islamism and jihadism as responses to these crises. There was also a vital necessity to compare and contrast jihadism with the relevant ideological, organisational and operational aspects of the history of terrorism and violent extremism dating back to the nineteenth century.
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