Whitewashing jihad has long been a cottage industry in academe, where professors twist logic and ignore evidence to insist that peace will blossom if only wishful thinking prevails. Writing for Campus Watch, Andrew Harrod reports on a recent lecture by Duke prof Ellen McClarney that perfectly illustrates this fantasy world in which jihad brings peace rather than war. His piece appears today at FrontPage Magazine:
Ellen McLarney, who teaches Asian and Middle Eastern studies at Duke, would have you believe that a "pacifist struggle for civil jihad" led by Islamic feminists offers a benign "alternative kind of jihad" to that practiced by Islamist terrorists worldwide.
She peddled her thesis to about twenty listeners (mostly graduate students) in a February 8 George Washington University lecture, reprising discussion of her recent book, Soft Force: Women in Egypt's Islamic Awakening. McLarney's lecture omitted the totalitarian jihadist ideology underlying what she described as a "protracted struggle with non-democratic regimes over matters of human rights."
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