Feminist Susan Faludi has joined the long list of academics who find one methodology or another for not looking Islamic terrorism in the face and portraying it as it is.
In The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, as Adam Kirsch comments, Faludi disregards
Islamic terrorism as an actual phenomenon that has already claimed many thousands of American lives, in Baghdad and Kabul as in New York and Washington. Instead, … Faludi concentrates solely on America’s imaginative response to terrorism. She is more at ease talking about the psychodrama of our “terror dream” than about terror itself, to the extent that terror comes to seem like just a dream, a blank screen on which we project our fantasies.
It appears too much to ask for the academy to get real about terror.