On Sunday The New York Post posted an article about a course being taught in some American colleges about the events of September 11, 2001. It is not a surprise that many of our college professors are politically left of center, but sometimes they simply cross a line that should not be crossed. Please follow the link above to read the entire story.
The article reports:
Case in point is a freshman-level English class taught at several major universities across the country called “The Literature of 9/11” — which focuses almost entirely on writings from the perspective of the Islamic terrorists, rather than the nearly 3,000 Americans who were slaughtered by them.
The syllabus, which includes books like “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “Poems from Guantanamo: Detainees Speak,” portray terrorists as “freedom fighters” driven by oppressive US foreign policies.
…In Ahuja’s (UNC associate English professor Neel Ahuja at UNC Chapel Hill) twisted worldview, al Qaeda terrorists are the real victims. “Abu Zubaydah’s torture may be interpreted as simply one more example of the necropower of US imperialism, the power to coerce and kill targeted populations,” Ahuja recently wrote in an academic paper criticizing the war on terror.
He says America’s depiction of the 9/11 terrorists as “monsters” is merely an attempt to “animalize” them as insects and justify “squashing” them in “a fantasy of justice.”
This colonialist “construct” of an “animalized enemy,” he added, “dovetails with the work of mourning the nation after 9/11 (which in the logic of security must be made perpetual, melancholic).” To him, it’s all cynically designed to justify more “imperial violence” against “Muslim, Arab and South Asian men.”
So, men who slit a flight attendant’s throat and killed innocent civilians are not monsters? I remember that day, and I remember sitting with a friend whose daughter was in the second tower waiting for word about her daughter. The word eventually came that her daughter had been killed, and DNA evidence found in a stairwell gave her family some closure.
Parents who are paying tuition at the colleges where this course is taught should demand that the course be taken out of the curriculum. This is an insult to the families of the people who were killed on that day, and it insults the intelligence of Americans who remember the events of that day.
