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Learning to love terrorists
U.S. News ^ | 10/8/01 | John Leo

Posted on 09/29/2001 9:05:06 PM PDT by Jean S

Spend a few hours on a computer search and you get some idea of how the American campus is reacting to the current crisis. It isn't pretty. The first thing you notice is that vigils and rallies tend to focus on feelings. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. We all have to get our bearings. But the concern with emotions and personal dislocation seems over the top, as if we need to look inward for therapy more than outward to come together for the fight ahead. An anthropologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill said she was pleased that her students' "thoughtful, passionate varieties of anger are openings to reflection, learning."

Worse, the words the rest of the nation is using–"attack," "terrorism," "resolve," and "defense"–don't seem to come up much on campus. Umpteen college presidents put out timid statements about coping with "the tragedy," and "the events of September 11" as if we have just suffered an earthquake or some other passing natural disaster.

The American Association of University Professors released a statement that probably would have made Neville Chamberlain throw up. It promised to "continue to fight violence with renewed dedication to the exercise of freedom of thought and the expression of that freedom in our teaching." What does that mean? That the people on campus in 1941 should have responded to Pearl Harbor by giving longer lectures? Bradford Wilson of the National Association of Scholars, a group that has been struggling to restore intellectual integrity to the campus, called the AAUP statement "fatuous nonsense," "Marxist claptrap," and "anti-American in its basic thrust."

Unreal. The campus flight from reality takes many exotic forms. One is the notion that the terrorists' target wasn't really America. "Students in my classes really see this as an assault on international trade, globalization," said the dean of Columbia University's international affairs school. Another is the attempt to adapt the crisis to the campus fixation on bias crimes. The most animated rally at the University of California-Berkeley was a protest against a campus newspaper for an editorial cartoon showing two Muslim suicide bombers in hell. Many students feel that singling out members of any religious or ethnic group as responsible for the attack is a sort of hate crime. The attack "was done by . . . people who hate," said one University of Wisconsin student, "and I don't think hate has a color or ethnicity."

But the dominant campus notions were ones the terrorists themselves would surely endorse: that America had it coming, and fighting back would be vengeful, unworthy, and a risk to the lives of innocents. A speaker at a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill teach-in called for an apology to "the tortured and the impoverished and all the millions of other victims of American imperialism." Georgetown University is holding a debate titled "Resolved: America's Policies and Past Actions Invited the Recent Attacks." At a Yale panel, six hand-wringing professors focused on "underlying causes" of the attack and America's many faults, including our "offensive cultural messages." In response, classics professor Donald Kagan said the panelists seemed intent on "blaming the victim" and asked why Yale couldn't find one panelist somewhere to focus on the enemy and "how to stamp out such evil."

Some students show a glimmer of awareness that the campus is a bubble of unreality. A Columbia student said: "A lot of people here think it would be a travesty to begin killing people. . . . go off campus you hear something else." On other campuses students resist the antiwar tilt in large numbers. At the mostly blue-collar California State University-Fresno, says Victor Hanson, who teaches there, "Maybe 90 percent of the faculty sympathizes with boutique anti-Americanism, and 90 percent of students are firmly behind the goverment, with the strongest support coming from the Mexican-American kids. The students understand what the faculty doesn't–that fostering humanity means stopping people who kill."

America still doesn't understand what has happened to its colleges. A campus culture has arisen around very dangerous ideas. Among them are radical cultural relativism, nonjudgmentalism, and a postmodern conviction that there are no moral norms or truths worth defending–all knowledge and morality are constructions built by the powerful. Add to this the knee-jerk antagonism to the "hegemony" of the West and a reflexive feeling of sympathy for anti-Western resentments, even those expressed in violence. This is a toxic mix, and it is now crucial for those both on and off the campus to start saying so.


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1 posted on 09/29/2001 9:05:06 PM PDT by Jean S
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To: JeanS
America still doesn't understand what has happened to its colleges. A campus culture has arisen around very dangerous ideas. Among them are radical cultural relativism, nonjudgmentalism, and a postmodern conviction that there are no moral norms or truths worth defending–all knowledge and morality are constructions built by the powerful. Add to this the knee-jerk antagonism to the "hegemony" of the West and a reflexive feeling of sympathy for anti-Western resentments, even those expressed in violence. This is a toxic mix, and it is now crucial for those both on and off the campus to start saying so.

Right on the money!

