Then came the tweet.
On March 26, 2015, Deepa Kumar – a Rutgers professor of media and Middle Eastern Studies whose career we’ve been tracing this week – tweeted the following: “Yes ISIS is brutal, but US is more so, 1.3 million killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan #NoToWar.”
In previous years, she’d already taken to social media to swipe at her class enemies. In one Facebook post, she encouraged her friends to use the word douchebag “to describe rich, white entitled males and their misogynistic, racist behavior!” In another post, she smeared Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim whose campaign for the rights of Muslim women has made her a terrorist target and obliged her to have round-the-clock bodyguards. To many people, Hirsi Ali is a heroine; to Kumar, however, she is nothing more or less than an “islamophobe [sic] and native informant” – the latter apparently meaning that by shedding a light on Islamic misogyny she’s ratted on her own.
But these Facebook rants hadn’t sparked worldwide attention. Nor had Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire – the 2012 book in which she spun her views on the topic into book length, and which received glowing reviews in such venues as the International Socialist Review, the Egyptian news site Al-Akhbar, and the website of the Florida branch of the Council on American Islamic Relations.
But the ISIS tweet was another matter. Suddenly Kumar, whose years of defending terrorists and demonizing Islamophobia in academic journals and left-wing rags had taken place entirely under the radar of the general public, was making international headlines. The Daily Mail rounded up a few outraged responses. Max Abrams, a professor of political science at Northeastern University, expressed sympathy for Kumar’s students: “Only a complete ideologue could claim the United States is more brutal than Islamic State.” Well, as we’ve seen, Abrams was certainly right there: there are few ideologues more complete than Deepa Kumar. As Abrams noted, the U.S., unlike ISIS, “isn’t in the habit of rounding up thousands of young girls to have them raped dozens of times…or throwing homosexuals off rooftops.”
Meanwhile, Marion Smith of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation responded to some of Kumar’s positive tweets about Marxism, saying that no professor should be teaching young people to admire the “deadly ideology” that had taken the lives of tens of millions in China, Russia, and elsewhere. It was also noted that the previous year, Kumar had helped lead a successful movement to keep former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from speaking at Rutgers.
Perhaps the most withering response to Kumar’s tweet came from Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a counterterrorism expert and professor at Marine Corps University whose parents had fled from Communism in Hungary – in other words, a man with no fatuous illusions about either Communism or Islam. Commenting in a TV interview, Gorka deplored Kumar’s comparison of “ISIS, which is crucifying people; which is killing children who aren’t fasting during Ramadan; that has used detonation cord to decapitate their prisoners,” with the U.S., “a nation that saved Europe twice in the last hundred years, and even in the 1990s saved the Muslims of Bosnia.”
But the dust-up ended soon enough; and Kumar remains at Rutgers, where she continues to indoctrinate students some of whose parents are paying upwards of $40,000 for the privilege.
Sounds like most of my college professors
LOL too true.
Well, US saved Muslims of Bosnia, all right – after four years of systemic rape of Muslim women in numerous rape-camps, with number of raped reaching 25 thousand per Red Cross, and these are only reports made by victims who were sane and courageous enough to report on their ordeal; than longest siege of the city in recorded history, which is Sarajevo, where 12 thousand civilians were slaughtered with mortars barrages and sniping, of these 12 thousand 2000 thousands were children age 0 to 18; than concentration camps and death camps in north-western Bosnia; than Srebrenica. these are just few main events fro top of my mind. At the end of this genocidal endeavor by both Catholics and Orthodox Christians, some 120 thousand of Bosnian Muslim perished, of which 100 thousand were civilians slaughtered in the first year of the genocide. Throughout of genocide French president Mitterrand and John Major British govt showed too obvious that their harts and mind belong to Milošević and Serbs, with all too many of UN, EU operatives, British and American “negotiators” (Cutiller, Vance, Owen, Stoltenberg) dragging the “peace process” with concessions to Serbia and the Serbs, UN generals (Morillon, MacKenzie) who never stopped denying genocide. Eventually, Clinton had to be persuaded by a shrewd move by Elie Wiesel, and almost being embarrassed by Elie’s famous The Perils of Indifference speech.
So, circumvent mentioning Bosnia in really long arch-over and avoid using its Muslims as a small change, in a claptrap like these, on who is patriot and who traitor, and what Islam is or isn’t. You have Russia practically owns Serbian politics, media and the state, and extends its influence on Serb held part of Bosnia with even tighter grip, not to mention what they are doing to Montenegro.