Sunday, September 21, 2008

Hijacking Terrorism Studies

From Quadrant Online, September 2008, Volume LII Number 9 (very brief excerpt from a long paper) by Mervyn F. Bendle, Senior Lecturer in History and Communications in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at James Cook University:

...Various commentators have described how “the war of ideas” against terrorism and its associated ideologies is being lost in the UK, Europe and the US ... while in Australia the one book that attempted to describe local jihadism (Martin Chulov, Australian Jihad) was withdrawn under legal pressure.

...the study of terrorism had either been ignored in Australia or had been colonised by the radical, postmodern Left, which was assimilating the study of terrorism to its prevailing ideological paradigm based on class, race, gender, anti-Americanism and cultural relativism, often under the guise of the neo-Marxist “critical terror studies” approach. ...

... various new university courses and centres providing studies in terrorism ... were established to take advantage of public concern and new government funding, and ...are aimed at military, security, police and diplomatic personnel, whose organisations can pay the expensive fees. The study of terrorism is also an important part of the curriculum in our military training institutions, such as the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA)...

.... Because most tertiary students were only young teenagers when the 9/11 attacks took place and are very vulnerable to the influence of apparently knowledgeable teachers, the ideological orientation of teachers is a primary concern.

...One academic from Macquarie University’s Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism addressed the Australian Police Summit held in Sydney in September 2006 shortly after he claimed on ABC radio’s World Today that terrorists (such as the 9/11 or Bali bombers) were not religious fanatics but were just responding to injustices, and indeed that suicide bombers “are people of deep concern, of deep thought about the injustice that they see being done to the people they identify with” (“Irreparable damage posed to counter-terrorism system”, Letters, Australian, September 16–17, 2006).

Griffith University’s Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security...was recently the focus of public concern when it was revealed that Griffith had “practically begged the Saudi Arabian embassy to bankroll [the unit] for $1.3 million, even telling the ambassador it could keep secret elements of the controversial deal” and that Griffith would be happy to “discuss ways” in which the money could be used, further fuelling fears that the unit would be used to promote Wahhabism, the sectarian form of Islam that is the Saudi state religion and a major ideological influence among Islamist terrorists (“Top uni ‘begged’ for Saudi funding”, Australian, April 22, 2008).

In March 2008 the unit hosted an international conference, “Challenges and Opportunities for Islam and the West—The Case of Australia”, at which the Saudi ambassador made the opening remarks and the keynote speaker was the highly controversial Islamist ideologue Tariq Ramadan, whose US visa was revoked by the State Department in 2004 after it concluded that his actions provided material support to a terrorist organisation...

...At Monash University, the new Global Terrorism Research Centre offers a Master of Counter-Terrorism Studies aimed at law enforcement, defence and diplomatic personnel. Regrettably, the centre’s major contribution to the terrorism policy debate has been a study, Counter-Terrorism Policing and Culturally Diverse Communities (2007), which has been criticised by counter-terrorism experts for its one-dimensional, multiculturalist advocacy of passive “community policing” (Allon Lee, “Counter-Terror Contretemps”, AIJAC News & Articles, June 24, 2008). It advocates the pursuit of values like “building trust, rather than … gathering intelligence”, and alleges that “crude forms of racial profiling [which] unfairly target communities as inherently suspect” have “taken root” in counter-terrorism in Australia. It even advocates “the flow of terrorism-related information … from police to communities”....

...As these examples indicate, Australian academics and universities are applying a “business as usual” approach to the study of terrorism, assimilating it ideologically to the prevailing leftist, postmodern and multiculturalist paradigms that already dominate academia, and marketing them with little or no awareness or concern about their ideological content. As Carl Ungerer recently observed, this means that universities “are consigning themselves to ever greater irrelevance” in the formulation of government policy on terrorism (“Radical pacifism in terror studies” Australian, July 9, 2008). Ungerer himself left academia in January 2008 to become director of the National Security Project at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra, deploring the domination of “university departments … by so-called critical terror studies”, and condemning what he calls “radical pacifism” in academic terrorism studies, which is extremely hostile to sovereign states like Australia, England and the USA, and “implied a moral equivalence between terror and counter-terror and even blamed open societies for the rise of religious extremists”.

