Many years ago, when I studied US slavery in college courses, I learned that most so-called scholarship on slavery prior to the US Civil Rights Movement had to be trashed because of the unspeakably racist portrayal of slaves as happy to serve their masters & incapable of higher aspirations. When I took up the study of Kashmir, I found that a good share of the available scholarship was US State Department-type analysis of little use in understanding the popular movement for self-determination. But when it comes to studying US wars, in particular the problems of fundamentalist militias (like the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS), one has to plow through a mountain of war mongering & Islamophobic rubbish to understand the complexities–& that’s without ceding an inch to the horrific politics of those groups. The so-called ‘war on terror’ has corrupted scholarship as racism, & misogyny always have–or rather as a continuation of that white & male supremacist tradition.