INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

‘Chanting "God is Greatest" after the 71-to-36 vote, Hamas lawmakers hugged and kissed Ismail Haniyeh, their teary-eyed prime minister-designate who vowed to not to abandon the fight against Israel.

"The Koran is our constitution, Jihad is our way, and death for the sake of God is our highest aspiration," Hamas lawmaker Hamed Bitawi said. [Bold-emphasis added by prof bug]

'Tuesday's comments stood in contrast to a more conciliatory speech by Haniyeh on Monday in which he stressed the new government's push for peace and dialogue'. (Reuters' Dispatch, March 28, 2005, with Italics added by prof bug)

Can't be! No, doesn't really mean it! . . . this Ismail Haniyeh, the new teary-eyed PM-designate of Hamas.

And why can't it be true?

Well, because Professor Robert Pape has spent 335 pages of white-splashed work assuring us that suicide terrorism has nothing to do with any substantive religious creeds or traditions, let alone --- as he tells us in chapter 7 of his stupendous excuse-making cover-up book, Dying to Win --- to do with any specific varieties of Islam whatsoever, including radical fundamentalism Islam and notions of Jihad. And to prove it, he does two things that we'll look at in today's buggy article --- itself, please note, a direct continuance of the previous article in this lengthy series on Pape's extravagant cover up of Islam's almost total monopoly of suicide terrorism since 1980: specifically, a good 94.4% of all the suicide terrorist groups active between that year and the start of 2004.

And remember: in this, as in all the other buggy articles on Pape's book, the views and criticisms unfurled in this series are strictly those of prof bug's --- even as he as striven each time to back them up with plenty of evidence.

 

PART ONE:
TWO FISH-STORIES AND SOME MISUSED SOURCES

First Pape Fish-Story in Chapter 7

Data Pishposh

We get the usual make-believe data-set laid out in a two-part table, plus a head-spinning, incomprehensible explanation in a half-page footnote that shows how his, Pape's Alternative-Universe statistical correlations derived from Fantasy-land data can find no sound relationship between known al Qaeda bombers as of the end of 2003 and Islamic fundamentalist traditions of a noticeable sort in their native countries. Wrong, Wrong, Wrong. Or so we'll see in Part One today.

Note in passing, if you've just joined this series on Pape's shell-game book, that being wrong is nothing surprising in Dying to Win. The surprise would be to find almost anything that's right . . . including simple division in which, somehow, 3/38 ends up in a pie chart as 71% on p. 205 . . . a knowledge of 2nd grade math apparently beyond the talents of Dying to Win's 16 research assistants, 20 scholarly readers, and Robert Pape himself. Come to that, to paraphrase Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman --- the dramatist played in a film, fittingly enough, by Jane Fonda --- even the "ands", "buts" and "or's" in Pape's book seem fishy. (For a summary of most of Pape's make-believe data-sets and statistical blunders --- not all! --- click here.

To show how wrong this fish-story stuff about Islamo-Fascist fundamentalism is in Pape's chapter 7, the Mad Hatter data-set, reproduced faithfully in an earlier buggy article, will be trotted out for one last display in the second part of today's commentary. With at most two or three exceptions of the 66 identified al Qaeda bombers down to the end of 2003, they all hailed, to a man, from Islamic countries with strong fundamentalist movements --- which Pape, in line with certain specialists and Islamic spokesmen, call Salafis. Pape himself denies this. And his proof lies in the let's-pretend data-set that you'll soon encounter, along with his extraordinary efforts --- which no honest researcher would ever stoop to --- to rest his entire statistical correlations on just one case among dozens of others: Morocco.

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!

As it happens, Pape is entirely wrong about Morocco. Contrary to what he claims --- resting those on one book, published in 1993 --- Morocco has one of the largest Salafi movements in the entire Arab world. Assume, however, Morocco didn't. What then?

Well, any competent scholar would have treated Morocco as an outlier and examined it with great care, delving deeply into its domestic politics and religious movements to see what was what. Not Pape. Far from being competent, he doesn't strike prof bug as any more upfront and open-minded in chapter 7 than he does in any of the other chapters of his book, itself --- as the previous articles have argued, with hopefully lots of convincing evidence to back up prof bug's views --- little more than a protracted snowjob that seeks to whiteout the almost total dominance of Islamic groups in suicide terrorism between 1980 and 2003's end: or 95% or so of them.

