Posted on 08/19/2006 6:06:54 AM PDT by epow
Dissident Arab Gets the Treatment
by Ahmad Al-Qloushi
What Ahmad Al Qloushi says:
* "The Borders of [Israel] should be from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River" * "America and Israel are great democracies" * "I could never believe how Jews were portrayed in my school in Kuwait" * "When I met a Jewish person in America for the first time my initial beliefs were confirmed" * "Walid Shoebat is a brave man and incredible human being and has done more for the Arab world in a short time than all Arab leaders put together"
I am a 17-year-old Kuwaiti Arab Muslim and a college freshman studying in the USA. I was three years of age when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. My parents still remember what it was like for us during the invasion. Waiting for long hours in line for a few pieces of bread. We had darkness 24 hours a day from the burning oil wells. My two uncles are still traumatized from being kidnapped and tortured in Iraqi prisons. Most of all we remember our one-week-old baby cousin who died while the Iraqi invaders were stealing incubators from hospitals to sell them for profit. The Americans by contrast came in to liberate us and asked for nothing in return. I love this country for the freedom it provides and for rescuing Kuwaits liberty in the first Gulf War. 12 Years later, America once again has selflessly protected my country and my people by removing Saddam Hussein.
I arrived in the United States for the first time 5 months ago with tremendous enthusiasm to study the political institutions and history of this extraordinary country.
I enrolled in Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California and immediately registered for Introduction to American Government and Politics." I was shocked by my Professors singularly one-sided presentation. Week after week, I encountered a lack of intellectual and political diversity that I would have more commonly expected to have heard on the streets of pre-liberation Iraq. In this particular class I heard only one consistent refrain: America is bad.
A week before thanksgiving Professor Woolcock assigned us a take home final exam. The final exam consisted solely of one required essay: Dye and Zeigler contend that the Constitution of the United States was not ordained and established by the people as we have so often been led to believe. They contend instead that it was written by a small educated and wealthy elite in America who were representative of powerful economic and political interests. Analyze the US constitution (original document), and show how its formulation excluded the majority of the people living in America at that time, and how it was dominated by America's elite interest.
When I read the assignment I remembered back to my high school in Kuwait. Many of my teachers were Palestinian; they hated America, they hated my worldview, and they did their best to brainwash me. I did not leave my country and my family to come to the United States to receive further brainwashing. I disagreed completely with Dye and Zeiglers thesis. I wrote an essay defending Americas Founding Fathers and upholding the US constitution as a pioneering document, which has contributed to extraordinary freedoms in America and other corners of the world - including my corner, the Middle East.
Professor Woolcock didnt grade my essay. Instead he told me to come to see him in his office the following morning. I was surprised the next morning when instead of giving me a grade, Professor Woolcock verbally attacked me and my essay. He told me, Your views are irrational. He called me naïve for believing in the greatness of this country, and told me "America is not God's gift to the world." Then he upped the stakes and said "You need regular psychotherapy." Apparently, if you are an Arab Muslim who loves America you must be deranged. Professor Woolcock went as far as to threaten me by stating that he would visit the Dean of International Admissions (who has the power to take away student visas) to make sure I received regular psychological treatment.
This scared me. I didnt want to be deported for having written a pro-American essay, so as soon as I left his office I made an appointment with the school psychologist. She let me go with a comment that I dont need regular therapy. As I left her office, I couldnt help thinking that even my Palestinian high school teachers had never tried to silence me or put me in therapy.
I have since learned that mine is not an isolated case. Many students in American universities are being indoctrinated and silenced by biased professors who hate America. America saved my life and the lives of my family. How can I not speak out?
The local media picked up the story of what happened to me. Professor Woolcock then filed a school grievance accusing me, under section 5 of Foothills grievance code, of an act or threat of intimidation or general harassment. If you are confused by this, so was I. Foothills Dean of Student Affairs, Don Dorsey, would not let me see the grievance as filed but he summarized it for me by saying, "Professor Woolcock feels harassed by your having mentioned his name to the media."
As a result of growing media attention I am told that Foothills Board of Trustees has received hundreds of e-mails. I came to this country to study American political institutions and I have certainly been getting a crash course. Ive discovered that, as a tax-payer funded college, Foothill has a 5 member publicly elected Board of Trustees who care passionately about Education.
