The Educated Terrorist

As you read this, I will be away from my desk. While I am gone, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work. The articles seem to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most instances, I will let the piece speak for itself.

This originally appeared as a blog on my own website. It was written before I started writing a blog for Pajamas Media. It also appeared in The Jewish Press.

What more is there to say?

Here’s something. Tarek Heggy is a prominent Egyptian intellectual and dissident. Nonie Darwish, my friend and also an amazing truth-teller, has just introduced us. Recently, according to Heggy, he had lunch with a former Crown Prince of Jordan and a dozen other Egyptians, “none of us without a Ph.D from a world class university.” Nevertheless, Heggy, a businessman, a leading liberal political thinker, and the author of fourteen books, was the only one who believed that 9/11 had indeed been perpetrated by Al Qaeda against America. All the others still believed that America either attacked herself or, like so much else (blizzards, earthquakes, poisoned well-water), that the Zionists did it.

I first wrote about this dispiriting, unyielding phenomenon in 2002 and I published it in 2003 in “The New Anti-Semitism.” Since then, nothing has changed. Actually, everything has changed–but for the worse.

Education–especially advanced education–in both the West and in the Islamic East does not seem to challenge or triumph over vulgar prejudice and really Big Lies.

Nobel Laureates (Saramago for one) believe that Israel is essentially evil and the cause of world suffering–but so does the Ford Foundation which continues, post-Durban, to fund those who continue to engage in such rank racism including John Mearsheimer and Joan Wallach Scott, both of whom will share their anti-Israel views at Columbia. Of course, their panel is being touted in grand Orwellian style as a shining example of free speech and academic freedoms which are otherwise under siege but, with the help of Ford and Columbia, will be briefly freed.

They share Osama bin Laden’s views which he recently shared with the world on videotape, live from No-Man’s land between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Most of what he said consisted of Big Lies–but they are distressingly indistinguishable from what is taught on most western campuses today.

Only the West has engaged in Holocausts he says. Agonizingly true but also not exactly true. Let me remind Osama that Mohammed himself ordered the genocidal extermination of the Jewish tribes of northern Arabia and thus set the pattern for such subsequent pogroms of both Jews and Christians and of other dhimmi populations.

Ethnic Arab Muslims are genocidally slaughtering black African Muslims in Darfur; they are also enslaving them. The only humanitarian aid to reach these poor people comes from Jews and Christians and from America. Arab and Muslim nations and leaders are not settling this matter and are not sending food or medical supplies to their “brothers.”

My point here: Osama is educated and wealthy. So were the maniacs who flew planes into American buildings on 9/11. So are my colleague, Tarek Heggy’s Egyptian intellectuals. So are all their American counterparts who firmly believe that the tragedy on 9/11 was either caused by America and/or Israel or that America deserved it because, like Israel, we are essentially, existentially, evil.

Leading European and American intellectuals believe that America is a terrorist nation-state and that Osama is a freedom fighter.

These are very dangerous delusions which have only begun to gather steam.

May a miracle avert all the coming disasters.

September 10, 2007