Not that you'd ever suspect this from the avalanche of white-stuff thrown down on every page of the book. Nor, come to that, would you suspect that rampant Jew-hating conspiratorial lunacies abound in all of Islam, not just among radical fundamentalists. The wilder the conspiratorial paranoia, the more gleefully much of the world's Muslim population --- over 60% if we can generalize from the Arab population of 300 million who denied Muslims were even involved in the 9/11 attacks on American cities (as a Gallup Poll of 9 Arab countries found months later) --- latch onto them. And of course there were no Jews found among the dead in the Twin Tower ruins, despite the identification of several hundred Jewish corpses by New York authorities afterwards.

No Need For Prof Bug To Say More Here, Is There?

Four articles alone, after all, were dedicated to the topic of Muslim Jew-hatred in late 2005, and it's been mentioned and documented several times in this series on Pape's whitewash stuff. Those who want to read them again, or for the first time, need only click on the sidebar table-of-contents on this or the home buggy page --- specifically on the heading labeled war on terrorism --- to find them all. As for the lurid psycho-ward lunacies about Jewish control of the world, charged with eruptive, high-pulsating paranoia that seems rampant throughout Islam, you might also find three buggy articles on the topic written in late May and April 2006 immediately after the Pape series ended: click here; here too; and here once more.

Too bad there aren't more leaders in the Arab world like the King of Jordan, who recently criticized the anti-Semitism in Muslim circles world-wide --- not that even he, a decent Arab leader, could do more than speak in careful, half-candid ways only . . . however understandably so. After all, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt was killed by Muslim Brotherhood terrorists in 1981 for making peace with Israel two years earlier.

And too bad, come to think of it --- however predictable it might be --- Robert Pape didn't include the Sadat assassination in his make-believe data-set on p. 15 of Dying to Win. In every respect, the act fits his definition of suicide terror: terrorism that entails suicide for the terrorists from the outset or runs a high risk of the terrorists being killed. But then, when you're busy ordering whitewash for your lengthy work --- all of the numerous glitches, omissions, errors, blunders, and botched statistical stuff not at all random (a sign of a remarkably careless scholar), but rather forming, each and every one, a consistent pattern of concealing Islam's near-total monopoly of suicide terrorism after 1980 --- you can't be too concerned with one more non-random slip-up, can you?

For the cover-up and distorting smoke-and-mirrors presentation of suicide-terror groups active between 1980 and the start of 2004 --- at any rate, on Professor Pape's counting --- click here. You might want to read the material right above the table and below it for some added light on Professor Pape's scholarly work. Somehow, there were 21 omissions in the corrected buggy table on even a conservative count . . . prof bug omitting two or three more likely suicide terror acts that might fit the Pape definition because of some lingering ambiguities

Crackpot Lunacies Embraced at the Islamic Summit in 2003 by 56 Heads of Muslim Countries

Yes, the wilder and more paranoid the views embraced by Muslims, the more gleefully they're embraced, it seems, as excuse-making and ways of making sense of the world --- especially their own countries' backwardness. Or as the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, told the 56 heads of Muslim countries who attended the Islamic Summit in his country at the end of 2003,

"We produce practically nothing on our own, we can do almost nothing for ourselves, we cannot even manage our wealth."

And of course, Mahahtir went on, Muslims are dissed by the rest of the world as a result.

"I will not enumerate the instances of our humiliation," Mr. Mahathir went on to say. "We are all Muslims. We are all oppressed. We are all being humiliated. . . . Today we, the whole Muslim [community], are treated with contempt and dishonor. . . . There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people. They feel that they can do nothing right." He added: "Our only reaction is to become more and more angry. Angry people cannot think properly.

But wait! What are the causes of this extraordinary backwardness and humiliation? Something, after all, must be responsible for the backwardness --- technological, scientific, economic, and educational --- that mark all 56 Islamic countries world-wide. Naturally, it can't be anything related to Islam itself, or its various cultural spin-offs. So what then?

