Former United States Ambassador Thomas W. Simons, Jr. spoke to an intimate group of students yesterday as part of a two-week-long visit to campus as the first Provost’s Visiting Professor at Cornell. Simons, a historian who served as ambassador to Poland and later Pakistan, discussed U.S. relations with the Muslim world, explaining that the use of terrorism as a political tool is relatively recent.
“The current crisis which is producing radical Islamism that validates terror as a political weapon doesn’t go back to the seventh century …. It is specific to 1970, when this reached its high water mark