IFAW Panel Discussion at Penn (10/22)

On Monday, October 22, the University of Pennsylvania hosted its first major event for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (renamed Terrorism Awareness Week at Penn to placate the varsity Ikhwan), a panel discussion that featured Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes and two Penn professors, terrorism expert Stephen Gale and War on Terror critic Ian Lustick. The Daily Pennsylvanian has a brief summary of the event along with some video clips.

My summary is attached below. And like Hunter S. Thompson, I am never afraid to insert myself into the narrative.

Dr. Pipes unfortunately arrived more than thirty minutes late, which threw a monkey wrench into the planned format. Rather than conducting a true panel discussion, the participants gave short, informal talks and then took questions. Prof. Lustick spoke first and accounted for most of the highlights / lowlights (see below). Prof. Gale followed him by discussing terrorism issues from a largely tactical standpoint and criticizing universities for offering embarrassingly few resources to help students grasp this important phenomenon. Dr. Pipes closed with a more strategic perspective, identifying radical Islam as the enemy and proposing to bolster moderate forces in the Arab and Muslim world.

But Prof. Lustick clearly stole the show. He opened the event by describing the reaction to 9/11 as overblown, even chiding networks for repeatedly showing footage of the attacks on the Twin Towers. He claimed that this had traumatized viewers into an over-exaggerated sense of the terrorist threat -- which he believes is quite minimal for America -- thus feeding into the aims of a "neocon cabal" that was eager for war in the Middle East.

In response to his implication that 9/11 was a one-off event and that terrorism is little to worry about, I recited to him a list of thwarted and failed terror attacks against Western nations over the past eighteen months: the Toronto terror plot, the trans-Atlantic airlines plot, the Fort Dix plot, the JFK fuel lines plot, the London car bomb plot, and the German and Danish plots -- not to mention the recent conviction of Al Qaeda's would-be dirty bomber / apartment bomber Jose Padilla. His response? That many of these plots were spawned in Europe and, hence, that terrorism is mostly their problem rather than ours; that most of the thwarted American plots are, in reality, cases of entrapment; and that the greatest domestic threat uncovered in the U.S. over the past few years featured a Christian extremist whom almost no one has heard of -- because the media and politicians are fixated on the Muslim-as-terrorist template. (Prof. Lustick's next appearance will be at the local comedy club.)

Overall, the event was informative and the audience was respectful -- an excellent start to what is sure to be an interesting week.