Well, as it happened, Mahathir himself gave the eagerly awaited explanation --- which drew the 55 other Islamic leaders swiftly to their feet, their thunderous ovation filling the hall: Jews. Yes, the world's 15 million Jews who rule only one tiny country, Israel with 6 million people --- a quarter of whom, Palestinian Arabs, enjoy the only full legal and civil rights that Muslims not living in the Western world enjoy --- are responsible for the backwardness of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims in 56 countries. In Mahahtir's ecstatically applause-drawing explanation,



" We are up against a people who think. They survived 2,000 years of pogroms not by hitting back but by thinking. They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong so that they can enjoy equal rights with others."

So Jews --- who apparently have invented all of modernity, and to dominate others --- rule the world, pulling strings everywhere . . . the essence of all modern Jew-hating racism, however it's served up: whether by Nazi Social-Dawinian pseudo-biology, Fascist fears of Jews who control socialism, communism, capitalism, liberalism, and what have you, or by crackpot, semi-literate imams, sheiks, publicists, intellectuals, dictators, and terrorist leaders who either embrace Islamo-Fascist Fundamentalism or (in the case of most Arab dictators) manipulate it demagogically to divert attention from their gangster-like kleptocratic rule that has produced bankruptcy, resentment, and bewilderment among their countrymen.



Hamas' Crackpot Paranoids

One more crazed paranoid projection is worth setting out here, if only because it brings us back closer to Pape's whitewash stuff about jihadist Islamo-Fascism. Jews not only, it turns out, control the world in various ways --- including, pace Mahathir, by inventing all modern ideologies for purposes of dominating others --- but also rule America's Christian Churches! Yes, Christianity in the US is itself in the hands of stealthy Jews (all of whom, as our Hamas observer should have added, wear Buck-Rogers Space-Yarmulkes that wire them directly to the head of the World Jewish-Conspiracy who lives on one of Jupiter's hidden moons, the better to stay out of harm's way from Islamic crackpots):

"A PROMINENT HAMAS member of parliament has explained why most American Christians support Israel. The churches are run by "converted" Jews who are exploiting Christians for Zionist purposes. "Even the churches where the Americans pray are led by Jews who were converted to Christianity, but they were converted to keep controlling the Americans," Sheikh Mohammad Abu Tir explained on an American radio show on April 7."

Never mind. The death-embracing Jihadist Kabooming proudly voiced by the new Hamas Prime Minister in the Palestinian Authorities might be joined by the most crazed of conspiratorial idiocies --- the more crazed, it seems, the more enthusiastically voiced and embraced --- but for Robert Pape, his 16 research assistants, and apparently 20 scholarly chums who read his manuscript, they have absolutely nothing to do with the (non-existent) near total-monopoly of suicidal terrorist groups since 1980.

Nor is that all:

More Confusion in Pape's "Rigorous" Social Science Work

Pape's stumble-bumble howlers seem to have no bounds. In his mental world, there can't be any paranoid fanatics or loonies with influence in Hamas or Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad or al Qaeda. The reason: it's contrary to his nationalist theory of suicide terrorism.

All suicide terrorists, you see --- besides being "community-minded altruists" acting only to protect themselves and their compatriots from democratic military oppressors --- are strictly "rational" types. Oh?

Well, no surprise really. Pape, who claims to be a very rigorous social scientist --- thanking his colleague at Chicago, John Mearsheimer for the inspiration --- doesn't seem to know the difference between instrumental and substantive rationality. The former has nothing to do with the latter. It is strictly a means-end relationship, in which the mental world and preferences of an agent are taken for granted, and the agent is assumed to be intent on finding the best way to maximize his chances of achieving what he or she wants.

Even paranoids in a mental hospital can calculate this way. In one such hospital in Illinois with well over 600 patients, for instance, the staff allowed patients in each ward --- 12 wards in all --- a voice to elect a council of spokesmen-leaders to represent them. Altogether, there were 93 members on the councils. According to a 1965 article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution that probed council members --- the researcher directly interviewing them, then comparing his results with the professional psychiatric staff --- paranoid-schizophrenics on the leadership-councils were over-represented by 400% . . . whereas all the other council-members were under-represented. Yes, four-hundred percent --- a figure worth considering. Somehow --- Being Paranoid to Win --- they were able, by weighing their alternatives and calculating their chances, to get the necessary votes and enjoy overwhelming representation on the councils.

