As Islamic terrorist attacks increase in the West, so, too, does the obfuscation of Middle East studies academia.  By employing the predictable tropes of poverty, alienation, workplace violence, the need for gun control, bullying, "Islamophobia," and other alleged Western ills, academics avoid assigning responsibility to the actual perpetrators or their Islamist ideology. Such has been the reaction to the December 2 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, which authorities were slow to describe as a terrorist attack, despite early evidence that married shooters Syed Rizwan Farooq and Tashfeen Malik had radical sympathies, including with ISIS.  This led to speculation that, not coincidentally, omitted the actual culprit. Omid Safi, director of Duke University's Islamic Studies Center, immediately jumped on the gun control bandwagon and – echoing President Obama's recent gaffe following the latest Paris attacks – claimed that mass...(Read Full Article)