RUTHFULLY YOURS

Preserving and defending what the West has built requires a sense of purpose and shared public morality. Sadly, of the literary fictions inspired by and following the 9/11 attacks, none goes beyond an agnostic predilection to equivocate
After 2001, the Library of Congress introduced a new category. “September 11 Terrorist Attacks 2001—Fiction” identified a genre of political novels that now includes inter alia: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) and Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days (2009). The category also includes European and Australian novels like Michel Houellebecq’s Platform (2003) and Submission (2015), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2007), Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist (2006) and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). By 2011 newspapers and journals published lists of the best post-9/11 novels, and US universities, such as Berkeley, offered undergraduate courses in post-9/11 fiction. What does the new genre tell us about the modern liberal character adrift in an interconnected world confronted by the apocalyptic certainties of the Islamic zealot?

That the contemporary novelist would derive inspiration from terrorism is unsurprising. As it evolved, modern terrorism cultivated the drama of the violent act. Consequently, the great early twentieth-century novelists found it a suitable fictional case for treatment. In The Princess Casamassima (1886) Henry James perceived in the anarchists of the time an emerging European revolutionary character that was a “strange mixture of anguish and aestheticism”. Joseph Conrad also dissected the revolutionary fanatic’s addiction to violence. Through characters like “the incorruptible Professor” in The Secret Agent (1907), Conrad depicted the morally challenged inhabitants of a bohemian underworld preoccupied with revolution, betrayal and conspiracy.

After 1945, Graham Greene, John Le Carré, Arthur Koestler, Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell explored the corrupt demi-monde of Cold War totalitarian terror. Novelists like Orwell and Conrad clarify the moral and political dilemmas that confront the liberal political conscience. Given that the political novel, at its best, offers insight into the motive for violence, what political and moral possibilities do the novels of September 11 Terrorist Attacks 2001—Fiction evoke?

A disenchanted modern cityscape inhabited by a cast of middle-class characters forms the setting for most 9/11 fiction. It is a cosmopolitan, secular city of commercial transactions, sexual infidelity and status anxiety. The denizens struggle with anomie, financial and emotional need, and a city which sustains only a minimal sense of civil association. Before any terror attack occurs this is a world that lacks moral purpose.

Murray Walters is a Brisbane psychiatrist
Once more we are treated to sermons by those who demand we ponder the grievances behind the Brussels slaughter. For them, the unthinkable truth that Islamists hate us must be always obfuscated. In this regard they match those bishops who could not fully grasp the evil of pederast clerics.

Another insane act of mass murder, followed hot on its heels by the usual piffle about disenfranchisement, powerlessness, and other exculpatory historicisms. The “minimisers” were keen to get their camera time, barely waiting for atomised human flesh to be scraped from an airport’s bomb-shattered departures hall before demanding that this latest slaughter be contextualised and their simple “truth” accepted as gospel. There is a mad futility to doing anything about it, they say, other than drawing maudlin pictures, lighting candles, singing “Imagine” and exchanging empty slogans about “standing with Paris”. Sorry, that was the last massacre, this time it was Brussels. It’s getting hard to keep up these days.

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian was amongst the first to occupy the apologists’ lectern, reminding us that “political terror is as old as war,” and that “…what is not stupid is seeking to alleviate, or not aggravate, the rage that gives rise to acts of terror, and then to diminish the potency of the incident itself”. Re-iterating a well-worn theme, he mouthed the purported wisdom that “a response to terror requires patience and restraint.” In other words, do nothing, mouth pieties and hope Allah’s suicide bombers go away. Or at least find someone else to terrorise.

Call me a callous, cynical sort if you will, but isn’t it funny how no one has urged “alleviating, not aggravating” or “patience and restraint” during the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse. Cardinal George Pell might have had a darn sight easier time of it if the same logic had been applied. After all, paedophilia is also as “old as war”. In fact, like old-fashioned rape, it’s often an integral aspect of it.