Even a Hitler or a Pol Pot or a Mussolini was pretty adept at seizing power, holding it, and then going to war . . . with some victories at the beginning. In the end, of course, their megalomanical goals led to the total destruction of their systems and entailed their death. No matter. The rigorous Professor Pape doesn't seem to know the difference between their substantive mental worlds of his Kabooming Kablooies and their calculated efforts to blow themselves and their enemies to smithereens. And to the extent he glimpses this difference and tries to deal with it in chapter 7 of Dying to Win, he undertakes his usual sugar-coated approach --- something we'll see in a few moments.

[The article, "Psychopathology, Decision-Making, and Political Involvement," was by Brent M. Rutherford and appeared in the Journal of Conflict Resolution for 1966. Rutherford, generalizing for theoretical purposes, noted that severe psychopathology is unlikely to mark the leaders of long-standing, solidly institutionalized democracies: candidates for high office, at any rate, have to undergo a long scrutiny in public life by their political colleagues and opponents as well as by the media if they're to be nominated and convince an electorate to vote for them in open debate. By contrast, it's ruthless totalitarian and authoritarian dictators who seize power by the gun and hold it that way who are likely to show the strongest abnormal tendencies toward extreme paranoia and be able to act on them.]

Is that surprising"?

Nor Is That All

Pape, the self-proclaimed champion of scholarly rigor, doesn't show the simplest awareness of how even [instrumental] rational-choice theory has been shown by social psychologists for four decades now to be a misconceived way of studying even much economic behavior, never mind political agents and organizations --- an insight that has landed three of them Nobel Prizes for their impact on economics. Why at least one of his 16 research assistants and 20 fellow scholarly chums who read his manuscript didn't clue him in on these matters remains a puzzle . . . unless, of course, you're willing to join prof bug and infer that Pape is something of a Simple-Simon whitewasher.

And Pape, supposedly a specialist in international relations theory --- who seems to know nothing about international law (in one interview last summer, he said the US use of "smart bombs" that presumably, with full legality, take out military targets with unusual accuracy was no different from the use of "suicide terror" that, illegally, target civilians) --- also seems to know nothing about Alexander George's path-breaking work, followed by other psychologically informed IR specialists, on the problems and shortcomings of rational-choice deterrence theory. The work started appearing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and it has subsequently been incorporated into a large part of deterrence-thinking, as well as in the theoretical work on "coercive diplomacy . . . to the point that the defenders of a-priori deductive rational-modeling have had to deal repeatedly in numerous symposiums trying to find ways to fend off the criticisms, and with at best, in prof bug's view, limited success.

For some clarifying comments on the debate about nuclear deterrence --- the political and technical conditions of stable deterrence, as well as the theoretical disputes over deductive rational-choice deterrence as opposed to empirically derived general insights into stable deterrence --- they appear in an appendix at the end of this article. Click here to jump ahead to that appendix.

 

 

PAPE'S SECOND FISH-STORY EXTRAVAGANZA



"From: Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders" [ A bin Laden-issued Fatwa, entitled "Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders" that declared war and death on all Americans, civilian and military as the enemies of Islam.]

"World Islamic Front Statement (February 1998 Fatwa)

"In compliance with God's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:

"The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God." We -- with God's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it."

Pape's Sources for His Understanding of Islamic Fundamentalism: A Brief First-Look

The more you probe Chapter 7 of Dying to Win , the more unreliable its arguments turn out to be.

Early on, between pages 105 and 108, Pape takes up the widespread criticism that Islamic fundamentalisms embrace jihad and a duty to wage endless warfare against the world of infidels, and he argues that the criticism is wrong and misconceived. To show this, he draws on a smattering of sources --- in effect, 13 or so --- and misconstrues the most important of those that he largely relies on: the introduction to an anthology by a post-modernist follower of Foucault, Roxanne Euben; the introduction to a more serious anthology by Mansoor Moaddel and Kamran Talatoff; and the cited view of Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Note that he only refers to the introductory chapters of the first two books, and simply quotes Nasr in passing.

Later on, we'll probe in detail these three sources and how Pape misuses or misconstrues their arguments and methods.

