Research ‘blames West for terror’

TERRORISM research in Australia is skewed towards the concept that Western policies are to blame and fails to explore fundamental questions about the nature of terrorists and the ideology driving them. University of Queensland terrorism researchers Carl Ungerer, a foreign affairs and national security adviser to former federal Labor leader Simon Crean, and David Martin Jones yesterday criticised the direction of terrorism research in Australia for ignoring the role of radical Islamism in breeding terrorists.

ARC chief executive Peter Hoj was forced to defend the council’s funding of terrorism research earlier this week after a Flinders University sociologist, Riaz Hassan, awarded more than $800,000 to study suicide terrorism, proposed to interview terrorist leaders.

What a novel approach. I can’t imagine why Churchill didn’t think to interviw Hitler to try and work out why he was at war with Germany. What was Riaz Hassan going to do – Phone up Osama’s PA and request an interview? Clearly, the 800 grand would be better spent building an assylum for socialologists to keep them out of harms way