Free Republic

They’re not just in Oregon. University students from Saudi Arabia have vanished while facing criminal charges here and in at least seven other states as well as Canada — evidence that a growing number of defendants from the wealthy Persian Gulf kingdom have fled justice in the United States. There are likely more to be discovered. The Oregonian/OregonLive uncovered five examples in Oregon and began searching other states in late January. We’ve found similar cases in Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin. We also found two cases in Nova Scotia: Saudi students in two separate incidents skipped bail...

A group of Saudi students caught in a cheating scandal at a Montana college were offered flights home by their kingdom's diplomats to avoid the possibility of deportation or arrest, according to a cache of Saudi Embassy memos recently published by WikiLeaks and a senior official at the school involved. The students were in a ring of roughly 30 alleged cheaters at Montana Tech accused of having systematically forged grades by giving presents to a college employee. The cheating was discovered — and the staffer was fired — following an investigation made public in early 2012, but the memos reveal...

The number of Saudi Arabian students in the United States has increased by more than 500 percent since Sept. 11, 2001—when Hani Hanjour, a Saudi national who came here on a student visa flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing 189 people. According to the Institute of International Education—whose numbers on foreign students in the United States are used in official reports published by the U.S. Department of Education—there were 5,579 Saudi nationals enrolled in U.S. institutions of higher education in the 2001-2002 school year. The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks took place near the beginning of that...

Shortly after the Center for Immigration Studies put out a report warning that the Student and Exchange Visitor Program was widely unregulated and abused, the Obama Administration has decided to dispose of the last restrictions instituted after 9/11 to prevent a repeat of the revolving door Saudi visa system. The United States, a decade after Al Qaida strikes in New York and Washington, has opened its doors to Saudi nationals. Diplomats said the administration of President Barack Obama has removed most restrictions on the entry of Saudis to the United States. They said the percentage of visa approvals for Saudis...

Way back a lifetime ago, on 14 January 2004 we published an op-ed piece in these Islam Commentaries about Jihad coming to Houston, Texas. A Muslim man named Mohammed Ali Alayed embraced the conservative tenets of Islam through a faith reawakening (I use this term reluctantly), murdered a Jew, and then confessed to the crime, which his own roommate witnessed as a near decapitation of the Jewish victim, Ariel Sellouk. We were astonished that the world press reported that Houston police said they didn't have a clue as to why Mohammed Ali Alayed killed Ariel Sellouk. On Easter Sunday, seemingly...