From Ian:
Double Trouble: The Leftist Threat and the Islamist Threat
Double Trouble: The Leftist Threat and the Islamist Threat
Focusing on Islam, however, does not preclude worrying about the left. Both are worrisome. More to the point, they are not unrelated threats. It is unrealistic to think of the two ideological movements—the one secular, the other religious—as separate and distinct, as though we can afford to tackle the immediate threat first and the remote one later. In reality, leftism and Islamism are best understood as a combined threat. Radical leftists and radical Islamists share similar ideologies and goals and have formed numerous alliances, both tacit and not-so-tacit.The Real Problem With Academia Isn’t the Anti-Israel Boycotts; It’s the Horrible Ideas
The words “Islamism” and “Islamist” were chosen because of their similarity to “communism” and “communist,” but the ideological similarities between Islam and communism were noted long before the politicized terms came into common usage. The list of philosophers, historians and intellectuals who have likened Islam to communism includes Bertrand Russell, Arthur Koestler, Whittaker Chambers, Jules Monnerot, and Bernard Lewis. More tellingly, the three most influential Islamic theorists of the twentieth century—Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Maulana Maududi—were all deeply impressed with Soviet communism. Though they rejected the atheistic element of communism, they recognized its affinities with Islam, and their writings reflect the influence of leftist thought.
Just what is wrong with academia these days? If you’ve been reading Tablet, you are surely versed in the grand guignol that is the attempt by clusters of professors in a host of professional associations that have little or nothing to do with the Middle East to single out Israel as the world’s singular source of evil. It’s a fun story to follow, mainly because—as that great poet of power, Henry Kissinger, noted—the politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. With precision that would’ve made Newton swoon, for every BDS action there is an equal and opposite and much greater anti-BDS action, and unless you’ve got your mind set on becoming a post-modernist, post-colonialist, post-Focauldian doctoral candidate in a second-tier university, chances are you can live a happy and fulfilling life and never give the rumbles of a few nasty and misguided fools another thought.How to thwart terrorism at 29,000 feet, by the only pilot who ever did
But BDS isn’t the problem. What should concern us, what is truly harmful, isn’t what a few academic organizations choose to do, but what many academic departments choose to teach. And the spirit of what they choose to teach is intimated in Evelyn Barish’s thrilling new biography of Paul de Man.
With world attention focused on MH370, Uri Bar-Lev recalls how he saved his El Al passengers from an attempted skyjacking, and says other pilots should have been trained to do the same — on 9/11 and in countless other cases
On September 6, 1970, Bar-Lev, who had flown as a 16-year-old in the 1948 War of Independence and later during the 1956 War, was picked up from his Amsterdam hotel and brought to Schiphol airport to fly the second leg of El Al Flight 219 from Tel Aviv to New York. Before take-off, El Al’s security officer on duty at the airport told the pilot that there were four suspicious people seeking to board the flight. Two held Senegalese passports with consecutive numbers; two others, a couple, carried less suspicious looking Honduran passports, but all had ordered their tickets at the last minute.























