9-11: treason in the academic comfort zone?

She believes that the concern with terrorism in America doesn’t arise from the fact that the country is actually under attack by well-resourced terrorists, but is merely “generated by the media (for ratings) and the government (for political benefits derived from fear generation and domestic political compliance)”.

This tendency to link anti-terrorism with racism, genocide and “settler societies”, and so on, is also exemplified by the special “Regimes of Terror Issue” of borderlands published in 2006. The editor, Goldie Osuri, from Macquarie University, claims that the Australian Government, under the auspices of the US, operates a “terror formation” that produces “racialised laws, sovereignties, securities, market economies … and territories”.

Moreover, she claims that these “regimes of terror” are inherent in Australian history, and that the contributors to the special issue “have carefully traced the historical continuities within racial and colonial relations of power with the post 9-11 discourses of security and terror that enable the contemporary formation of regimes of terror [in Australia]”.

These other contributions include articles on the “Draconian Counter-Terrorism Laws and the Déjà Vu of Indigenous Australians”; “Terror Australis: White Sovereignty and the Violence of Law”; “Sovereignty, Torture and Blood: Tracing Genealogies and Rethinking Politics”; and “Live and Let Die: Colonial Sovereignties and the Death Worlds of Necrocapitalism” by Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, who is Professor of Strategic Management and Director of Research at the International Graduate School of Business, at the University of South Australia.

So predictable has such work proven to be that it has been remarked by a researcher involved in the field that it might be a good thing that so few Australian academics write about terrorism, because the quality of their work is so bad that the world is better off without it!

Nevertheless, we must expect and demand more from the Australian academic community, otherwise it won’t be long before we see endorsements of the view put forward by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed of the University of Sussex, that 9-11 was an act of “state-sponsored self-terrorism” carried out by America against itself to further its nefarious ends.