Embedded in the considerable coverage of the Kevin Barrett affair – Barrett is the University of Wisconsin conspiracy theorist/professor who believes that 9/11 was an “inside job,” i.e., perpetrated by the American government – was a revealing vignette. I refer to comments by a Wisconsin undergraduate who finished a course on Islam this summer, and whom The New York Times quotes as follows, regarding her view that her professor’s omission of a discussion of the war on terror was justified:

I just feel like it isn’t relevant because Islam is a religion…It’s not about what’s going on currently in politics so much.

Not relevant? No compatibility between Islam and terror? If the report on this course is accurate, and if such “compartmentalization” about Islam and the war on terror is widespread in academe, then this generation is being steeped in deep denial about the dangerous and long war before them.

Our youth need to learn the truth about radical Islam as told, perhaps most clearly, by the distinguished scholar Bat Ye’or (in a National Review Online Symposium):

…Islamism is deeply imbedded in a jihadic ideology, with its legal framework of permanent war derived from religious scriptures, consolidated by a history of 13 centuries of warfare, conquests, and subjugation of infidels…its references are religious, and its hatred targets equally Jews and non-Jews. Codified in 8th-century Islamic jurisprudence, Islamic warfare tactics conform exactly to a sharia-jihadic worldview, set in an enduring, theological pattern.
…Being unfamiliar with jihad, Westerners do not understand that the fight against terror is against a 21st-century jihad and do not realize the breadth of its scope and constituents.

Our students and the West must understand the origins of the militant Islamic – jihadist – threat if they are to survive it. It is time the professoriate rises above political correctness and fear of Muslim wrath and teaches the truth about the connections between Islam itself and violent “holy” war.