Here’s Jenkins again:

There is no way any community can make itself immune to terror attacks. Since they are random, no protection can defend that community from them. No amount of police work or surveillance, no deployment of armies or navies, let alone of missiles or nuclear weapons, can guard against them. Intelligence and surveillance can go so far, but the bombers and killers will get through any net.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on February 24, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

In 1993 I was a seasoned federal prosecutor, but I only knew as much about Islam as the average American with a reasonably good education—which is to say, not much. Consequently, when I was assigned to lead the prosecution of a terrorist cell that had bombed the World Trade Center and was plotting an even more devastating strike—simultaneous attacks on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations complex on the East River, and the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters—I had no trouble believing what our government was saying: that we should read nothing into the fact that all the men in this terrorist cell were Muslims; that their actions were not representative of any religion or belief system; and that to the extent they were explaining their atrocities by citing Islamic scripture, they were twisting and perverting one of the world’s great religions, a religion that encourages peace.

Unlike commentators and government press secretaries, I had to examine these claims. Prosecutors don’t get to base their cases on assertions. They have to prove things to commonsense Americans who must be satisfied about not only what happened but why it happened before they will convict people of serious crimes. And in examining the claims, I found them false.

One of the first things I learned concerned the leader of the terror cell, Omar Abdel Rahman, infamously known as the Blind Sheikh. Our government was portraying him as a wanton killer who was lying about Islam by preaching that it summoned Muslims to jihad or holy war. Far from a lunatic, however, he turned out to be a globally renowned scholar—a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. His area of academic expertise was sharia—Islamic law.

I immediately began to wonder why American officials from President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno on down, officials who had no background in Muslim doctrine and culture, believed they knew more about Islam than the Blind Sheikh. Then something else dawned on me: the Blind Sheikh was not only blind; he was beset by several other medical handicaps. That seemed relevant. After all, terrorism is hard work. Here was a man incapable of doing anything that would be useful to a terrorist organization—he couldn’t build a bomb, hijack a plane, or carry out an assassination. Yet he was the unquestioned leader of the terror cell. Was this because there was more to his interpretation of Islamic doctrine than our government was conceding?

The enemy, we are told again and again, is not Islam but ‘radical Islam’. There is comfort in that appellation, certainly, but unless and until the West acknowledge that violence is enshrined in the Koran, the soft pillow of such delusions will smother us

lamb shadow smallZuhdi Jasser is a self-proclaimed devout Muslim and, I believe, an all round good guy. He is a medical doctor and a former lieutenant commander in the US Navy. He founded and heads the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. He rejects what he calls political Islam. He is a regular media commentator. After the attack in Brussels he correctly pointed out that the problem lies within Islam, as he always does. And again, par for the course, he argued that Islam needs a reformation. At the same time, he expressed “love” for his religion.

I will guess (without too much risk of being wrong): the religion Dr Jasser loves is about moderation, peace and tolerance, and exists separately from the state. But what is his religion? That to me is the mystery. Religions need a scriptural base. Islam has the Koran (the very words of God) and the Sunna and canonical Hadiths (the instructions, doings and reported sayings of Muhammad). I imagine Dr Jasser’s scriptural base is a subset of this Islamic scripture from which all of the nasty bits have been excised. For example, this nasty anti-Semitic bit from the Bukhari Hadith 52:177:

The Hour will not be established until you fight with Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”

Dr Jasser and others of like mind do not express themselves on this point. On this point we hear only platitudes.

What do radical Israeli groups have in common with their European funders?

Last Thursday, Channel 2 broadcast candid camera footage of Breaking the Silence members gathering classified information on IDF operations. The footage was taken by Ad Kan activists.

Breaking the Silence claims to be an organization dedicated to collecting testimonies from IDF soldiers documenting ill-treatment of Palestinians. Posing as soldiers with information to share, Ad Kan activists were interrogated by Breaking the Silence investigators.

Yet rather than question them about how their units treated Palestinians, Breaking the Silence members asked them about troop movements, weapons platforms, IDF cooperation with foreign militaries. The investigators asked what sort of guns an unmanned combat vehicle carried, who controlled the vehicle and whether it was in operational use.

They wanted to know how the IDF discovers Hamas tunnels. They wanted to know when tanks were used in battles and how.Breaking the Silence’s intelligence operations didn’t stop with post-operational debriefs.

A Breaking the Silence employee named Frima Bobis is filmed telling Ad Kan activists how when she was still in high school, a Breaking the Silence worker advised her where to serve during her military service.

