Are we winning the war against terror – or more precisely, against the death-cult ideology of extreme hatred that employs terror as one of its weapons? America, Britain, and Israel have all committed significant sums of money in order to fight jihad militarily. We must, however, simultaneously battle another very hot war, one that will decide if Western civilization lives or dies. This is a war we are not winning; some argue that it is a war we have not yet begun to fight.
I refer to the cultural war that both Islamists and Western intellectuals have launched against America and Israel. We face a situation in which hate speech, Big Lies, and Orwellian propaganda have all triumphed on academic campuses across North America and in Europe. As parents and grandparents, we are sending our beloved heirs to be brainwashed, not educated.
Today, the truth is not holding its own against the base propaganda that has increasingly gained a foothold at our most distinguished universities and in our mainstream media.
The Palestinianization of the Western academy and media began in earnest in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Initially groundbreaking views about gender and racial inequalities became increasingly influenced by Marxist views against capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and organized religion and gradually came to constitute what is now known as the “postcolonial” and postmodern academy. Race replaced both class and gender as a primary concern. By the late 1990’s, Palestinians – not Tibetans, Kurds, Bosnians, or Rwandans – had come to be viewed as the symbolic victims of the world by those academics who considered themselves anti-racist, anti-violence, and anti-misogynist.
In an Orwellian world of doublespeak and groupthink, Palestinians became the new black South Africans and Israel became the new white Afrikaner Apartheid regime. Politically correct Western academics and activists romanticized Palestinians, including terrorists, whose methods they viewed as a justified response to oppression.
Paradoxically, these same Western academics viewed only two nations as dangerous “terrorist” entities: Israel and America. The atrocities committed by China, Soviet Russia, Cuba, Korea, Iran, Sudan, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq never viscerally outraged them in quite the same way.
The fact that jihadists also opposed modernity, democracy, human rights, and women’s rights did not seem to matter to the self-proclaimed arbiters of human rights in the West.
The fact that Islamic culture is far more patriarchal than Judeo-Christian culture did not seem to register in significant ways. In fact, feminist academics tiptoed around it. For a Westerner to accuse a non-white, non-Westerner of barbarism (especially if it were true) was seen as unacceptably “racist.” That such Western academics were willing to sacrifice non-white, non-Western women and men to savage regimes did not strike anyone as either racist or sexist.
Ironically, in the war of civilizations that is upon us, dare to argue for military as well as humanitarian intervention and you will be slandered as a racist – even when you are arguing for the lives and dignity of brown-, black-, and olive-skinned people. Such cultural relativism is perhaps the greatest failing of the Western academic and media establishment.
It is important to note that such views currently exist in every discipline within the humanities and social sciences and are no longer merely confined to Middle Eastern or Jewish Studies departments. And those views did not diminish post-9/11, or post-3/11 (Madrid), or post-7/7 (London). Academics and activists continued to rage against President Bush and American foreign policy, while anti-Israel sentiment – particularly the calls for boycotts and divestment – has only increased in the last five years.
Esteemed citadels of academia – including Duke, Georgetown, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton – have supported academics who, post-9/11, continue to call for boycotts of Israel, challenge the Patriot Act, care more about the civil liberties of Muslim jihadists captured in battle than they do about civilians under jihadic siege. Such academics are the first who charge “racism” when their biased views are challenged.