H’n’R reader Marybeth Hayes, reacting to my “Field of Battle” piece of yesterday, sent on a link to this sinister little piece of work by Shahid Alam of Northeastern University.
It’s difficult to isolate the neutral rot from the consciously mendacious--the absurd parallelism between the American revolutionaries and the 9/11 hijackers; the desire to find reason in the New York and Washington attacks, and explain this with a veneer of intellectualism, when the hijackers never bothered to do so; the gridlocked prose, where in passages Alam says the exact opposite of where he is leading (that Americans heard the shot of 9/11 “clearly”, after which Alam underlines how unclearly they heard it)
Here’s a choice passage, suggesting that Alam may have been on something, in which case I’m almost, but then again not quite, prepared to forgive all:
It’s puzzling why Alam should have published such rubbish now, over two years after 9/11. He might have lost tenure in the angry aftermath of the attacks, or maybe he just needs to be over the top to be noticed by his comrades in the Middle East studies field. That said, and despite the criticism many in the field merit, Alam is out on a very distant limb here. Few others are really quite so stupid.
I await, with relish, the angry backlash, popcorn in hand.
