Jane Christensen was an associate professor of political science at North Carolina Wesleyan College. She received a B.A. from Howard University, a Master’s degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and a Ph.D. from Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy and the State University of New York at Albany.

On her academic website, Professor Christensen once posted a photograph that featured five rifle-brandishing guerrillas in ski masks and frogman suits; one of them was Professor Christensen herself. Emblazoned above the photo were the words: “Fighting The New World Order.”

Christensen taught a course called Politics 112, which was billed as “an introductory course in American government and politics.” In her syllabus, Christensen noted that the class would focus on American “preparations for war on the rest of the world,” and added: “We will focus specifically on how the ‘war on terrorism’ has granted unprecedented powers to the President, bypassed Congress and courts, and how it has undermined the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and specifically how it is moving us in the direction of a police state.”

Politics 112 featured only three readings. One text was a November 2001 editorial, titled “Bush’s War at Home: a Creeping Coup d’état,” from the World Socialist website. This piece asserted that America would soon be ruled by an “all-encompassing political police agency.”

The second text was a column about Jose Padilla, the al Qaeda-trained terror suspect, which appeared in the January 2004 issue of Counterpunch. This column contended that by detaining Padilla, the U.S. government had become a “tyranny,” and claimed that the way the Padilla “case is decided will determine whether or not democracy will continue to function in the United States.”

The lone book assigned by Christensen for the course was Democracy for the Few, a 2002 polemic by the Communist writer Michael Parenti. An outline of the book on Parenti’s website informs readers that it “tries to explain how democracy is incongruous with modern-day capitalism and is consistently violated by a capitalist social order.”

Parenti’s political tract was also required reading for Christensen’s class, “The American Presidency.” The key to success in this class lay in parroting Professor Christensen’s claim that the Bush administration has used the pretext of fighting terrorism to destroy democratic government. The first two questions on one of Christensen’s exams read:

1. “How has the war on terrorism contributed to the powers of the Bush presidency?”
2. “Discuss the sweeping attack on democratic rights under the Bush administration and what this means for the future of democratic government in America.”

Another Christensen class, “911: The Road to Tyranny,” promised to challenge the “official story” about the terrorist attacks. Professor Christensen’s syllabus explained: “This course is outside the scope of traditional ‘political science’ in many ways. First it is ‘unscientific’ in that it relies much on eyewitness accounts and speculation. Secondly, there is not yet a solid literature on the September 11 ‘attacks’ or on the war on terrorism.”

The course drew on a voluminous collection of conspiracy theories, all disputing the notion that terrorists were behind the 9/11 attacks. Typical is 9/11: The Great Illusion, a booklet by George Humphrey. Adapted from an eponymous documentary, it purports to show that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by a camarilla of powerful elites, and that the mainstream media then created a “great illusion” to obscure this reality.

Another recommended text was a 2002 book by the aforementioned Michael Parenti, who spent the Cold War supporting America’s Communist enemies. Parenti’s book, The Terrorism Trap, contends that the 9/11 attacks were a logical response to “U.S. Global Militarism” and “free trade.” The book includes a chapter titled “Did They Know Ahead of Time?” — which speculates that government officials had foreknowledge of the 9/11 hijackings but did nothing to avert them in order to gain a credible pretext for perpetual war, empire-building, and the enrichment of military contractors.

Also among the recommended readings for the course was a lineup of radiccal Left websites, including Counterpunch, the World Socialist Web Site, and the anti-Semitic site Rense.com. “These sites should be visited on a daily basis!” Christensen enthused on her website.

Professor Christensen also extolled the website Infowars.com, which she called “one of the best on the web.” Infowars.com has reported, among other things, that both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush White Houses were infested with homosexual prostitution rings of young boys sent by Soviet agents to engage in sodomy and espionage. It has reported further that the George W. Bush administration “knew” of the planned 9/11 attacks in advance and “they not only let it happen, they made it happen.” Another Infowars article, “How Bush’s Grandfather Helped Hitler’s Rise to Power,” accuses the Bush family of having funded the military buildup of the Nazi regime in the 1930s.

Professor Christensen promoted anti-Jewish conspiracy theories with particular passion. Her website linked to a story claiming that “America is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under Zionist control,” and that “Jews rule America (and most of the world) by proxy. They trick us into fighting and dying for THEM. Politicians of the ‘free world’ are too cowardly to oppose Zionism.”

In an April 2005 interview, Christensen assured a reporter that she was the target of “a war by the extreme right-wing motivated by the Zionists to quash academic freedom on campus.” Christensen also insisted that her website was “under constant surveillance by political extremists and neo-Nazis.”

Professor Christensen died, after a long illness, on November 20, 2005.

This profile is based partially on the article “Jihad Jane and the Jews,” written by Mike Adams and published by FrontPageMagazine.com on April 5, 2005.