In particular, as you'll see, Euben's apology for Islamic fundamentalisms is as methodologically cumbersome, strained, and misleading as any typical post-modernist blah-blah. Moaddel is a far more serious scholar, a good sociologist who has done field-work in the Middle East, but Pape --- who cites only the introduction and may not have read the book's selections themselves --- seems not to have noticed that the modernist writings all end in the first part of the 20th century, whereas the fundamentalists monopolize the latter half, and all of them are stridently hostile to democracy and human rights, are crammed with self-righteous animosity toward the West, and appear to believe that a purified Islam of an imaginary sort --- ruling by strict, totalitarian-like Muslim law (Sharia) --- will alone return Islam to righteous paths, glory, influence, power, and eventual triumph in the inevitable struggle with evil infidels.

Nasr, described by Pape as a "widely respected scholar", adheres to a small sect of Sufi Islam, a mystical (or quasi-mystical) set of traditions with a Shi-ite thrust in his case, who --- as prof bug will show --- has endorsed the continued use of "force" against Muslims and apparently all others until they are all converted to the one and true form of Islam . . . which, in typical totalitarian manner, will erase all boundaries between public and private life and ensure --- again in typical totalitarian manner --- that its theological credos and laws infuse not just all political, administrative, and legal domains, but all private life, cultural life, and even science. Simultaneously, Nasr's expressed desire to submit all of public and private life to the Sharia lies at the heart of all totalitarianisms, whether of the left, right, or theocratic: their overwhelming aim is to shatter all civil society in the name of their pure ideological fantasies, while using a variety of coercive pressures to force everyone to conform to the norms of the new emerging wonderland . . . always, without exception, complemented by concentration camps, secret police, and the total obliteration of all civil and political liberty. Nasr even claims, explicitly --- as do all totalitarian advocates --- that the use of force to such ends isn't "violence as ordinarily understood".

These, it seems, are the three main sources for Pape's views on Islamic fundamentalism, and that's why we'll probe their arguments at length later on.

 

OTHER PAPE SOURCES

John Esposito, a Pape-Like Apologist

As for the 9 or 10 other sources that Pape footnotes between pages 105 and 107 --- the extent of his treatment of Islamic fundamentalisms --- they are mostly well-known apologists for radical Islamic fundamentalism like John Esposito, and even then Pape almost always refers to a few pages . . . often, no more than a handful. Pape, for example, draws on Eposito's Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam, 2002, in footnotes 12 and 16, for a total of 5 pages --- not that the other pages in his book are any more reliable, Eposito having long argued during the previous decade that Islamic fundamentalism was essentially a democratic social movement that had no violent tendencies toward the US or the rest of the West, let alone any tendencies to spawn widespread jihadi terrorism. The creation of Islamic terrorism, the book also argues, is the fault of the West . . . especially US foreign policy.

No surprise really.

In an earlier book that appeared before 9/11, Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality, Esposito had flatly denied that any such thing as Islamic terrorism actually existed --- even though several other scholars, not beholden to the Middle East Studies Association that Esposito headed for a year, had analyzed at length the roots of Islamic terrorism and predicted its future use of terror against the US and other Western countries.

Esposito's Biases Bursting Out All Over

Years after 9/11's terror massacres --- and those in Madrid, London, Turkey, Indonesia, and several Arab countries --- Esposito, in a talk at Georgetown University where he teaches, admitted that Islamic terrorism did exist (!), but once more located the root-cause in American foreign policy. "At one point" in his talk, according to an article by an auditor at the talk, "Dr. Esposito characterized American foreign policy as approving the rape and murder of Arabs in Palestine by Israelis and then, to make it OK, offering a little foreign aid to build houses for those who survived."

Then, to make matters worse --- with his ideologically inspired apologetics for Islamic terrorism spilling out all over --- Esposito denied in response to a question from the floor that . . .

his post-9/11 views had changed; he flatly denied that in his earlier book he had concluded Islamic terrorism was a myth. He claimed that he had in fact found such a threat in radical Islam and suggested that the questioner should reread the pre-9/11 book.

But the questioner was not alone in believing that Dr. Esposito had changed his tune; Dr. Esposito stated during his talk that he had been giving the same answers for many years. Patrick Clawson, Deputy Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in reviewing Unholy War in Commentary, remarked that in his pre-9/11 book Esposito "argued that Islamic fundamentalist groups did not present a menace." Esposito had written "Many Islamic movements have turned from revolution to reform, and have "joined the rising chorus of voices calling for political liberalization". As a result, Dr. Esposito had concluded "while they are a challenge to the outdated assumptions of the established order and to autocratic regimes, they do not necessarily threaten American Interests."