Ironically, as I was going through all of this I learned that California State Senator Bill Morrow was introducing the Academic Bill of Rights to the State Legislature to defend academic freedom and intellectual diversity on Californias campuses. As a result of my own experience and the many stories I have heard from other Foothill students, I am helping to form a chapter of Students for Academic Freedom to get my college and my state to adopt this bill. You can encourage Foothills Board of Trustees to pass the Academic Bill of Rights as official school policy by emailing them at http://www.fhda.edu/about_us/board/.
Ahmad Al-Qloushi was born and raised in Al-Shaab, Kuwait where he attended English language school. He recently became President of Foothills College Republicans. He is a Political-Science major at Foothill College.
I heard a interview recently with a former inmate of a state prison who said that radical Islamic clerics who are given free access to our prisons are converting literally tens of thousands of American prison inmates to militant Islam, and are indoctrinating them with the same implacable hatred for all things American, western, Jewish, and Christian that they would get from the most radical militants anywhere in the Islamic world. We must be the most suicidal society ever to inhabit this planet.
Figures. A great thread like this and one FReeper drops by. Boo.
"I couldnt help thinking that even my Palestinian high school teachers had never tried to silence me or put me in therapy."
Whoa.
*Ping*
There's a middle ground between genocide and Dhimmitude. Too bad Western civilization insists on not walking it.
We need a "Domestic Dubya".
That's the gospel truth. My daughter encountered that same hostility to America's government, culture, and values, and to also to Christianity, in the faculty of the large state university which she attended and graduated. The radical anti-American left has thoroughly infiltrated our colleges and universities, and most parents have no clue as to what kind of hate-America indoctrination their kids are receiving.
Islamofascists are pikers. Their murderous rampages are nothing compared to the damage the Communist saboteurs have inflicted upon the Constitution and nation. Who else could claim to have killed 40 MILLION American children (ie babies). If America falls, it won't be because of a jihadi, but a pointy headed liberal professor.
I hope your daughter adapts well or is in a better institution.
Were not the dangers posed by those pointy-headed professors the main point of the article? The same irrational liberal mindset that promoted communism in American colleges and universities during the post WWII era is now promoting the murderous hate-America ideology of militant Islam. Liberals in general have now adopted Islam as the "downtrodden masses" their elder brothers and sisters once championed while advocating socialism and communism.
I have to disagree about the relative dangers of communism and militant Islam at this stage of the game. Communism has been exposed to most of the world for what it is, an abject failure. OTOH militant, fundamentalist Islam is gaining more and more converts and influence throughout the entire world with every day that passes. There was never the fanatical devotion to communism by hundreds of millions of people that there is for Islam today. I believe that enthusiasm for collectivism in all of it's various forms is waning in the aftermath of the USSR's dissolution, but that is definitely not the case with the slave mentality of Islam's followers.
Who else could claim to have killed 40 MILLION American children
I agree that the tragedy of 40 million aborted American babies cries out against the Godless, socialistic, scourge of humanistic liberalism that is still the primary ideological thrust of American public education. But the threat of anti-American professors and administrators in our colleges and universities sympathizing with and promoting militant Islam while demeaning American society, our form of government, and our Christian heritage is growing more ominous every day IMHO. IOW at this point in time I am more concerned about the specter of fanatical, suicidal, nuclear armed Islam waging an insidious religion/culture war, and eventually a military jihad when the religion/culture war fails, against the U.S. and the Western democracies than I am about what I believe is an improbable resuscitation of currently moribund communism.
I think this kid has a bright future here, if some crazed leftist or islamonazi doesn't kill him first.
But I wouldn't bet on there not being a few hundred, or maybe even a few thousand, Muslim kids already here who would be happy to blow up a kindergarten if their Imam told them to. Of course if that happened the idiot professor in CA would say that the murder of dozens of innocent American kindergarten kids was justified because the suicide bomber was only protesting the oppressive capitalist policies that Americans and Israeli JOOOZ have employed to steal his homeland and keep his people in poverty.
Thanks for the ping! This was refreshing reading at long last. It would seem that there is hope.
Despite the failure of most Communist states, its agents and enablers are abound in every Western Society. Which greatly accounts for the fact that our war is much harder than it has to be. Were it not for these groups, we could fight with a much freer hand.
As usual, the left displays a false face sympathy with the Jihadis. History has proven that those who oppose the left will pay a heavy price when they come to power. And that includes their pseudo-jihadi love affair. They aren't fooling any one. If the President was a liberal Democrat, they wouldn't give a second thought to the WoT.
The Jihadis can only bleed us. But the left can enslave us and forever destroy the ideals and dreams that our Founding Fathers fought for.
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