The battle against the Islamic State could be lost on the campuses of American universities: moral clarity is not welcome in multicultural-obsessed academia

Jihadism and ‘the language of good and evil’

By Clifford D. May 

”The battle of Waterloo,” the Duke of Wellington is supposed to have said, “was won on the playing fields of Eton.” The battle against the Islamic State could be lost on the campuses of American universities.

Among the reasons: The dominant ideology in academia is multiculturalism. To a multiculturalist, being judgmental is a cardinal sin — not least when it comes to those whose goal is to defeat and destroy the United States and its allies. It therefore should come as no surprise to see The New York Times giving space for an op-ed by Michael J. Boyle, an associate professor of political science at La Salle University in Philadelphia. His theme: The “disturbing return of the moralistic language once used to describe al Qaeda in the panicked days after the 9/11 attacks.”

Mr. Boyle is particularly exercised by President Obama’s reference to the Islamic State as “a ‘cancer’ spreading across the Middle East.” He hears in that “an eerie echo of President George W. Bush’s description of the global war on terrorism as a campaign against ‘evildoers.’”

Why is that a problem? It led to “foreign wars begun in the name of stamping out ‘evildoers’” — wars that incurred “huge costs and reputational damage.” So the preferable option would have been to do what? Refer Osama bin Laden to the U.N. Human Rights Council?

In any case, Mr. Boyle doesn’t think the Islamic State is as malevolent as charged. In his considered opinion, it “operates less like a revolutionary terrorist movement that wants to overturn the entire political order in the Middle East than a successful insurgent group that wants a seat at that table.”

How could anyone be so moralistic as to deny the Islamic State a place to sit — just because its warriors mass-murder minorities, enslave women and sever journalists’ heads?

The professor adds: “The language of good and evil may provide a comforting sense of moral clarity, but it rarely, if ever, produces good policy.”

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