Terror Training Grounds
Caroline B. Glick
Caroline B. Glick
The Jewish Press Posted Jul 29 2009
www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/40254
For ten years Bernardine Dohrn was a terrorist fugitive on the FBI's Ten
Most Wanted List. Now she's a law professor at Northwestern University Law
School where she teaches a course on law and the Palestinian conflict with
Israel.
During her time as co-commander of the Weather Underground terrorist
organization with her husband, education professor William Ayres, the group
committed some sixteen bombings. Among its targets were the State
Department, the New York Queens Courthouse, military recruiting offices in
Brooklyn and the home of New York Supreme Court Justice John Murtagh while
Murtagh was asleep at home with his wife and children.
Dohrn, her husband and their colleagues emerged from hiding in 1980 when
terror charges against them were dropped due to a technicality. None of them
ever served hard time for their crimes. Neither Dohrn - whom FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover once referred to as "the most dangerous woman in America" - nor
Ayres ever expressed the slightest remorse for their actions.
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Indeed, in a 1998 interview with ABC News, Dohrn said that looking back
on her career as a terrorist, her only regret was that she hadn't committed
more attacks. As she put it, "We'd do it again. I wish we had done more. I
wish we had been more militant."
But then, those who cannot do teach. And now Dohrn is passing on her
knowledge of terrorism to a new generation of students through her seminar
on Palestinian terrorists.
Dohrn is no newcomer to the subject. In 1974, together with her fellow
Weather Underground terrorist colleagues, she published a book called
Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. As the David
Horowitz Freedom Center's Discoverthenetworks.org website makes clear,
Prairie Fire was the Weather Underground's declaration of war against the
United States. Among other things, it asserts, "Our intention is to disrupt
the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it
hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to
join the world struggle, to attack from the inside."
Dohrn and her co-authors dedicated their book to the Who's Who of the
terrorist murderers club. Among their honorees was Sirhan Sirhan, the
Palestinian terrorist who murdered Robert F. Kennedy. No doubt, for Dohrn,
the unapologetic terrorist, teaching a course on the Palestinian terror war
against Israel is like closing a circle.
Dohrn's class is notable because it is likely the only current instance
in a U.S. university where a formerly active terrorist is teaching a class
about terrorists. But by paying a someone like Dohrn to teach a course on
terrorists, Northwestern is not pushing the envelope very far along. In
universities - both major and minor - throughout the U.S., supporters of
Palestinian terrorists are teaching American students the history,
sociology, politics, law and culture of the Arab and Islamic world's war
against Israel. The fact that the narrative they teach has little to no
connection to historic truth or to objective, measurable reality is of no
interest to anyone.
Well, actually that is not true. In many cases, the professors who stir
up the most controversy for their incendiary support for terrorists and
condemnation of Israel and its supporters are of great interest to
university administrators. Indeed, they arguably owe their careers to their
hostile stance toward Israel.
Case in point is newly tenured Columbia professor Joseph Massad, a
little-accomplished professor of Middle East studies whose resume includes
no scholarly achievements. He rose to prominence with the David Project's
2005 release of its documentary "Columbia Unbecoming" in which Jewish
students at Columbia related the intellectual intimidation they suffered in
the classroom at the hands of Massad and his colleagues. A university panel
formed to investigate the students' allegations found that Massad exceeded
"commonly accepted bounds" of behavior in his treatment of one of his
students.
As Jacob Gershman reported last month in the New York Post, Columbia
quietly granted Massad tenure earlier this year in a secret procedure that
likely was unprecedented in its lack of transparency or justification.
Massad's "academic" achievements to date consist of diatribes against
Israel, Jews, gays and feminists. Jews and Israel are guilty of stealing
Palestinian land and murdering Palestinians and of being Jewish "Nazis" to
the Palestinian "Jews." Homosexuals - whom Massad refers to as "Gay
International" - are involved in a nefarious plot to force otherwise happy
gays in the Arab world out the closet. And "Imperialist Feminists" are
involved in a conspiracy to destroy the Arab way of life by objecting to
so-called "honor-killings," which in Massad's view are nothing more than
"crimes of passion."