Another questioner, apparently harrassed by the moderator of the talk, then posed another question that the auditor who wrote these words described this way:

After being pressed [by the moderator], the questioner stated his question concisely: "If one were to apply Occam's Razor, would it not be likely that the proximate cause of Islamic terrorism was the funding from Saudi Arabian petrodollars of madrassahs and mosques world wide that are used to spread the pernicious doctrine of Islamism?" Dr. Esposito was quick to deny that also. Esposito's response was, no, that if you ask a man on the street in these countries they will say that they object to American foreign policy aiding Israel and supporting repressive regimes in the Middle East.

The auditor's summary of the talk and the exchanges that were permitted with the audience is worth noting in detail, not least because Esposito's blatant whitewashing to Islamist terror exactly parallels Pape's in Dying to Win:

"Esposito equated the violence of terrorism and murder of innocent civilians as resistance of the same kind that we Americans used during our Revolutionary War.

How bizarre. I couldn't help but think that we were just across Massachusetts Avenue from the headquarters of the General Society of the Cincinnati. Had he declaimed there that there was no difference between the American revolutionaries at Bunker Hill and the Islamist terrorists murdering school children at Beslan and Ma'alot, or blowing up civilian buses, he might have been lynched.

Second, he said jihad is always defensive, in defense of Muslim land, and so on. A person with his background should have known that Islamists divide the world into the Dar al Islam, the domain of Islam, and the Dar al Harb, the domain of war. He surely should know that radical Islamists such as Sheik Abdullah Azzam say there is a collective obligation to extend the domain of the Dar al Islam until shar'ia law is supreme over the entire world.

Third, he argued that since the Israelis admit they are using reasonable violence, they are no different than the Islamic terrorists who believe their violence is reasonable. But "terrorism" is "the use of unlawful force and violence to achieve a political objective when innocent people are targeted" such as bombing a civilian bus, or murdering schoolchildren. It seems to me that, contrary to Professor Esposito, there is a significant difference between the Arab use of unlawful force and violence and the Israeli use of reasonable force which is lawful when used in self-defense.

It came to me finally that the program was dedicated more to the struggle for the American mind than the mind of Islam. Another person at the program evidently thought so too and asked why the club could not have a more balanced program. He suggested inviting Dr. Daniel Pipes. . . "

Esposito and His Fellow Middle East Studies Friends

For Martin Kramer's own long, devastating dissection of Esposito's Unholy Terror, click here. For an overall summary of Esposito's harmful influence on American Middle East studies --- mirrored in other heads of the Middle East Studies Association like Juan Cole of Michigan and Joel Beinin of Stanford, not to mention virtually every other president of that association for years and years --- see this appraisal in Kramer's landmark work on the frivolities, ideological biases, illusions, and outright defense of radical Islam: Ivory Towers in the Sand.

Beinin, a notorious left-wing radical who blames the US for practically everything bad in the world, headed the Middle East Studies Association in late 2001 and 2002; among other things, despite 9/11's terror attacks, he defended the total absence of any grappling with Islamic terror in the MESA's nearly 1000 papers in its 2001 and 2002 annual conferences. Apparently, it's better to leave the most pressing issue in Middle East Studies languishing in a murky mist than confront the realities of Islamic terror head-on. Doing so, it's clear, would bring the MESA's members' overwhelming ideological biases --- many lavishly funded directly or indirectly at Saudi financed Middle East Centers in US universities ---into the glare of blazing disbelief on the part of all but Islamists, Islamist apologists, and left-wing ideologues entrenced on way too many campuses.

For another take on Beinin, see the article by David Horowitz.

As for Juan Cole, MESA's 2005 chairman, he's not only an apologist for Islamic radicalism and terror, he tried to use his post, among other things, to encourage his chums to dig into Dr. Martin Kramer's past and see if they couldn't come up with some dirt to bury him under. The encouragement, needless to say, was done secretly, but one of the chums showed some conscience and informed Kramer of the cabal. That cabal is typical of the kinetically charged pc-mentality that marks the psychology and mind-sets of true-believing pc ideologues in academia: they can't stand probing, well-informed criticisms of their work, they are usually narcissists working out their identity-problems in their teaching and scholarship and bristle and scream at any of their critics, they can't tolerate honest, no-holds-barred exchanges with their critics, they resort to dirty stratagems when they are embarrassed (hate-speech codes, kangaroo courts, tolerating or actively encouraging student Storm-Troopers to invade the classrooms of non pc-professors, cabals, and the like), and the value of their scholarly work and teaching is essentially worthless when cashed in . . . when it isn't actually harmful and destructive.

