David Solway has a trenchant commentary at Pajamas Media about professors’ partisan, appeasing, and dangerous ”babbling” about Islamic terror. Their departure from reality is exemplified by Ian Lustick’s Trapped in the War on Terror.

The argument of Lustick, a political-science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is typical:

The threat has been grossly exaggerated. . . . The fear factor has been exploited by business and government for profitable ends. . . . Terrorism is mainly a European problem, and . . . 9/11 was a one-off attack.

How handy to leave out

that it was owing to sheer dumb luck that 40,000-50,000 people did not perish in the inferno — and, indeed, only by grace of a miscue that the Madrid attack did not claim thousands of victims. Conveniently, he pays no heed to the many subsequent terrorist attempts, not only in the UK and Germany, but in Canada and the U.S. that have been foiled by alert surveillance.

The sound thinkers here? Our own Mark Bauerlein, who writes:

The very system that academics invoke to fend off critics has become part of the problem. Ideological bias has seeped into the standards of professionalism. . . . Tenured professors enjoy their lifetime paychecks and proceed by professional habits . . . los[ing] touch with common sense and real-world implications.

Self-interest in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land? To be sure, as André Glucksmann also concludes, in real real-world terms:

The threat of Ground Zero, small or great, advances behind a mask. . . . The terrorist without borders makes us think about him always, everywhere. . . . Each of us waits for the next explosion. . . . The general run of our academics and intellectual elites, however, lapped in their dolce far niente, wait instead for the next book deal, the next invitation to hold forth at learned conferences, the next promotion, the next CNN appearance, the next citation or award — and who knows, maybe even a Nobel Peace Prize.