As Gershman reported, Massad was granted tenure this year despite the
fact that a tenure panel convened two years ago rejected his tenure
application. Apparently, the 2007 tenure committee was unconvinced that
Massad's work excusing Arab males for murdering their womenfolk for the
"crime" of "dishonoring" them was up to Columbia's traditional academic
standards.
The first tenure committee's loyalty to traditional academic standards
apparently didn't sit well with Columbia President Lee Bollinger and Provost
Alan Brinkley. The two men must have felt that in light of the celebrity
Massad brings to the school, Columbia stood to benefit from granting him a
lifelong appointment. And so Massad was given an unheard-of second hearing
before a different committee this past year.
All of this naturally raises the question of why American universities
embrace men and women like Dohrn and Massad. Why do America's greatest
institutions of higher learning bend over backward to make terrorists and
crackpots, bigots and intellectual pygmies feel welcome to spew their bile
in the classroom in front of students whose families pay upwards of $50,000
per year to enroll in their sub-level courses?
The answer, unfortunately, is that in the long history of academia bad
scholarship and bad ideas flourish until two conditions are met. First, bad
ideas must be so widely discredited that professors become too humiliated to
espouse them openly or associate with colleagues who do. Second, funding
must dry up for work in the discredited field for professors to stop
engaging in it. The occasions on which both conditions are met are so rare
that only one example from the last century comes to mind: eugenics.
Eugenics, the pseudo-science of racial pecking orders, was so much the
rage in academic circles from the late 19th century through the 1930s that
even a towering liberal figure like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes believed in it. In 1927 Holmes upheld a Virginia law imposing
forcible sterilization of the mentally disabled, arguing that "Three
generations of imbeciles is enough."
It took the Holocaust to force American academics to desert their support
for eugenics and American financiers to stop endowing professorships and
underwriting conferences in the "scientific" quackery they propounded.
We cannot know what it will take for the current fashion of Israel
bashing in campus classrooms to be discredited. But we can safely assume
that whenever it is finally abandoned, it will be replaced by something
equally reprehensible and intellectually dishonest.
===========
Caroline Glick is senior contributing editor at The Jerusalem Post. Her
Jewish Press-exclusive column appears the last week of each month. Her book "The Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad," is available at
Amazon.com.
caroline@carolineglick.com
www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/40254
For ten years Bernardine Dohrn was a terrorist fugitive on the FBI's Ten
Most Wanted List. Now she's a law professor at Northwestern University Law
School where she teaches a course on law and the Palestinian conflict with
Israel.
During her time as co-commander of the Weather Underground terrorist
organization with her husband, education professor William Ayres, the group
committed some sixteen bombings. Among its targets were the State
Department, the New York Queens Courthouse, military recruiting offices in
Brooklyn and the home of New York Supreme Court Justice John Murtagh while
Murtagh was asleep at home with his wife and children.
Dohrn, her husband and their colleagues emerged from hiding in 1980 when
terror charges against them were dropped due to a technicality. None of them
ever served hard time for their crimes. Neither Dohrn - whom FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover once referred to as "the most dangerous woman in America" - nor
Ayres ever expressed the slightest remorse for their actions.
Advertisement
Indeed, in a 1998 interview with ABC News, Dohrn said that looking back
on her career as a terrorist, her only regret was that she hadn't committed
more attacks. As she put it, "We'd do it again. I wish we had done more. I
wish we had been more militant."
But then, those who cannot do teach. And now Dohrn is passing on her
knowledge of terrorism to a new generation of students through her seminar
on Palestinian terrorists.
Dohrn is no newcomer to the subject. In 1974, together with her fellow
Weather Underground terrorist colleagues, she published a book called
Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. As the David
Horowitz Freedom Center's Discoverthenetworks.org website makes clear,
Prairie Fire was the Weather Underground's declaration of war against the
United States. Among other things, it asserts, "Our intention is to disrupt
the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it
hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to
join the world struggle, to attack from the inside."
Dohrn and her co-authors dedicated their book to the Who's Who of the
terrorist murderers club. Among their honorees was Sirhan Sirhan, the
Palestinian terrorist who murdered Robert F. Kennedy. No doubt, for Dohrn,
the unapologetic terrorist, teaching a course on the Palestinian terror war
against Israel is like closing a circle.
