By Christopher Chow

A new class at California State University at Hayward, "The Sexuality of Terrorism," claims that all wars are caused by men's sexual aggression.

"Well, I think one way of putting it is that terrorism is on a continuum that starts with violence within the family, battery against women, violence against women in society, all the way up to organized militaries that are supported by taxpayer money," says ethnic studies professor Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz.

"The Sexuality of Terrorism" will offer a "response to many questions not being asked regarding the feminist perspective on 9-11 and the military response." Ortiz's theory is that wars and violence are not a continuation of politics by other means, but are caused by men seeking sexual fulfillment in killing. "Armed conflict is not essentially hell for those who fight it, but rather a form of eroticism. The religious fervor, close to ecstatic and hostile to women, combined with organized mass murder presents a clear case of eroticized war."

The class will focus mainly on the current conflict in Afghanistan, where, according to Ortiz, the United States is the terrorist aggressor while the Taliban is the victim. She teaches that human rights violations committed by the Taliban government were done so at the instruction of the United States in order to resist the Soviet invasion of the 1980s. The Taliban did not come to power in Afghanistan until 1996. The Soviet military departed Afghanistan in 1989.

To Professor Ortiz, the current war in Afghanistan is not about freeing the Afghan people and stopping bin Laden's terrorist network, but rather the US military releasing sexual tension by bombing Afghanistan. She claims that the United States subjects its soldiers to pornographic films before going into battle. "We really have the fox guarding the chicken house in the [Bush] administration. In this administration are some of the most documented terrorists on the face of the Earth."

Much of the media today is also to blame for the current violence, professes Ortiz. Oscar winning films like Braveheart and Gladiator depict the romantic heroes as dark warriors who kill, and die bloody deaths. As a result, women fall in love with them. "Pure love is linked to the idea that love blooms, lives briefly, and ends in death by betrayal, murder or suicide….This hero suggests death as a symbol of manhood. [The hero's] eagerness to kill himself becomes a means of identity [and is] what fatally attracts men to such action, what attracts other men to the men already committed to such action, and what attracts women to those men."

The class's proposed solution to warfare is feminism. Just wars, according to Ortiz have been won by women workers. The United States' military is the cause of and not the solution to terrorism. "Well, I think freedom has not come automatically. And it has come not through soldiers fighting nearly as much as workers organizing and giving their blood where troops have been called out against them in their strikes in the early days, against the mine workers. These were U.S. troops that were doing that." Ortiz wrote in her essay Declaration of War on Male Supremacy, "no revolution could have been conceived or carried out without the initiatives, strategic planning, soldiering, sacrifices and contributions of women, not to speak of their cooking, cleaning, comforting, and fucking the 'great warriors' which took all the time women could have been writing, theorizing, creating art."

Now teaching in her 28th year at Cal State-Hayward, Professor Ortiz has been an outspoken activist in Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, the Revolutionary Union, and the African National Congress. She even took part in Vietnam Peace 25's celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the communist victory in Vietnam.

Professor Ortiz is also an author of such books as Outlaw Women and The Great Sioux Nation. She's best known for her 1997 book, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie. Angry about her childhood during the Depression, she accuses European explorers and settlers of being "foot soldiers of empire." European colonization is blamed for all poverty and violence in America, as if these problems did not exist prior to Columbus' arrival. She demands "reparations" from the United States to blacks and Native Americans. In California State-Hayward's newspaper, she suggested that the United States apologize for American slavery by disavowing all U.S. Presidents and the government that existed prior to the Civil War. "The United States, among other things, would have to cease honoring its 'founding fathers' and the founding documents, as well as each and everyone [sic] of the administrations that maintained the legality and constitutionality of slavery… the revision of approved U.S. history textbooks, national monuments, and government rhetoric in much the same manner that Germany and Austria were required to do after World War II." She even accuses Andrew Jackson of waging a "final solution" against Natives Americans.

Red Dirt received critical praise from the Los Angeles Times, Publisher's Weekly, and was featured at the Anarchist Bookfair of San Francisco. Left History raved, "Her book makes clear that right-wing populism derives much of its power from the souring of radical hopes and the repression of genuinely egalitarian political movements."

Ortiz's newest project is helping to launch an Oakland, California newspaper, War Times, devoted to protesting the current conflict in Afghanistan.

Cal State-Hayward is not the only college that takes a controversial stance toward the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Harvard's "The Economics of National Security" and "Terrorism and the Politics of Knowledge" both criticize American military action in Afghanistan.

Besides "The Sexuality of Terrorism," Cal State-Hayward is also offering "Contemporary Perspectives on Justice, War and Terrorism," "Terrorism: Afghanistan and the Emerging World Order," and "War and Peace," which teaches "Alternative strategies for fighting terrorism."

These courses exploit the suffering of the victims of terrorism by not only politicizing academics, but also by suggesting that U.S. military response is equivalent to what bin Laden did on September 11.

"The Sexuality of Terrorism" is merely one of many politically charged campaigns organized by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. "Ideally, I believe human beings have to learn how to work out conflict and issues through negotiation…. We would be better off with the feminist values, that women are also a part of the patriarchal system. But as women have become liberated and developed ideas for global peace, men can learn these as well. But it would be a whole different structure of society."