Hijacking Terrorism Studies - Mervyn Bendle

17 September 2008

Dr Mervyn Bendle of James Cook University in Townsville was one of the first people to warn of the dangers associated with Saudi Arabian funding coming into Australian universities. Last week he was the guest speaker at the annual Quadrant magazine dinner, and he focussed on the rise of a new academic field - Critical Terrorism Studies - which treats terrorism as a construcrt of the Western imagination, or else as a rational and justifiable response to Western evil.

ABC radio interview here (mp3). Quadrant speech here.

In his speech on Thursday night Dr Bendle focused on what he says is the rise of a whole new academic discourse in our universities, known as Critical Terrorism Studies. As much as possible it avoids mention of the religious roots of terrorist groups like al-Qa'eda. Instead, it sees terrorism as a construct of the Western imagination, and at the same time, paradoxically, as justified by Western misdeeds.

'In fact', he says, 'such arguments are based on a Manichean view of the world that has prevailed in the West for some 50 years, according to which the West is inherently evil and only the non-West is good, a great amorphous, but intrinsically benign 'Other' condemned to suffering by Western wickedness. Consequently the West deserves to be destroyed and has no moral right to fight back or protect itself.'

Well, in a week when Abdul Nacer Benbrika and six others have been convicted on terror offences in the Victorian Supreme Court, Merv Bendle says in the war on terror, our universities have become a major new battleground, and it is in the universities that the war of ideas is being lost.