With no hope of winning an argument on the facts, demagogues resort to the argument ad hominem. Too often, it works. And in the modern “progressive” West, no demagogic tactic works better than branding one’s political adversaries as racists. That is why the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Islamic-supremacist organization, dreamed up the term “Islamophobia.” It is why Western progressives, stalwart allies of the Brotherhood, have lustily embraced the Islamophobia smear tactic — even sought to engrave it in our law, in brazen violation of the First Amendment.

It beats trying to refute the irrefutable nexus between Islamic scripture, sharia supremacism, and jihadist terror. It beats trying to rationalize the sheer idiocy of a policy, their policy, that idealizes Islam as the irenic monolith they would like it to be, rather than the complex of competing and contradictory convictions it is. Of the latter, the most dynamic is the conviction that Islam is an alternative civilization determined to conquer the West by force, by political pressure, by cultural aggression, and by exploiting Western civil liberties (liberties that are forbidden in the sharia societies Islamists would impose).

While the anti-Israel activists are busy protesting against Israel on Western campuses, Palestinian students and professors are persecuted by their own Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas governments.

Let us redefine “pro-Palestinian.” Instead of bashing Israel, real pro-Palestinians will demand democracy for those they champion, and scream for public freedoms for Palestinians under the PA and Hamas regimes, which have always smashed dissent with an iron fist.

PA security forces systematically target students and academics under various pretexts. Hundreds of students have been rounded up. Many remain in detention without the possibility of seeing a lawyer or a family member.

Palestinians on campuses in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have once again been reminded that they remain as far as ever from achieving a state that would look any different from the other Arab dictatorships in the region. The campus incidents, which have hardly caught the attention of the international media and anti-Israel activists in the West, also expose the media double standard about human rights violations.

In the first case of its kind under the PA, Kadoori University in Tulkarem suspended a student who hugged his fiancé in public.

These are the days when everything is backwards. The “pro-Palestinian” activists on university campuses throughout the Western world have gotten into the spirit: Palestinian students and academics in the West Bank and Gaza Strip endure daily harassment by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas, because all that gets the activists going are “Israeli abuses.”

Apparently, today, to be “pro-Palestinian” one has to be “anti-Israel.”

For the self-appointed advocates of the Palestinians at Western university campuses, the Palestinian issue is nothing but a vehicle for spewing hatred toward Israel. In good, backwards form, Israel is castigated, and the PA and Hamas are free to abuse their own people.

It came as no surprise this week when New York’s Senate backed Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposal to cut state funding to the City University of New York.

Few in Albany were prepared, however, when the Senate, in its own budget proposal, criticized CUNY’s handling of alleged anti-Semitism.

In light of the issue, the Senate said it is denying funding until it is satisfied with the school’s response “and this difficult and atrocious situation is adequately addressed.”

That budget proposal, issued Monday from the Senate’s Republican majority, has seemed to draw every imaginable reaction: an anxious response from CUNY, outrage from Democrats, praise from a Zionist group, concern from First Amendment attorneys and even dissent from within the GOP’s ranks.

“It was breathtakingly shocking to me,” said Sen. Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat opposed to the cuts. “This was one giant ‘what the heck?’ moment.”

The anti-Semitism allegations surfaced in a letter from the Zionist Organization of America, an Israeli advocacy group, sent in February to CUNY Chancellor James Milliken.

It alleges numerous anti-Semitic incidents at CUNY over the past three years, from cries of “Zionists go home!” to a swastika found on one of the school’s campuses. The letter blames a university group, Students for Justice in Palestine, for many of the alleged incidents, and urges CUNY to condemn it. CONTINUE AT SITE

On February 18, Adam Falk, president of Williams College, sent an email to the Williams community announcing “the extraordinary step” he was taking by “cancelling a speech by John Derbyshire.” The email was sent on a Thursday, cancelling an event that had been scheduled for the following Monday. I have corresponded with President Falk about his decision, and with his permission, I will present his full, unedited answer.
You can skip to that below, but I hope you will stay with me as I review the broader situation.

