A Failure of Academia

This is a draft I wasn't going to post but it seemed to fit in well with the post "Thailand Identifies the Enemy".
Walid Phares is a Professor of Middle East Studies and a Terrorism Analyst. His analysis are posted on Walid Phares . This is his first article for Front Page Magazine
---Larry Everett

"9/11: A Failure of Academia
By Dr. Walid Phares
Front Page Magazine| July 28, 2004

A few months ago, when the 9/11 Commission released footage of the communications between several command centers and the transportation network during the dramatic minutes of September 11, one phrase chilled me to the bones. It summarized how unprepared America was to face to the Jihadist onslaught. A pilot of an F-16 rushing to the scene over the Pentagon screamed on his radio: "God, the Russians had us...they had us."

Since the end of the 1990s, Americans, were subjected to a campaign of intellectual subversion. The Jihadist factor, although identified by U.S. intelligence agencies as the driving force behind terrorism throughout the past decade, didn't make it into the national psyche. Hence, this American jet pilot automatically blamed "Russians," even 11 years after the end of the Cold War.

The 9/11 Commission had a historic opportunity to confront this reality last week. After nearly two years, the U.S.-mandated entity assessed the threat and attempted to reveal how we failed to prevent this catastrophe..."

[snip]

"The commissioners blamed 9/11 on a failure of "management" and a failure of "policy.” Indeed, not responding to the terrorist threat during the Clinton years proved perilous. It logically led to mismanagement of crisis. If you don't act in response to the enemy, you will encourage him. That was what happened in the 1990s. Not responding to the 1993 attacks led to a series of additional attacks around the world, culminating in the 1998 embassy bombings. Responding inappropriately that summer (bombing a factory in Sudan and bombing an empty tent in Afghanistan) emboldened the Jihad warriors. The strike against the USS Cole was their next move. The silence that followed the naval attack hastened Mohammed Atta's plans..."

[snip]

"When an FBI agent rushed to her supervisors to inform them that "Saudi men" were learning to fly but not land airplanes, no one lifted a finger. Agents were told that CIA analysts were receiving cable after cable indicating that Jihadist elements were mounting operations against the mainland, and possibly planning to use planes. But the agency's political bosses had not produced guidelines to help the analysts properly recognize the terrorist threat. In 1998, bin Laden himself declared war against infidel America. The White House did not hear and Congress did not see. Back in 1994, a former CNN journalist, now an MSNBC Terrorism analyst, Steven Emerson, filmed Jihad preachers in New York calling for violence and showed it to the nation. Not only was there no response, but Wahhabi political factions began systematically lobbying against a crackdown. Worse, all experts who attempted to warn America were suppressed by Arabist-Islamist factions. The Wahhabi Lobby claimed that, "warning from the Jihad threat was a cover for pro-Zionist propaganda to advance Israel's interests!" ...

[snip]

"Americans have a great imagination. What the U.S. lacked was a basic education about Jihadist terror, the worse enemy we have met, the enemy who visited destruction upon New York and Washington in 2001. The pilot that morning embodied the state of America’s education about radical Islam and terrorism, not the state of our imagination. Some academic elites had insisted that after the Soviet Union collapsed, the West had no real enemies. Hence, the last foe the pilot knew was Russia. Don't blame him for what he said when he saw the smoke over the capital and Manhattan. He, along with millions of Americans, was told for a whole decade that Islamic Fundamentalism isn't a threat. Al-Qaeda was attacking us from one side, and our educators were failing us from the other."
[Read the Whole Thing]

The money quote : "Our leaders didn't understand the gravity of the threat."