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You'd expect that from a tenth-grade girl, Oprah Winfrey, a Rotary Club member pie-eyed on a blue ribbon, and others who have a tough time believing in the existence of any human evil that can't be vanquished by sharing an "I love you, man" hug. You wouldn't expect it from a U.S. senator. Yet a bipartisan group of them, guided by a belief that the Islamic world hates America because it doesn't really know Americans, wants to spend nearly $100 million over the next five years to give Muslim high-school students from overseas a year of study in the United States. The Cultural Bridges Act of 2002, which is now before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would provide $20 million a year in taxpayer funds to the State Department, for the purpose of beginning the new exchange program (an additional $75 million yearly is being proposed for expanding existing exchange programs). Under the proposal, Muslim students would live with American host families while they attended public high schools, and "participated in activities designed to promote a greater understanding of American and Islamic values and culture." Those eligible to participate would be students from the 57 member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, excluding Muslim-dominated former Soviet republics. The program would be open to youth from the suicide-bomber breeding grounds of the West Bank and Gaza as well. Alarmingly, official Islamic terrorist states — Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Sudan — are not specifically excluded by the legislation, though there is some question as to whether these countries are automatically forbidden by their inclusion on the State Dept.'s terrorist list. The program would be modeled on the Future Leaders Exchange Program, an old Cold War plan for Soviet high-school students. According to the bill's language, that program "demonstrated the positive impact of reaching out to international students at the secondary school level, introducing them to American culture, and strengthening their commitment to democratic values and ideals." The main premise behind the bill, whose lead sponsor is Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, is pudding-headed Wilsonian piffle: "A critical element in the war against terrorism will be increasing mutual understanding and respect between the peoples of the United States and peoples around the world, particularly those of the Islamic faith." The Fulbright Association, the organization for former Fulbright scholars, buys this line with gusto, urging its members in an April 16 "action alert" to contact their U.S. senators to make the point that, "No previous foreign policy crisis has been so deeply rooted in cultural misunderstanding." This is silly. History shows that war is most often not the result of misunderstanding, but of real disagreements. The Islamic radicals know us well enough; they hate us because everything we believe in is literally anathema to them. And they would rather fight than be nice multiculturalists. "The record shows over and over again that Muslims who come to the West, in reliably significant numbers, turn against it," says Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum. "The archetype was Sayyid Qutb, who came here and was horrified. He had a deep and abiding influence on modern Islam. There are many more examples." Qutb, the founder of the radical Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, was hanged by Nasser in 1966, but his thought lives on as a key intellectual wellspring watering the Islamic fundamentalist movement. Qutb, then a civil servant, was sent to America by the Egyptian government from 1948 to 1951 as part of a program to study the American education system. For Qutb, Harry Truman's America was Babylon, a cesspool of irreligious, racist degenerates who didn't know how to put women in their place. In his travelogue, "The America That I Saw," Qutb exhorted Muslims to hate America saying, "The believer from his height looks down at the people drowning in dirt and mud." So much for travel broadening his mind. Or consider the more contemporary examples of the 9/11 terrorists, who lived in the West, took advantage of its freedom, its education system, and, in some cases, its finest strip clubs. Everything Mohammed Atta and his evil crew saw and experienced in America and Europe only radicalized them further. We know too that the most extreme elements among Islamic fundamentalists are often the educated classes in Arab countries, which is to say, the people who should know better. We also have the sad example of Muslim men studying in the United States who charm and marry American women, take them home to the Islamic world to live — and reveal themselves as monsters once they get back on home turf. Patricia Roush, who lost her two daughters to Khalid al-Geshayan, her Saudi ex-husband, calls the Kennedy bill "ludicrous." "Promote better understanding of the West? Khalid was here for 12 years." she says. "This is about hate and fanaticism and roots. Americans don't get it. Family, tribes and the teachings of Islam always take precedence over any study program or 'time-out' in the West. When they return home, they just fall back into the dictates of society. This is pie-in-the-sky nonsense." How can a single year abroad overcome a lifetime of Islamic anti-American indoctrination when not even growing up in this culture can wean some from the Islamic culture of death? National Public Radio recently aired a shocking report revealing intense Islamikaze sentiment among Palestinian Americans living in the northern Virginia suburbs. "These Palestinian Americans are expressing views one doesn't expect to find outside the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or among its sympathizers. They express a contempt for the rule of law and an allegiance to an extremist, foreign ideology that is antithetical to American values," wrote Linda Chavez, in a column about the NPR report. "And they are a reflection of our new multicultural America, where young people are taught that one's allegiance to one's ethnic group takes precedence over allegiance to the United States or adherence to democratic values. These young people may have been born in the United States, but they are Palestinians first and foremost." This is the America that's going to win the hearts and minds of the young jihadis? Not likely. There has been little attention paid to the Cultural Bridges Act since it was introduced in mid-May. One is not surprised to find liberal do-gooders like Patrick Leahy, Christopher Dodd, and Jim Jeffords attaching themselves to the Kennedy bill, but it is remarkable to see Republicans like Chuck Hagel, Thad Cochran, and Sam Brownback signing on as cosponsors. The ill-considered support of conservatives for this measure may reflect a post-9/11 desire to throw money at any well-intentioned thing that purports to improve relations and understanding with the Islamic world. "There's a pretty good consensus in Congress that exchanges make sense," says a source in the Senate Republican camp. "However, this is a lot of money for a program like this, and somebody's going to have to think carefully about whether or not we can handle the visa screening." Ten million visa holders arrive here every year, a fraction of whom are students. Given the fact that the American government can't keep track of all the foreign students, Muslim and otherwise, now studying here, is it really in the country's best interest to subsidize the importation of thousands more in this time of war on Islamic terror? There is no evidence to support the notion that exposure to the West moderates extremist Islamic views, but ample evidence indicating that it has either no effect or only confirms America-hating Muslims in their beliefs. "I'd hate my tax money to go toward turning someone into an anti-American zealot, and I fear that in some cases, this program would do just that," says Pipes. And I would hate to be the U.S. senator trying to explain to my constituents why I voted to spend $100 million to give a year's education to Muslim foreigners, instead of taking that money, if it had to be spent at all, and providing college scholarships for the children of those murdered by Islamikazes on September 11. |
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here
are still people left who believe that the Muslim world hates America
because it doesn't really understand what fine fellows we Americans are.
If only these benighted Mohammedans could spend time with us, they'd put
aside those unfortunate Great Satan stereotypes and be our pals. 