Dohrn's class is notable because it is likely the only current instance
in a U.S. university where a formerly active terrorist is teaching a class
about terrorists. But by paying a someone like Dohrn to teach a course on
terrorists, Northwestern is not pushing the envelope very far along. In
universities - both major and minor - throughout the U.S., supporters of
Palestinian terrorists are teaching American students the history,
sociology, politics, law and culture of the Arab and Islamic world's war
against Israel. The fact that the narrative they teach has little to no
connection to historic truth or to objective, measurable reality is of no
interest to anyone.
Well, actually that is not true. In many cases, the professors who stir
up the most controversy for their incendiary support for terrorists and
condemnation of Israel and its supporters are of great interest to
university administrators. Indeed, they arguably owe their careers to their
hostile stance toward Israel.
Case in point is newly tenured Columbia professor Joseph Massad, a
little-accomplished professor of Middle East studies whose resume includes
no scholarly achievements. He rose to prominence with the David Project's
2005 release of its documentary "Columbia Unbecoming" in which Jewish
students at Columbia related the intellectual intimidation they suffered in
the classroom at the hands of Massad and his colleagues. A university panel
formed to investigate the students' allegations found that Massad exceeded
"commonly accepted bounds" of behavior in his treatment of one of his
students.
As Jacob Gershman reported last month in the New York Post, Columbia
quietly granted Massad tenure earlier this year in a secret procedure that
likely was unprecedented in its lack of transparency or justification.
Massad's "academic" achievements to date consist of diatribes against
Israel, Jews, gays and feminists. Jews and Israel are guilty of stealing
Palestinian land and murdering Palestinians and of being Jewish "Nazis" to
the Palestinian "Jews." Homosexuals - whom Massad refers to as "Gay
International" - are involved in a nefarious plot to force otherwise happy
gays in the Arab world out the closet. And "Imperialist Feminists" are
involved in a conspiracy to destroy the Arab way of life by objecting to
so-called "honor-killings," which in Massad's view are nothing more than
"crimes of passion."
As Gershman reported, Massad was granted tenure this year despite the
fact that a tenure panel convened two years ago rejected his tenure
application. Apparently, the 2007 tenure committee was unconvinced that
Massad's work excusing Arab males for murdering their womenfolk for the
"crime" of "dishonoring" them was up to Columbia's traditional academic
standards.
The first tenure committee's loyalty to traditional academic standards
apparently didn't sit well with Columbia President Lee Bollinger and Provost
Alan Brinkley. The two men must have felt that in light of the celebrity
Massad brings to the school, Columbia stood to benefit from granting him a
lifelong appointment. And so Massad was given an unheard-of second hearing
before a different committee this past year.
All of this naturally raises the question of why American universities
embrace men and women like Dohrn and Massad. Why do America's greatest
institutions of higher learning bend over backward to make terrorists and
crackpots, bigots and intellectual pygmies feel welcome to spew their bile
in the classroom in front of students whose families pay upwards of $50,000
per year to enroll in their sub-level courses?
The answer, unfortunately, is that in the long history of academia bad
scholarship and bad ideas flourish until two conditions are met. First, bad
ideas must be so widely discredited that professors become too humiliated to
espouse them openly or associate with colleagues who do. Second, funding
must dry up for work in the discredited field for professors to stop
engaging in it. The occasions on which both conditions are met are so rare
that only one example from the last century comes to mind: eugenics.
Eugenics, the pseudo-science of racial pecking orders, was so much the
rage in academic circles from the late 19th century through the 1930s that
even a towering liberal figure like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes believed in it. In 1927 Holmes upheld a Virginia law imposing
forcible sterilization of the mentally disabled, arguing that "Three
generations of imbeciles is enough."
It took the Holocaust to force American academics to desert their support
for eugenics and American financiers to stop endowing professorships and
underwriting conferences in the "scientific" quackery they propounded.
We cannot know what it will take for the current fashion of Israel
bashing in campus classrooms to be discredited. But we can safely assume
that whenever it is finally abandoned, it will be replaced by something
equally reprehensible and intellectually dishonest.
===========
Caroline Glick is senior contributing editor at The Jerusalem Post. Her
Jewish Press-exclusive column appears the last week of each month. Her book "The Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad," is available at
Amazon.com.
caroline@carolineglick.com
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