Much Ado About... What?

Californian professor claims Osama bin Laden is a FREEDOM FIGHTER in book he has made required reading for students

Was the headline that I followed to the Daily Mail, I found more to think about once I got there.  The quote from the book that is causing the controversy follows:

"The Al Qaeda movement of Osama bin Laden is one example of an attempt to free a country (in this case, Saudi Arabia) from a corrupt and repressive regime propped up by a neocolonial power (in this case, the United States),"

The Problem

The problem here is that the quote is, mostly, true.  Saudi Arabia is indeed a corrupt and repressive regime, they are propped up by the United States, and one of the goals of Al Qaeda is the elimination of the Saudi monarchy. 

Now don't get me wrong, I don't think Osama bin Laden was a freedom fighter as I think his primary goal was simply to replace one corrupt and repressive regime with another.  It is indisputable that the House of Saud is the antithesis of the principles our country was built upon but as Egypt so perfectly illustrates, the devil you know is far better than the devil you don't.  

So far, the only place I have seen bin Ladin called a "Freedom Fighter" is in headlines about this professor and his book and not in any of the excerpts from the book itself.

Liberal Bias?

Nor do I dispute the student's allegation that the professor suffers from liberal bias:

He was encouraging us to be activists, the whole last part of the course was about how to cause "positive change"... but his examples of positive change were all stuff like Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and raising the minimum wage.

After all, even liberal professors can see the liberal bias in American colleges and universities. In a UCLA study 12.4% of professors are identified as far left, 50.3% as liberal, 25.4% as 'middle-of-the-road' and only 11.5% as conservative... the opposite of far left, the far right garners a mere 0.4%

The Problem part II

The problem in and of itself isn't professors that are liberal but the lack of professors that are conservative.  For the most part the conversation on campus is one-sided and that is the true problem.  

From what little I've been able to garner from articles, Dr Emmit Evans is a good liberal professor, I'd probably enjoy taking his class.  If only we had more conservative professors just like him.

"The Al Qaeda movement of Osama bin Laden is one example of an attempt to free a country (in this case, Saudi Arabia) from a corrupt and repressive regime propped up by a neocolonial power (in this case, the United States),"

Think about it.