A DISINVITED DECADE
The Derbyshire disinvitation was, of course, only one more in a growing list of disinvitations on college campuses, as well as other snubs, actions prompting invited speakers to cancel their own appearances, and speakers showing up only to be drowned out by protesters. In 2014, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) published a “List of Campus Disinvitation Attempts, 2000-2014,” which captured nearly 200 cases. That was before George Will was disinvited by Scripps College in October 2014, and before Suzanne Venker was disinvited from Williams College in October 2015. Venker is the author of several anti-feminist books and a frequent guest on Fox News programs.
As it happens, Venker wasn’t disinvited by President Falk. Her red card came from the students who originally invited her. They disinvited her after they came under intense pressure from fellow students. President Falk at the time defended Venker’s right to speak. In a column (“How to Disagree”) in the student newspaper he wrote, “Whatever our own views may be, we should be active in bringing to campus speakers whose opinions are different from our own.”

The campus disinvitation phenomenon has been widely discussed—and deplored. It represents a failure on the part of colleges and universities to uphold the cardinal principles of intellectual freedom and freedom of expression. Cry-bully students and Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists primed to take “offense” at anything that troubles them; faculty members frantically eager to engage in virtue signaling; and college presidents determined to stay ahead of the wave of political correctness have contributed to this odd form of censorship.
The beginnings of campus protest are often traced to Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964-1965. As though the protesters had set out to prove Hegel right, the movement gave birth to its own antithesis fifty years later: a movement that flat out rejects the ideals of free expression in favor of “safe spaces.” The distance between FSM and BLM turns out to be much smaller than anyone could have dreamed.

CHANGING SCRIPPS
Among the members of the National Association of Scholars are many who view the disinvitations as a singularly bad development. I share some of that outrage, but the task of NAS is to seek to repair American higher education, and merely declaring that a college here or a university there has behaved in an egregious way does limited good. In the case of the decision by Lori Bettison-Varga, president of Scripps College, disinviting George Will, I wrote her a letter urging her to reconsider. I wrote separately to the Scripps board of trustees and yet again to the editors of the student newspaper. Rather disconcertingly, President Bettison-Varga did not reply, nor did any trustee, any representative of the trustees, or any student editor.

The decisions by all involved to ignore my letters is, I believe, part of the larger phenomenon. Not answering a letter is another way of closing the door on the exchange of ideas. It is a less visible form of silencing but important in its own way. In 1987, when I went to work in the John Silber administration at Boston University, one of my first tasks was to answer the letters of complaint that were part of an organized campaign. The hundreds of letters stemmed from the non-reappointment of a faculty member who had a base of support outside the university. Answering them was not a matter of sending the same canned response to everyone. My instructions were to take each letter on its merits and explain as fully as needed the university’s position.

Adam Mission is the pseudonym of someone who works in the admissions office of a well-known public research university.

“As you might expect, her father and I are concerned with the financials,” she said, “We’ve been diligent about saving through a 529 plan. Despite this, our shortfall would still be in the $70,000 range.”
The applicant’s parents sat across from my desk in the admission department. They seemed sheepish that they didn’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting in their account. I could tell from the moment they walked into my office that this was their first child going to college.
“Frankly, we’re old school,” the mother continued, “Besides our mortgage, we’ve never had any debt, lived within our means and saved for the future. We hope for our child to graduate with as little debt as possible.”
She paused, and finally straightened as if to brace for what she was going to say next.
“We’re both from humble, hardworking Midwest households and we’ve earned every penny we have. We’re even prepared to move here if it means getting our daughter in-state tuition.”
Her story wasn’t unusual. In fact, the high cost of college tuition is one of the most common things I deal with as an admissions counselor for a well-known public research university. College tuition is outrageously high; and it’s only getting higher every year. When my father went to college, tuition at my current institution was around $300 a year. Even accounting for inflation, the average American family a generation ago could afford going to college without breaking the bank. Now tuition at my university is 30 times as expensive. Students and their families pay for college by taking on second mortgages, working four jobs, or moving to another state. Most often they take on crippling debt that will haunt them the rest of their life.
There are a lot of theories about why the cost of tuition is so high and just as many about how to get those costs under control. Politicians, unsurprisingly, promise increased federal funding to make it “free.” Academics criticize the increased expenditure on massive collegiate athletic programs. All sorts of people disapprove of uncontrolled spending on expansive building projects and the all-inclusive resort amenities that students now seem to expect at college. What really costs money, though, is salaries. As with most businesses, the highest expenditure of a university is payroll—and that cost has been skyrocketing. The reason is the growth in administrative jobs. In the past 25 years, the number of non-academic administrative employees has doubled nationwide, growing at more than double the rate of increase in the number of students.