Academia Indicts America for Orlando Terrorist Attack

Omar Mateen

Following Omar Mateen’s massacre of forty-nine people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, professors of Middle East studies reacted predictably by blaming guns, American homophobia, Christians, Deep South bigotry – anything but Islamic terrorism. Never mind that Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIS, depicted himself as an Islamic soldier during the attack, had taken two trips to Saudi Arabia, and was interviewed three times by the FBI in connection with terrorism. In the latest Campus Watch research, appearing today at American Thinker, CW West Coast representative Cinnamon Stillwell reports on academia’s willful blindness and outright mendacity:

Immediately after the attack, University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole announced, “I don’t think it probably was terrorism in any useful sense of the term.” His reasoning? Mateen didn’t “make demands about U.S. government policy,” and hitting soft targets is “not a form of classical strategic terrorism.” The victims of terrorist attacks – many issued without demands – on cafés, malls, restaurants, resorts, schools, social services, and countless other soft targets would beg to differ.

. . . Meanwhile, Omid Safi, director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, decried "[t]he sickness, the homophobia, the violence, and the ease of access to war-grade guns that brought about this vile terrorist attack,” predicting that “the solution” will come about only when Americans “confront this xenophobia and violence in our own society.”

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Winfield Myers

Winfield Myers is managing editor of the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch project, which reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North American universities. He has taught world history and other topics at the University of Michigan, the University of Georgia, Tulane, and Xavier University of Louisiana. He was previously managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine and CEO of Democracy Project, Inc., which he co-founded. Mr. Myers has served as senior editor and communications director at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and is principal author and editor of a college guide, Choosing the Right College (1998, 2001). He was educated at the University of Georgia, Tulane, and the University of Michigan.