Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

Open Letter from an Arab-American Student

Oubai Mohammad Shahbandar | 02.06.2003 22:51

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.

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?

Oubai Mohammad Shahbandar
- Homepage: FrontPageMagazine.com

Comments

Display the following 5 comments

  1. try again — john
  2. imperialistic stooge — hellsbells
  3. fight for your country — ser
  4. Hi — john
  5. David Horowitz... — STOP NYC Inc.
Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech