Intellectual Assault presents parents, students, and academics themselves, with a vivid snapshot of the intellectual climate of America's university faculties and its academic administration. Based upon exhaustive research culling information from every single college and university in the United States, this book uses statements that academics made about the 9/11 terrorist attacks to reveal what they think about America. Unfortunately, the results are not pretty. For example, many academics believe the United States got its just deserts on 9/11 and even reveled in the atrocity. Moreover, many of them inflicted those views upon students in the classroom. Intellectual Assault, owing to its extensive documentation and by virtue of the evidence it adduces, lays waste to arguments that anti-Americanism is a fringe phenomenon in academia. It notes the revolting remarks of celebrated academic anti-Americanists such as Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill and Nicholas de Genova, but more important, demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that the attitudes which animate that trio also pervade academia in general. For every Churchill and de Genova, there are literally thousands more like them holding forth in classrooms and holding sway over the academic power structure. In addition to exposing academia's contempt for America, Intellectual Assault provides concerned citizens with a blueprint for reforming the colleges and universities they are funding with their tax dollars.

Intellectual Assault

Academic Anti-Americanism and the Distortion of 9-IIBy Joseph A. Yeager

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2010 Joseph A. Yeager
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4490-8322-9

Chapter One

Blaming The Victim

"Why, why, why? Don't tell me there is no justification for such an act."-Michael Sells, Haverford

In the aftermath of 9/11, academics and mainstream Americans were alike in one respect: we were all asking the same question-Why did they do it? But in answering this question, the two groups parted company as starkly as possible.

For the vast majority of Americans, certain things were very clear. First, the people who hijacked the fuel-laden jumbo jets and piloted them into office buildings filled with civilians were evil. America is, in essence, a religious nation, and most Americans believe in the existence of good and evil, which are defined by divine law and judged according to its tenets. These citizens might disagree on what, specifically, constitutes evil, but there was no hesitation in labeling the calculated mass-slaughter of 3,000 innocent people, evil. If such an act is not evil, nothing is. Given the choice then between non-judgmental "understanding" of the terrorists and their putative grievances, and naming the killers evil, Americans, en masse, chose the latter. But as we will see in this chapter and in others, the existence of evil was demonstrably not a part of academia's calculus when it came to explaining 9/11.

One of the scant few exceptions to this rule was MIT's Harvey M. Sapolsky, who, in his comments about 9/11, characterized America's foreign policy as "arrogant, dangerous, foolish and even a bit evil...." But this rhetoric of evil, in the rare instances it was advanced, was never directed at Osama bin Laden and his minions. Rather, the target of choice was the United States.

The second point of departure between mainstream Americans and their educators was to be seen in the identification of the immediate factors which compelled the murderers to commit their acts of terrorism. In addition to the innate evil noted above, most Americans saw and continue to see 9/11 as a flashpoint in the collision between two expansionary and mutually incompatible civilizations, the Islamic and the Western. Moreover, and although they are chary of voicing these beliefs in polite company for fear of causing offense, the majority of Americans view the Islamic world as intolerant of different social systems and beliefs, and as hostile toward the West. As they see it, this culture of intolerance and belligerence combined with messianic, religiously-sanctioned aggression in the form of jihad, inevitably gives rise to fanatics who are willing to kill themselves in an attempt to annihilate a society they view as standing athwart Islam's ultimate triumph on earth. This, in short, is a rough approximation of how typical Americans, without Ph.Ds or eyes on the provost post, viewed and continue to view 9/11. Note that this explanation places blame squarely on the shoulders of the murderers and the society that all too often fetes them.

Academics, on the other hand, all too frequently lionized the Islamic world in 9/11's aftermath, and shockingly, charged the United States with a vast constellation of crimes that allegedly catalyzed the 9/11 killers. And these "crimes," to a large degree, also excused the 9/11 atrocities.

In short, academia asserted almost univocally that America's democratically elected leaders had long been guilty of acts equally vicious as 9/11 (but without mitigating predicates), and that 9/11 itself was the bitter fruit of their sins. Lisa Sideris, a professor in Indiana University, provides us with a statement that pithily encapsulates the academic view that the United States is responsible when others slaughter Americans, "The terrorists are like capricious, angry gods and we are left to ponder what we have done to incur such wrath."

The University of Pennsylvania's retired professor Edward S. Herman does not state specifically what America did to provoke the terrorists, but he does make clear that it was incalculably bad, "One of the most durable features of the U.S. culture is the inability or refusal to recognize U.S. crimes. The media have long been calling for the Japanese and Germans to admit guilt, apologize, and pay reparations. But the idea that this country has committed huge crimes, and that current events such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks may be rooted in responses to those crimes, is close to inadmissible."

Note that Herman implicitly compares American society to Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, two of the most malevolent in modern history, and America's "huge crimes" to those of the principal Axis powers. Now the Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking surely trump 9/11 in any reasonable assessment of comparative evil, and it is to those sorts of monstrosities that Herman yokes American actions. According to Herman, therefire, the 9/11 attacks were a relative pittance in the returned coinage of U.S-authored geopolitical misery.

Another Ivy League professor, Princeton's Richard Falk, echoes much of what Herman states, and also praises academia for its willingness to indict the United States for its allegedly wretched behavior, "I agree that the US's foreign policy is one of the motives behind such atrocities, however it is necessary to understand that this view is completely missing from the American response-by the political leadership, Congress, the media and by the general public. There is no willingness to question why the attacks occurred except on a local level, such as at universities. At the national level there has been war rhetoric successfully orchestrated by the political leadership and by the media and there is not that kind of critical questioning about our own responsibility for generations of hostility and hatred."

In other words, only those who blamed America for the savagery enacted against it bothered to question why 9/11 occurred. And if the American people and their leaders had deigned to engage in the "critical questioning" so typical of academia, we would not have bombed the apparently blameless Taliban into oblivion. Falk's conceit that introspection and intellection occur only in academia is, alas, a common one.

A pair of political scientists, Roger Paget of Lewis and Clark College, and Stephen Smith of Winthrop University, are two more professors who castigate the American people for their refusal to blame themselves in a manner befitting the good academic. Says Paget, "Our enemy, if our government's public assessments are correct, has cells in 50 or 60 countries dispersed among all the populated continents; is simultaneously highly organized and remarkably decentralized; enjoys high intelligence, extraordinary patience, and professional practicality; knows us intimately; and is fanatically focused on our demoralization and destruction. This inventory of capabilities should, at the very least, cause us seriously to examine our own record, on the possibility that allegations of our turpitude have a basis in reality." Presumably then, Paget would contend that the Jews and kulaks should also have flagellated themselves based upon the efficiency of their Nazi and Bolshevik murderers.

Smith likewise urges a salubrious dose of deep introspection upon American citizens, "... it is many times easier to jump on the bandwagon denouncing the crimes of others than to learn and think critically about the policies, actions, and, yes, crimes, of your own government." And it is doubtless just this sort of "critical thinking" with which Smith graces students who are nave enough to believe in the essential goodness of the United States and the inexcusable barbarism of those who attacked it.

Were the United States as pernicious as its academic detractors contend, it would be logical to inquire why the American people do not bring their government to book for its atrocities. J. Dudley Woodberry of Fuller Theological Seminary makes an effort, although a feeble one, to explain this very curiosity, "Because Westerners are individuals, we do not feel responsible for things our government does or that our predecessors have done. To communal cultures like those in the Middle East, this does not make sense."

It would doubtless come as a shock to Middle Easterners that they are not individuals, but let us set that absurdity aside. More astonishingly, Woodberry appears not realize that America, unlike the "communal" nations of the Middle East, is a democracy, and, perforce, that its citizenry actually chooses its leaders. This fact, in turn, makes U.S. citizens almost directly responsible for the actions of their government, and that is precisely why many of them bridle at accusations that their government is a latter-day incarnation of the Nazi Party. It also makes it difficult for the professors to sustain the argument that the American public is decent while its government is unholy. In point of fact, the professors have little use for either.

Whereas Woodberry and Smith indict the U.S. government for its "crimes," and Falk spreads the guilt for 9/11 across the entirety of U.S. society, Emory's Abdullahi An-Na'im centers his attack squarely on the people of the United States, "I hold the American public responsible for the failure in foreign policy. Americans need to treat foreign policy the way they do domestic policy. We need to be more informed and find out what is happening."

The fact that An-Na'im, a Muslim, felt comfortable chastising the American people for this "failure" after his co-religionists had recently murdered some 3,000 U.S. citizens is an incredibly telling commentary on academic culture in America. Temerity such as this from an individual who, by all rights, should have been condemning the terrorists and apologizing on behalf of his faith is the direct result of an environment in which America is seen as doing no good, and preferred groups such as Muslims are automatically canonized and a priori absolved of any possible blame.

In another statement, Professor An-Na'im continues his assault on the nation that makes his life of comfort and prestige possible, "It is amazing that the USA, renowned for perfecting a system for even the most trivial things people do, and for its ruthless economic efficiency, keeps reinventing the wheel in its foreign policy. It ends up paying such an inflated last-minute price for what it can't buy anyway, which is genuine good will and respect. The Bible says, 'if you want peace, do justice.' It doesn't say, pay for peace by bribing others or hiring thugs to do your dirty work for you."

An-Na'im's anti-American contempt is utterly manifest here. He mocks the U.S. for wasting time on "trivial things," cites its "ruthlessness" in economic matters, avers that America enjoys no good will or even respect, and then summarizes U.S. foreign policy as consisting of nothing more than bribery and the enlistment of scoundrels to perform acts for which it does not have the stomach. And again, we see the trope of America being to blame for 9/11. Presumably, the 3,000 dead Americans are the "inflated price" to which An-Na'im refers. The murderers themselves and the society that produced them are simply not part of the equation. Rather, they are hapless agents of destruction inexorably thrust into American buildings by the vile impositions of the United States itself.

This notion that the United States is the prime motive force for everything awful that occurs in the world is, of course, predicated upon the laughable twin beliefs in American omnipotence and the utter fecklessness of other nations and peoples. As Yale's Immanuel Wallerstein demonstrates, it is almost as if other peoples simply do not exist. Rather, the United States magically summons golems from the soil of other lands and puts them to its own nefarious uses, "The United States ... was able to enforce its will in the rest of the world, and did so without compunction. Think of Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Lebanon in 1956, the Dominican Republic in 1965, and Chile in 1973. The coup in Chile by Gen. Pinochet against the freely-elected government of Salvador Allende, with the active support of the U.S. government occurred on Sept. 11."

Wallerstein's litany of "offenses" refers to Cold War actions, carried out almost entirely by indigenous people against Marxist radicals attempting to gain control of those nations, occasionally democratically, but usually otherwise. And lest one think that democracy such as the Chilean variant that produced Allende's rule is the acme of goodness, one only need note that Adolf Hitler came to power through democratic processes. Wallerstein and his kind, however, never mention these sorts of contextual and historical details because they are interested solely in propaganda attacks on America, not historical truth.

In the very same lecture, which Wallenstein delivered in Brooklyn College less than three months after 9/11, he reasserts that America used its power overwhelmingly for the worse, and that it is almighty. Indeed, he vests the United States with the ability to actually create worlds, "Can we maintain our moral bearing amidst the uncertainty that the world we have made heretofore is only one of thousands of alternative worlds we might have created, and the world that we shall be making in the 30-50 years to come may or may not be better, may or may not reduce the contradiction between our ideals and our privileges? In-sha 'a-llah."

Nikos Salingaros, a mathematician in the University of Texas-San Antonio, unlike Wallerstein, does not credit the U.S. with the power to create worlds, but merely to impose them upon others, "And so we are left with a world after the modern towers, and after modernism. We will surely destroy al Qaeda and the Taliban. But even more important, we need to destroy the festering conditions in which men like these are made. To do that, we will have to reexamine the kind of modern world we have imposed upon the planet-economic, technological, artistic. We will have to reexamine, and rebuild, the decaying foundations of our own modern culture."

The world that the U.S. has "created" or "imposed" (actually, America worked with scores of other nations during the crucial Cold War era) is, of course, that of broadened democracy, free markets, and increased human rights. And it is this world, apparently, that is in some sense responsible for triggering the madness of 9/11. Interestingly enough, however, the homicidal forces that wrought 9/11 originated precisely from those areas outside of America's "world," where democracy, free markets, and human rights are conspicuously absent. The professors, alas, have sided overwhelmingly with those forces of reaction rather than with the United States and its allies.

MIT's Noam Chomsky, whom conservative activist David Horowitz has rightly dubbed the ayatollah of anti-Americanism because of both the murderousness of his rhetoric and the vastness of his influence, here provides a laundry list of supposed American actions that made 9/11 inevitable: "They [Muslims] are very angry at the United States because of its support of authoritarian and brutal regimes; its intervention to block any move towards democracy; its intervention to stop economic development; its policies of devastating the civilian societies of Iraq while strengthening Saddam Hussein; and they remember, even if we prefer not to, that the United States and Britain supported Saddam Hussein right through his worst atrocities, including the gassing of Kurds, bin Laden brings that up constantly, and they know it even if we don't want to."

In point of fact, the United States has done practically the opposite of what Chomsky claims. Hence, the U.S. and its reliance upon Middle Eastern oil scarcely retard Middle Eastern "economic development," but are the very engines for that development; when the U.S. supported "brutal regimes," it did so because there was no better alternative; America has supported democratic movements when possible (in Turkey, for example), but such movements have been historically scarce in the Islamo-Arab world, and to the extent that the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein, it was in opposition to an even more monstrous Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. Unlike any entity in the Islamo-Arab world, moreover, the United States has actually moved against Saddam Hussein, and decisively at that. Thus, not only is Chomsky more than willing to assault the United States, he readily lies in doing so.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Intellectual Assaultby Joseph A. Yeager Copyright © 2010 by Joseph A. Yeager. Excerpted by permission.
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