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PARTISAN REVIEW
could suffer. They marched against wars in far-off countries, but
condoned political terrorism closer
to
home.
More recently, politically correct restrictions placed on the American
intelligence community during the
1990S
handicapped its efforts to
combat terrorism. When the CIA was mandated by Congress to cut ties
with informants with vio lent pasts, one of its former directors, James
Woolsey, warned that "political correctness and fighting terrorism often
don't work well together." He was correct.
In
the autobiography
See
No
Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the C.I.A. 's War on Ter–
rorism,
Robert Baer bemoans how in the years leading up to September
II
"the C.I.A. was systematically destroyed by political correctness."
Even after the cataclysmic events of September
2001,
political cor–
rectness and multiculturalism still inhibit people from speaking honestly
about terrorism. There seems to be a collective reluctance, for instance,
to discuss the religion of the nineteen hijackers, out of a misplaced fear
that referring to the militant Islam of these terrorists will offend main–
stream practitioners of this faith. Cathy Young, in
Reason,
has written
about critics of this trend who claim that an oppressive impulse within
Islam is "being whitewashed for the sake of political correctness." The
travel correspondent Llewellyn Howell has been more forthright:
"While the war on terrorism may not be a war against Islam, there is a
very high correlation between attacks on tourists and instigation by
Islamic terrorists, rather than Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian. No
amount of political correctness can disguise this fact from tourists, tour
organizers, and insurance companies."
Yet academics in North America still try to hide the truth. According
to a recent article by Jonathan Calt Harris of the Middle East Forum, of
the more than five hundred papers and presentations at the
2002
annual
meeting of the Middle Eastern Studies Association in Washington D.C.,
there were none specifically on militant Islam and "the topic of terror
or terrorism appeared exactly
twice
in the presentation titles." Daniel
Pipes, one of the most ardent and effective opponents of militant Islamic
terrorism in the United States, has shown that the American professor–
ate has collectively promoted a benevolent, benign interpretation of the
doctrine of jihad, while systematically ignoring its violent proclivities.
Priorities on some campuses are clearly out of line. Tom Paulin, the
British poet who said that Brooklyn-born Israeli settlers should be
killed, was permitted to speak at Columbia University, while Benjamin
Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister of Israel, was prevented by rau–
cous crowds from speaking at Concordia University in Montreal. This
