Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Three Podcast Six

            Popular culture—movies, television, comedy, art, drama—has explored the Caliphate, and so has academia. There have been myriad panels, discussion groups, speaking engagements, and resolutions passed on university campuses. Some see it as a campus craze. This is important because universities prepare future generations of journalists, public intellectuals, and scholars for leadership worldwide. Professors and other intellectuals shape public debate. On television, radio, the internet, and social media, professors are a key source of informed commentary on the Islamic State. Today’s university students are tomorrow’s political and cultural leaders.               Debates about the Islamic State are often framed within the broader context of Western–Islamic relations. In universities’ Middle East Studies and liberal arts departments, there is broad agreement that Western policies have provoked Muslims around the world. Some of this consensus reflects the red-green campus alliance, an informal and confusing solidarity among left-leaning professors and Muslims. As discussed earlier, leftists and Islamists seem like strange bedfellows, given their often-clashing views on women, homosexuality, religious piety, and certain democratic norms, yet both converge on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of establishing “cultural hegemony” and are highly critical of existing Western values.               Within this campus alliance, there is broad agreement that Western foreign policy in the Middle East has often been ill-advised, counterproductive, and unjust. Many professors view the Caliphate's popularity as an unintended consequence of American-led wars in Iraq and of general American belligerence. These acerbic themes are underscored in academic publications, conferences, and campus-based advocacy. For example, celebrated American scholar Noam Chomsky holds that the root causes of the terrorist attacks in Paris were the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.               This was also true of Columbia professor Hamid Dabashi, who equated “ISIL’s atrocities [with] Trump’s vulgarities.” The behaviors of both the Caliphate and the presidential aspirant were “pornotopic.” Dabashi explained to al Jazeera that “pornotopic” refers to “the spatial formation of biopolitics in modernity, a dreadful exhibitionism transcending the false binaries we usually make between democracy and terrorism, between modern and medieval, between normative and barbaric.”                             University life has offered opportunities to prankster activists. James O’Keefe, a conservative provocateur, turned his attention to the academy. Pretending to be a Muslim, O’Keefe asked Cornell University’s assistant dean for students to invite a Caliphate “freedom fighter” to lead a campus “training camp” under the guise of a “sports camp.” The dean agreed. After the gag was revealed, O’Keefe said Cornell owed “people an apology, or at least an explanation.” But Cornell’s president offered neither.               At a similar sting at Catholic University, an undercover student journalist posed as a spokesperson for “Sympathetic Students in Support of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.” She confided, “I want to start fundraising efforts on campus, and what I want to do is raise funds to send overseas.” She received sympathetic consideration. At Barry College, a faculty adviser also agreed to permit fundraising for the Islamic State. This campus controversy is typified by two scholars with opposing views. Both Mark LeVine and Daniel Pipes have much to say about the Caliphate and political Islam, as discussed below.