Jocelyne Cesari is “senior research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University, and director of the Islam in the West Program at Harvard University.” In this piece she epitomizes what is wrong with academic discourse about Islam today: she doesn’t even mention the blazingly obvious reason for “the appeal of radical anti-Western groups like ISIS among European Muslims,” which she purports to explain in this piece: the European Muslims who embrace the Islamic State find its interpretation of the Qur’an and Sunnah, and its resultant call for Muslims to wage jihad for the sake of Allah, convincing on Islamic grounds.

Cesari, as part of the academic establishment in Middle East Studies, which marches in a dreary intellectual lockstep, and as a faculty member at two Saudi-funded universities, Georgetown and Harvard, cannot examine that possibility even long enough to dismiss it. If she mentioned it and asserted that these European Muslims were falling for a transparently false understanding Islam, as Barack Obama, David Cameron, and so many others have recently claimed, she would entangle herself in the same falsehoods and absurdities that make them look ridiculous today. But if she acknowledged that the Islamic State is basing its appeal upon understandings of Islam that have firm ground in Islamic scripture, tradition and law, she would be committing a mortal sin in the eyes of the Middle East Studies establishment, which has ruled out even examination of that possibility as “Islamophobic” and “hateful.” She does mention “the powerful presence of the Salafi version of Islam in the religious market of ideas,” but makes no effort to explain why its presence is powerful, and ends up apparently ascribing that power to the discrimination that Muslims supposedly face in Europe.

So all that is left for Cesari are the possibilities that European Muslims are drawn to the Islamic State because they are poor and deprived, which she dismisses in her opening paragraph, or that they embrace the Islamic State because European states are discriminating against Muslims and preventing them from integrating into European society. She ultimately chooses the latter option, despite its patent absurdity: European Muslims are not integrating into European societies not because those societies are “racist” and “Islamophobic,” but because Muslim leaders in Europe have denounced the possibility of assimilation and worked energetically to ensure that Muslim communities in Europe would remain separate and aloof from the larger society that those leaders hold in contempt as jahiliyya.

Jocelyne Cesari is, of course, not unique. She is just another establishment professor of Islam, of the type that American universities today hire by the pound in mass quantities. Her ridiculous analysis here is mainstream thinking in American universities today — which is one reason why the understanding of the jihad threat among government officials at all levels is so abysmally low.

“Europe Needs to Embrace Islam,” by Jocelyne Cesari, New York Times, August 29, 2014 (thanks to Thomas Pellow):