As an example of this leftist domination in Australia’s elite academic centres, Ungerer drew attention to the recent “eyebrow raising” appointment of a leading critical terror studies advocate, Dr Anthony Burke, as an Associate Professor to the University of New South Wales at the ADFA. Ungerer emphasised that “the lecturers at ADFA are teaching the next generation of military leaders” in Australia, and Burke’s appointment certainly raises questions about what those future leaders will be taught about terrorism, especially as Burke’s far Left views are well known. Revealingly, Burke dismissed Ungerer’s concerns about the radicalism of “critical terror studies” as “a neo-conservative, highly culture wars-type argument”, while simplistically equating the Israeli government’s policies on the Palestinian question and international sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq with terrorism “in that they targeted civilians and sought to inflict suffering and fear for a political purpose”.

At the centre of Burke’s worldview is the “radical pacifism” that Ungerer condemns. Burke denies any ultimate legitimacy to sovereign nation-states, and denies that they have any right to preserve their security, defend themselves from attack, police their borders, or pursue their national interests, when these might impinge upon “the Other”. ...

... On the question of terrorism, Burke declares that “our critical task is not to help power [that is, the USA] seek out and destroy the ‘enemies of freedom’ [that is, terrorists] but to question how they were constructed as enemies of ‘freedom’ [and how] we … might already be enemies of freedom in the very process of imagining and defending it”. As Burke’s use of scare-quotes indicates, he doubts that terrorists are enemies of freedom or that freedom has any particular value, while claiming that it is “we” who are its real enemies anyway. One wonders how students at the ADFA will feel if they are asked to place their lives on the line for Australia in Afghanistan, Iraq or in other battlegrounds in the war on terror....

... according to Burke’s extremely abstract and tendentious postmodernist perspective... the Australian national values and our way of life are merely “vast ideological abstractions”, and claims about “fundamental freedoms” just reveal a “narcissistic performance of self in which ‘Australia’ is represented as pure and good”, and as falsely superior to “the religion of Islam”.....while our defence of national sovereignty can be likened to the policies of the Nazis (see page 220 of his book).

... in reading Burke’s polemics, one gets an impression not only of the “radical pacifism” deplored by Ungerer, but of a deeper, almost pathological tendency revealed in Burke’s antipathy for liberal democracies and mainstream Australians, and his relentless sympathy for terrorists, illegal immigrants, communists, and “the Other” in its multitudinous forms.

...Unfortunately, Burke is not the only academic at the ADFA whose orientation to the study of terrorism raises concerns, as another new book makes clear. This is Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism (2008), edited by Michael T. Davis and Brett Bowden, who is a Senior Lecturer at the ADFA. The book is presented as a history of terror and terrorism over the past 400 years, with the editors claiming that the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 inaugurated the age of modern terrorism—a typically confused and untenable claim ....

A close reading reveals the book has the following principal ideological and apologetic objectives. (1) To depict Europe as both the home and principal location of modern terror and terrorism. (2) To make the United Kingdom central to this allegedly Western tradition of extreme political violence. (3) To defend contemporary terrorist groups by claiming that they have been falsely “labelled” as “terrorists” and are merely doing what various European and the English political groups have done throughout their history. (4) To further deflect attention from contemporary non-state terrorist groups by emphasising the state terror carried out by totalitarian regimes—all in Europe. (5) To insist that the central issue is not actual terrorism but an alleged “Islamophobia”....

...That ... academics ...can have such views published by a university press in a text purportedly on the history of terrorism would be beyond belief if this wasn’t Australia, where academic terrorism studies have generally been taken over by the political Left, with all the anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-terrorist, and postmodernist ideological gobbledygook that entails.

As for the ADFA, we can only wonder what the activities of people like Burke and Bowden portend for the future expertise and morale of Australia’s military forces.

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