Someone is definitely into stirring the pot here. However what remains unacceptable are apologists for Islam any more than apologists for Islam's sister Nazism which drew inspiration from Islam.
So he may be onto something that long since needed to be said.
The West is not yet committed to a world war aimed at demolishing Islam except all the reasons to support such an outcome are falling in to place. That it must happen is something that we all want to deny. The reality remains that Islam refuses to allow any form of liberalism in its culture at all. Western values continue to be spat on while they do anything to take advantage of those same values.
Yet they will all be beggars soon. The educated elite could well escape the Islamic trap but few others can.
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West Point professor calls on US military to target legal critics of war on terror
US military academy official William Bradford argues that attacks on
scholars’ home offices and media outlets – along with Islamic holy sites
– are legitimate
An assistant professor in the law department of the US military
academy at West Point has argued that legal scholars critical of the
war on terrorism represent a “treasonous” fifth column that should be
attacked as enemy combatants.
In a lengthy academic paper, the professor, William C Bradford,
proposes to threaten “Islamic holy sites” as part of a war against
undifferentiated Islamic radicalism. That war ought to be prosecuted
vigorously, he wrote, “even if it means great destruction, innumerable
enemy casualties, and civilian collateral damage”.
Other “lawful targets” for the US military in its war on terrorism,
Bradford argues, include “law school facilities, scholars’ home offices
and media outlets where they give interviews” – all civilian areas, but
places where a “causal connection between the content disseminated and
Islamist crimes incited” exist.
“Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, [dissenting]
scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are – at least in theory
– targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish
noncombatants from combatants, employ nonprohibited weapons, and
contribute to the defeat of Islamism,” Bradford wrote.
West Point is the revered undergraduate institution north of New York
City where the US army educates its future officer corps. It prides
itself on the rigor of its curriculum. Representatives from the school
said Bradford had only begun his employment there on 1 August.
Bradford’s article, Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of
Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column, appeared in the most
recent issue of the National Security Law Journal, a student-run
publication at the George Mason School of Law. Bradford clarifies that
the term means “treason of the professors”, itself an allusion to a
famous attack on French intellectuals from the 1920s.
In the paper, Bradford identifies himself as an “associate professor
of law, national security and strategy, National Defense University”,
seemingly his previous job before West Point. But a representative of
the National Defense University said Bradford was a contractor at the
prestigious Defense Department-run institution, “never an NDU employee
nor an NDU professor”.
It appears not to be the first time Bradford misrepresented his credentials. He resigned from Indiana University’s law school in 2005 after his military record showed he had exaggerated his service. (Among his paper’s criticisms of supposedly treasonous lawyers is “intellectual dishonesty”.)
The National Security Law Journal’s editor-in-chief has called the article’s publication a “mistake” and an “egregious breach of professional decorum”.
“We cannot ‘unpublish’ it, of course, but we can and do acknowledge
that the article was not presentable for publication when we published
it, and that we therefore repudiate it with sincere apologies to our
readers,” the editor-in-chief, Rick Myers, wrote on the journal’s
website.
Bradford does not clearly name his academic opponents, instead using
the neologistic acronym CLOACA, for “critical law of armed conflict
academy” to describe them. (In nature, “cloaca” is also the name of a
body cavity into which intestinal, reproductive and urinary tracts empty
in some animal species.)
The CLOACA, in turn, are part of a GMAC, or
“government-media-academic complex”, which Bradford defines as an
“aristocracy of senior government officials, elite media members, and
university faculty, which squeezes non-members from public colloquy and
shapes opinion on security, military and legal issues.”
This “clique of about forty” scholars, Bradford writes, have
“converted the US legal academy into a cohort whose vituperative
pronouncements on the illegality of the US resort to force and
subsequent conduct in the war against Islamism” represent a
“super-weapon that supports Islamist military operations” aimed at
“American political will” to fight. They are supported by “compliant
journalists” marked by “defeatism, instinctive antipathy to war, and
empathy for American adversaries”, but Bradford considers the lawyers a
greater threat.
The offending legal scholars “effectively tilt the battlefield
against US forces [and] contribute to timorousness and lethargy in US
military commanders”, he writes. They are among several “useful idiots”
who “separate Islam from Islamists by attributing to the former
principles in common with the West, including ‘justice and progress’ and
‘the dignity of all human beings’”.
Bradford
derisively quotes Barack Obama, who has prosecuted a globalized war
against al-Qaida and now the Islamic State, discussing “co-existence and
cooperation” with the Islamic world in his 2009 Cairo speech.
The West Point faculty member urges the US to wage “total war” on
“Islamism”, using “conventional and nuclear force and [psychological
operations]”, in order to “leave them prepared to coexist with the West
or be utterly eradicated”. He suggests in a footnote that “threatening
Islamic holy sites might create deterrence, discredit Islamism, and
falsify the assumption that decadence renders Western restraint
inevitable”.
Robert Chesney of the University of Texas, a founding editor of the
influential national-security law blog Lawfare, is one of the legal
scholars Bradford references as pernicious – for a 2011 paper that
largely defended Obama’s execution without trial of US citizen and
al-Qaida preacher Anwar al-Awlaki.
“It’s very hard to take this seriously except insofar as he may
actually be teaching nonsense like this to cadets at West Point,”
Chesney said.
Bradford did not respond to emails and phone messages for comment.
A spokesman for the US military academy, army lieutenant colonel
Christopher Kasker, told the Guardian: “Dr William Bradford was hired on
1 August 2015 at the US Military Academy. His article in the National
Security Law Journal titled ‘Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law
of Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column’ was written and
accepted for publication prior to his employment at West Point. The
views in the article are solely those of Dr Bradford and do not reflect
those of the Department of Defense, the United States army, the United
States Military Academy.”
The US military’s educational institutions have come under fire
before for promoting “total war” against Islam. In 2012, General Martin
Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, ordered a comprehensive scouring of anti-Islam training material after a course proposed “Hiroshima” tactics against Islamic holy sites, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary”.
The previous year, highly regarded counter-terrorism scholars
affiliated with the US army aided the FBI in eradicating similar
material from its own training. Those scholars came from West Point.
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