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I wonder how many are living here having the same inclinations toward terrorism as Tahir Ibrihim Aletwei, but not acknowledging?

I am guessing there are about 30,000 students total at UTA, with 20% being ME. That's 6,000 at UTA alone. How many of those are Muslim Fundamentalists? If it's 1% = 60, that's 60 too many. Imagine 60 suicide bombings over a couple of years in the D/FW area. Imagine each one claims 10 lives each. Yikes !

Now, imagine that capability in every major metropolitan area in the country and...well, that's kinda scary, huh?...

And from what I've heard, Washington-Oregon is really infested with ME whackos.

It's scary, indeed. I can't help but wonder what Aletwei said: "he proceeded to explain to agents that his desire to become a martyr was cultivated by his home country's hatred of the neighboring state of Israel and its most powerful ally, America."

A culture of anti-Americanism and Jew-hatred is prevalent in the Arab countries. It's hard for us to believe this since we get a muddled picture of Islam from the conventional media, which keeps telling us over and over again, that Islam is the religion of "peace," and that the 9/11 terrorists are not true representatives of Muslim thought. In my opinion, I think the opposite is true.

I'm currently a student at UTA and thought maybe I could offer a bit of a different perspective on the matter. This is actually a pretty general reply to a number of the issues that I've seen as I read through these posts.

First of all, I did a little research, and as best as I can determine there are about 2300 international students at UTA, with the total number pf students being more like 21000. I assume this includes graduate students but probably doesn't include students studying at the English language institute. With them it's probably more like 2400, maybe 2500. Of these, perhaps 20% are from the Middle East, though even that number sound a little high to me. But I couldn't find any statistics on exactly where the international students come from. I think it puts the hypothetical numbers down to about 5 Muslim Fundamentalists, which I agree would still be 5 suicide bombers too many.

However, unlike that poster, there are many of you who seem to be working on the assumption that all Middle Eastern students are like this guy. First of all, I only know of this person indirectly. However, I do know that both Americans and other Jordanian students thought he was strange, and have for some time. The general impression (whether accurate or not I cannot say) was that he was just trying to get attention--perhaps this is why he had no formal training and had never been contacted by a terrorist organization. His professor may have been surprised when he heard of his deportation, but many people were expecting it would happen sooner or later.

To those of you who would deport every international student, I can also say that I know many, many international students at UTA, including some of those who came from Jordan with the same program he did. Now, the vast majority of those I know are non-Muslim Asians, and they wouldn't represent a terrorist threat at all right now. However, the Muslim students who I know personally, including those from Jordan, also present no threat that I can see to our security. Yes, they were raised in a Muslim country by Muslim families, and yes, to varying degrees all of them continue to identify themselves as Muslims. And yes, this does color their view of the world, especially of Israel. But as educated people, many of them are capable of being far more objective than someone like Tahir appeared to be. I cannot imagine any of them becoming suicide bombers. The only one of these Muslim students that I knew well at the time of 9/11 was as shocked and horrified as I was by it. Incidentally, the ones who I know best are/were studying things that were not related to technology, so they are also not here to go back to their country to with knowledge of building better weapons, etc.

Is it possible that there is a terrorist wandering around the campus? Yes. Does it worry me? No. Should it? Maybe. But not enough so that I fail to treat my fellow students with the basic respect they deserve as human beings, the same way we want them to treat us. Though Tahir obviously sounds pretty messed up, he did mention that the kindness of the Americans he met here did for a time dissuade him from terrorism. And if he meant that literally, then the Americans who treated him kindly saved the lives of other Americans. Fortunately those are the ones he met.

I love my country, and I also love the knowledge I have gained of the world through the many here that I count as friends who are citizens of other countries. I think it's also worth noting that Tahir is the second student with ties to another country and to UTA that has made the news in the last week ... the other was Kalpana Chawla ...

I know this is long, but I thought maybe a perspective of someone more personally tied to the whole thing would help.