The Quartet That Pape Noticeably Misconstrues or Misuses

With four exceptions, the remaining 5 or 6 writers footnoted by Pape between pages 105 and 108 hardly differ from Esposito's soft-soap lathering of Islamic radicalism, and it's senseless to delve into their writings.

Not so the four exceptions in Pape's sources, all of whose insights into radical Islamic fundamentalism and violence are either misconstrued or misused by Pape

The first exception is a book on fundamentalisms that appeared in 1996, a collection of original chapters by diverse writers. The four editors are all good, truth-seeking scholars . . . including Timur Kuran at Princeton, a specialist on economics. Many of the chapters are illuminating as well. But note: only about a third of the 25 chapters are devoted wholly to Islamic fundamentalism, and none of those 8 chapters remotely predicted the eruptive outbreak of jihadi terrorism of the late 1990s and especially since 9/11. By contrast, the two chapters on Jewish fundamentalism and violence in Israeli policy exaggerated the degree of conflict between Israeli fundamentalisms and the large majority of secular Jews in the country when it came to negotiating with the Palestinians over Gaza and the West Bank, both up to the 2000 Camp David Accords and the follow-up offers in the era of Prime Minister Barak, and since then . . . just as they exaggerated the likelihood of violence and terrorism by disgruntled Israeli settlers and supporters if the Israelis ever withdrew from Gaza and, it seems --- given the new policy of building a wall and separation -- from the West Bank.

At no point does Pape refer to any of these matters, even though his own book didn't appear until 9 years later . . . plenty of time in which to assess the reliability of the chapters on Islam and jihadi terror. Similarly, he ignores the chapters --- say by Martin Kramer on Hezbollah, who has emerged as one of Pape's biggest critics in academia --- that conflict with his own sugar-coated views of Islamic fundamentalism and suicide terrorism.

A second exception mangled far more by Pape is Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who knew the Taliban and Taliban totalitarian system in Afghanistan as well as any outsider, roaming the country during its rule. His 2000 book --- Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale) --- catalogues in depth the brutality of the Taliban, their extensive use of repression, terror, and public beheadings as well as their cruel mistreatment of women in the name of "purified Islam", but you would never know this from the citation Pape makes to the book in footnote 14 of Chapter 7. The footnote, along with that of another writer, is strictly limited to illustrate a totally anodyne one-sentence reference to the Deobandist Salafi influence on the Taliban! Once again, Pape obviously hasn't either read the book he cites or is whitewashing a mass-murdering totalitarian thrust built, it appears, into all Islamic fundamentalisms.

A third exception is a Christopher Blanchard, who wrote a brief study of 6 pages on "The Islamic Traditions of Wahhibism and Salafiyya" in 2004. Once more, Pape takes a research effort by someone else --- top-skimming as it may be --- and manages to overlook a key point about the growing thrust toward hostility to the West, jihadi violence in the name of spreading Islam, intolerance, and the Saudi support of Sunni fundamentalisms of all sort.

" . . . It is worth noting that there are Salafis and Wahhabis who believe that violence should be a last resort and, if used, should be the final stage in a long process of personal transformation, purification, and self-discipline in which each Muslim should engage and which ultimately will lead to the establishment of a pure Islamic state. These "reformists" oppose violence on the basis of the Prophet Muhammad's own practices; however, their rejection of violence is not absolute and is debated in the face of defending perceived threats against the Islamic religion [italics added by prof bug]."

The final exception is Mark Sageman, an uncommonly gifted scholar trained in psychiatry and a former CIA agent whose own extensive, first-hand knowledge of radical Islam is markedly at odds with Pape's nationalist theory of suicide terrorism. Quite a combination, no? Once again, a work Pape cites is is either markedly misconstrued or misused by him. Sageman's personal and scholarly insights into Islamic fundamentalism and terror couldn't differ more from Pape's sugar-coated work. In particular . . .

