Author: Oubai Mohammad Shahbandar
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: June 2, 2003
On May 9th, a Saudi student at Arizona
State University, Muhammad Al-Gurashi was arrested for direct connections
to terror. He personally drove convicted terrorist supporter Faisal Al-Salmi
on numerous occasions to President Bush's Crawford, Texas ranch apparently
on a pre-terror reconnaissance mission. This April, the home of Hassan
Alrafea, president of the ASU Muslim students' association was raided by
the FBI for suspected terror-links, confiscating their computers. But the
left-wing political orthodoxy of our university prefers to stay silent
on the matter.
In fact, we are not the only university
in this country that has problems with its Saudi students covertly supporting
terrorism. Sami Al Hussayen a former president of the Muslim Students Association
in his college in Idaho was arrested by federal officials for his role
in raising funds for Al-Qaeda's terror network. Academics rallied to his
defense.
At the same when ASU radical
Muslim student Ahmad Saad Nasim faked a "hate crime" on himself, on two
separate occasions the university's president held a press conference the
same day denouncing the alleged hate against Muslim Americans that that
9-11 had supposedly inspired. Yet, the ASU administration was silent about
the Islamist hate that led to 9-11 attack itself.
When I, a proud American of Arab
decent and Muslim faith, took a stand on behalf of the liberation of my
oppressed Iraqi brethren, the ASU Muslim Students' Association personally
attacked me for not being a real Muslim and announced to the ASU student
body in editorials in the student paper that I Oubai Mohammad Shahbandar
was a hater of Arabs and Muslims. There was no press conference by the
president of this university or anyone else in his administration in behalf
of this Muslim victim of Islamist hate.
We didn't land on terror, terror
landed on us. But our professors tell us America is to blame, our universities
sponsor "educational" programs designed to install in the American student
a sense of shame for being American, and yet here we are on the cusp of
a great struggle in human history between the forces of decency and democracy
and tyranny and terror. Yet we are told America is to blame for terror.
We are told America's foreign policy
is based on racist neo-imperialism, we are taught that national security
is a foul epithet to be reviled; we are told the Jews and Israel are to
blame for the hatred against us. We are told that multiculturalism and
diversity classes are the bridges to world peace and an end to terrorism
as we know it. We are told this even though the Saudi terrorists who slaughtered
our fellow Americans that September morning were able to manipulate our
generally open environment of tolerance to achieve their evil designs.
Despite all the all too evident signs of their malevolent intent, the murderers
were given the benefit of the doubt by INS agents too wary to make judgments
and leftist university officials who preferred to turn a blind eye to the
danger emanating from their own campuses lest they lose their precious
Saudi tuition dollars and donations or incur the wrath of the ACLU and
other leftwing "civil liberties" organizations. We are told that despite
evidence to the contrary most Saudi students are peaceful and accepting
of our American culture.
Our radical professors tell us that
the war on Iraq is racist, while the radicals on campus Show their contempt
for this proud Arab people and its liberation. In our history classes We
are told to despise our founding fathers and traditional American principles;
in our political Science classes we are taught to to fear our president
and our own armed forces. We are told to hate men in women's studies and
to hate white people in African studies. In Chicano literature courses
we are taught that Arizona is Mexico and in Gay and Lesbian studies that
the Bible is hate-literature.
America is the principle adversary
of Islamist terror and whether by choice or birth we all inhabit the same
danger zone. But our professors never teach us the truth -- that the war
on terror protects all Americans, white, brown, black, Asian, Arab, Jew,
Christian, Muslim, Hindu, straight or gay from the despotic hatred of Islamist
terrorism, which seeks our extermination. That's right, OUR extermination.
In sum, we are taught to hate everything
except that which seeks our annihilation.
The frontlines of this war stretch
across the entire globe and into our classrooms, our homes, our places
of worship, into every aspect of our everyday lives. But don't tell this
to our tenured terror appeasers who hide behind the intellectual credentials
that have been bestowed on them by the anti-American university system.
They have never known the humiliation
of living under the iron rule of an Islamic despotism. I have. They have
never tasted the cruel bitterness of forced silence in the shadows of a
dictatorship. I have. They have never seen the face of evil. I have. For
I was born and raised in Syria, the country enslaved by Hafez El-Assad.
I was one of the fortunate victims of this tyranny because my family was
able to emigrate to American a land of freedom. Yet in the free universities
of this country legitimacy is bestowed on the very forces that oppress
my former countrymen and I am instructed to be compassionate towards my
own oppressors and to be hostile to the country that has liberated me.
I have had to witness the post 9-11
"teach in" sponsored by our university president's "Campus Environment
Team" entitled "Understanding the 'other,'" which sought to place moral
equivalency between America and the terrorists who attacked us. I have
had to listen to inanities about the attack like that of a member of the
university-sponsored Diversity Awareness Programming Board who said, "
we must remember that 9-11 was about diversity too." I have been subjected
to the humiliating prospect of the university's anti-American, anti-war
poetry reading, sponsored by our English Department last April. I have
had to watch our unversity president, Michael Crow, provide a platform
for the former Swedish Ambassador so he could spill his anti-American bile
before a university audience. I have had to listen to the Administration's
guest Mary Francis Berry denounce the most tolerant nation in the world
as a racist oppressor. I have had to walk daily by the mural plastered
on the Memorial Union and sponsored by the university's "progressive coalition"
and funded by the university itself which features a map of the United
States with "Racist Nation" and "Bush is Racist" and "What about the Arabs"
written across it.
This August I will be heading to
Israel to study counter terrorism under a program hosted by the Foundation
for the Defense of Democracy. I, a Muslim Arab was able to attend this
program largely due to the gracious sponsorship of David Horowitz, a Jew.
No multicultural sensitivity class made that possible. I will not
stand idly by as our professors and our universities pave the road for
terror's long march into humanity's last sanctuary of freedom.
What contribution will you make
to the cause of liberty, to our nation's security?
I am a Muslim American Arab and
I am willing to fight for my country. How about you?
