Jamie Walker: The Australian | September 20, 2008
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24374073-601,00.html
SOME of Australia’s top thinkers on national security have opened a new front in the culture wars – over whether a postmodernist interpretation of terrorism is brainwashing our next generation of military leaders.
At the centre of the intensely personal battle is the appointment as an associate professor at the Australian Defence Force Academy of Anthony Burke – who after claiming he was being misrepresented as “pro-terrorist”, has demanded his chief critic be investigated for academic misconduct. Dr Burke, 42, complained to James Cook University over an article in Quadrant magazine by Merv Bendle, a senior lecturer in history and communications, which claimed university terrorism studies had been hijacked by a “neo-Marxist, postmodernist orthodoxy” among academics.
Another senior Canberra academic, Paul Pickering, of the Australian National University, fired off a separate protest to the Townsville-based university, but stopped short of calling for action against Dr Bendle.
The barrage of complaints and counter-claims brought to a head a row that began two months ago when Carl Ungerer, former national security adviser to the federal Labor leadership, questioned Dr Burke’s appointment to the defence force academy as “eyebrow-raising”.
Dr Burke withdrew his complaint against Dr Bendle yesterday after conceding “it may be that administrative action is not the best way to address the problem”.
He told The Weekend Australian: “I remain deeply unhappy about Dr Bendle’s accusations, and the violation of scholarly protocols they represent.”
Dr Bendle, 57, turned up the heat on Dr Burke, who describes his political orientation as “liberal-left”, by singling him out for being part of an academic clique that had compromised university terrorism studies.
“In the war on terror, a main battleground has become the universities where Islamist groups openly recruit members while an updated, post-9/11 version of the old neo-Marxist, postmodernist orthodoxy on terrorism dominates among academics,” Dr Bendle wrote in the latest edition of Quadrant, a standard-bearer for Australia’s conservative intelligentsia.
Dr Bendle accused Dr Burke of trying to deny the right of countries such as Australia to defend themselves against attack by terrorists. In doing so, “one wonders how students at the ADFA would feel if they are asked to place their lives on the line for Australia in Afghanistan, Iraq or other battlegrounds in the war on terror”, Dr Bendle wrote.
Describing the ADFA man’s published writings as “astonishing” for someone who was responsible for educatin ...
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