. . . Three Huge Differences Stand Out with Pape's Aplogetics and Sageman's Work on Islamic Fundamentalism and Jihadi Terror

Sageman, who has published widely on radical Islam --- see the book that Pape cites, but clearly either didn't read or misconstrued --- worked with al Qaeda in Afghanistan during the cold war and has more recently stressed the jihadist and religious roots of modern Islamic terrorism since 1990 or so. For that matter, he stresses the religious nature of the tiny handful of non-Islamic terrorist groups since then. By contrast Pape, you'll recall, argues in Dying to Win that religion substantively has nothing to do with suicide terrorism. If it influences the nationalist struggle to use suicide terror against oppressive democratic military occupiers, it is only secondarily and indirect: first off, the oppressor must be of a different religion, and then that difference aggravates the fears and hatred of the oppressive government and its people, demonizing them and making suicide terror a more moral course of action that they have resorted to only as a last desperate effort to achieve national self-determination for their compatriots.

Sageman's arguments couldn't be more at odds with this view, yet Pape, even while citing Sageman, makes no effort to note any differences at all. Consider just this trio here:

1) For Sageman, a psychiatrist, the roots of jihadist Islamic terrorism are psychological --- in particular, a sense of alienation and lack of purpose and meaning among the jihadists who, by a self-selecting, bottom-up form of recruitment into localized networks that they create, embrace radical Islam and terror against infidels and apostate Muslim allies as a way of overcoming their emotional distress and finding new meaning and commitments in life. Pape's superficial understanding and dismissal of these psychological roots has already been emphasized in this buggy article, and for that matter in several earlier articles in this series: specifically, his confusion between instrumental and substantive rationality.

2) In Sageman's view, if radical Islamic religion didn't function as an ideology in serving these personal needs, then the disaffected, mentally confused young Islamic men wouldn't be drawn to the jihadist terrorist networks. Pape's arguments, by contrast, see religion as derivative and secondary in influence, with nothing specific in Islam conducive to the horrendous spate of suicide terrorism carried out by jihadi radicals since 1980 --- 94.4% of all suicide terrorist groups between then and the start of 2004, the years studied by Pape. Not, please recall, that Pape's fantasy-land data-tables and smoke-and-mirror presentation of even the few accurate nuggets in those tables would ever let you know that Islam has a near-monopoly of such suicide terrorist groups.

3) Sageman's lengthy stress on bottom-up self-recruitment to the terrorist networks --- which draws on the biographies of 175 terrorists --- also stands in strong contrast with Pape's views. Dying to Win's Part II emphasizes a process of top-down recruitment by leaders, organizational influences, and the impact of constant, careful indoctrination. Who's right here? Well, Pape has no experience interviewing captured terrorists as Sageman has, let alone ever acquired the sort of first-hand knowledge Sageman did as a CIA agent working alongside al Qaeda, Taliban, and other Afghan resistance movements to the Soviet-backed Afghan government after the Soviet intervention in that country in the late 1970s. (For Sageman's 2004 book, Understanding Terror Networks, click here.)

What emerges, then, in Pape's treatment of Islamic fundamentalism at the start of Chapter 7 --- remember, for 3 pages and no more? Relying on a few sources, most unreliable --- and the four that are reliable misconstrued or misused by him --- Pape unfolds little else than a typical Dying-to-Win whitewash job of radical Islam and its almost total monopoly of suicide terrorism since 1980.

And that's not the end. It gets worse for Pape.

 

HOW SO?

Because the Jihadist Fundamentalists Claim That Islamic Traditions Clearly Justify and Encourage Jihadi Violence and Terror, and They're Right

What Robert Pape says in chapter 7 --- that jihad has nothing to do with Islamic suicide-terror, any more than Islamic groups happen to have a near-total monopoly of suicidal attacks since 1980, a good 94.4% of the total --- happens to conflict head-on with what such authorities on Islamic credos and traditions as Osama bin Laden and the new Hamas Prime Minister in the Palestinian areas happen to say? Or, come to that --- as you'll see in a few moments here --- with what the Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary dictator of Clerical-Fascist Iran after 1978, said from a Shi-ite position? All of these authorities, whether Sunni or Shi-ite, insist that waging jihadist-war against infidels in the name of pure Islam is the duty of all Muslims everywhere.