2 posted on 09/29/2001 9:08:52 PM PDT by KayEyeDoubleDee
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To: JeanS
Man kinds greatest sin is the total love and deep concern for SELF.
The Liberals have managed to master it.
3 posted on 09/29/2001 9:10:26 PM PDT by concerned about politics
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To: KayEyeDoubleDee
As we search to find some good that may come out of the attack by Islamist terrorists (not a "tragedy"), one ray of hope is that the kinds of reactions on our campuses Leo outlines here will be publicized widely. Perhaps the rest of America will finally learn how thoroughly these utterly despicable creatures have taken over academia and what vile claptrap the are teaching our children.
4 posted on 09/29/2001 9:15:19 PM PDT by comitatus
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To: JeanS
Bring back the draft. And make college students go first.
5 posted on 09/29/2001 9:18:41 PM PDT by Nogbad
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To: JeanS
Jean, maybe more articles like this will wake up some of the left leaning people here, and, see what their way of thinking has wrought.
6 posted on 09/29/2001 9:21:46 PM PDT by joyce11111
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To: joyce11111
I doubt it Joyce. The sheeple are still asleep, especially on the left coast. Until these attacks start hitting home emotionally, physcially and financially will the entire nation rally against the enemies foreign and domestic in the necessary fashion.
7 posted on 09/29/2001 9:24:55 PM PDT by Nuke'm Glowing
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To: Nogbad
Yes, and start at Berkeley. We don't really even have to seriously draft them, because they all will be living up with you! Oh okay, I'm sorry, but it works for me.
8 posted on 09/29/2001 9:35:47 PM PDT by World'sGoneInsane
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To: comitatus
I have become extremely weary of the words;"tragedy" and "events of Sept. 11" myself. It was an ATTACK, a MASS MURDER, a SLAUGHTER and a thousand other things, and to call it a "tragedy" is to (sorry) piss on 7000 graves.
9 posted on 09/29/2001 9:39:36 PM PDT by Long Cut
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To: JeanS
These are the future leaders of this nation. It is bad enough to have seen the example of the sixties "college grads" we just endured, this will be a continuation of the Clinton's, The Second Generation.
10 posted on 09/29/2001 9:42:32 PM PDT by ladyinred
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To: JeanS
At the mostly blue-collar California State University-Fresno, says Victor Hanson, who teaches there, "Maybe 90 percent of the faculty sympathizes with boutique anti-Americanism, and 90 percent of students are firmly behind the goverment, with the strongest support coming from the Mexican-American kids. The students understand what the faculty doesn't–that fostering humanity means stopping people who kill."
I'm proud of these Mexican-American kids. Maybe it's time to rethink the argument about affirmitive action?
11 posted on 09/29/2001 9:52:50 PM PDT by TerryInRiverside
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To: JeanS
Where are the hard-hats?
12 posted on 09/29/2001 9:54:16 PM PDT by eniapmot
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To: JeanS
Among them are radical cultural relativism, nonjudgmentalism, and a postmodern conviction that there are no moral norms or truths worth defending–all knowledge and morality are constructions built by the powerful.

Oh...now the mainstream presses feels it can mention this?

13 posted on 09/29/2001 9:55:59 PM PDT by eniapmot
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To: Nogbad
Good idea. Those 'kids' will learn as they grow older...problem is, they have a LONGER way to go than I did. We need more US revolutionary history in our schools to instill that pride in our kids.

madison46
ex-DLC member(I learned)

14 posted on 09/29/2001 9:56:21 PM PDT by madison46
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To: JeanS
I am sickened by the calls for healing as if we had some disease. The need for dialogue as if terrorists wish to meet you for tea and scones. I really think that many naive folks believe that the worst is over.
15 posted on 09/29/2001 9:59:35 PM PDT by rebdov
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To: maica,jmurphy4413
bttt
16 posted on 09/29/2001 10:00:25 PM PDT by Travis McGee
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Comment #17 Removed by Moderator

To: rebdov
I believe these jerks, when they saw the events of the last two weeks unfold, saw it as their long-awaited opportunity to get in on the free-love hippiedom of the 60's, that but for the poor timing of their births, were brutally denied the experience of wallowing in. Lets just hope this will be more like the protests of the 80's vs the Contras as opposed to the Vietnam protests, and noone will listen to them except to laugh.
18 posted on 09/29/2001 10:11:48 PM PDT by L`enn
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To: Travis McGee
I sure wish Liver Eating Johnson was still around .....I bet he'd love "terrorist's" . Albeit with a side of onions.

Stay Safe.

19 posted on 09/29/2001 10:15:22 PM PDT by Squantos
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To: JeanS
The "college experience," at least since the mid-sixties, has been one of total leftist, pacifist indoctrination by faculty. My perfectly "normal" group of high school graduating seniors in 1967 was distinguished a few years later by whether or not they attended college, and where they went if they did so. Berkeley and UCLA alumni -- total lefties, every one. Community college grads, not so bad. Of those who did NOT attend college, many males supported the government and Vietnam conflict and a great number of them served there. Females, like me, went to work and became part of the feared and hated "establishment." I'd like to think that HAD I attended college with my peers, I would've been STRONG enough to disregard the gross blatherings of those disgusting "professors."
20 posted on 09/29/2001 10:16:09 PM PDT by Califreeper
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