EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION: ‘When people are imprisoned, tortured, displaced, or silenced by governments supported by the United States, they may see the United States as a participant in their oppression’
A critical race theorist and retired law professor said the 9/11 terrorist attacks need to be understood through America’s history of “whiteness” and “oppression.”
While Vernellia Randall begins her 25th anniversary essay by calling the attacks “indefensible,” she offers up several defenses of the attacks.
The former University of Dayton law professor follows a pattern of terrorism apologists who seem to condemn violence while suggesting it can be rationalized.
Commenting on the 1953 coup of Iran’s prime minister, Randall argues the U.S. acted hypocritically, which has “consequences.”
“American officials have routinely spoken about democracy while supporting repression when repression served American economic, military, or geopolitical interests,” she wrote. “That contradiction has consequences.”
She continued:
When people are imprisoned, tortured, displaced, or silenced by governments supported by the United States, they may see the United States as a participant in their oppression. Their anger does not necessarily stop with their immediate rulers.
And then: “Terrorism remains the responsibility of those who commit it. But refusing to examine the conditions under which terrorism develops is not patriotism. It is deliberate historical blindness.”
In other words, terrorists are responsible for what they did, which is bad, but also maybe they were pushed to do so, Randall seems to say.
This line of argument is not new.
Former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil argued the October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks on Israel were needed “to break the cycle.”
“It felt frightening that we had to reach this moment in the Palestinian struggle. I remember I didn’t sleep for a number of days,” Khalil said last year on a podcast.
He also said the Palestinians “couldn’t avoid such a moment.”
It is a clever trick. Khalil and Randall appear to be condemning terrorist violence while with a wink and nudge saying they understand why people acted the way they did.
The law professor’s comments could be dismissed as a clumsily worded argument if she did not have a history of maligning victims.
“Charlie Kirk, White Supremacist, Dead at 31,” Randall wrote last year.
After calling Turning Point and Kirk racists, the critical race theorist danced on his grave. Kirk had previously said that there would be some gun deaths as part of the Second Amendment.
Randall did not express any sympathy for the slain husband and father of two children beyond a brief line about it being a “personal tragedy.”
Instead, Randall wrote “In the end, the violence he rationalized and the racial fear he amplified converged in his own fate.”
“That is the legacy he leaves behind—a stark reminder that when a nation tolerates racism and violence as the ‘price of liberty,’ both become self-perpetuating forces that consume even their champions,” she wrote.
What will Professor Randall leave behind?
A legacy of hatred for conservative values and a distorted worldview that finds sympathy for terrorists but not for slain dads who were practicing their free speech.
