In his book Preachers of Hate, Kenneth Timmerman
recounts how Islamic clerics once banned young Muslims from
traveling, living or attending school in the infidel West. However,
as the Islamic world fell further and further behind
technologically — particularly in regard to military technology —
it was decided that Muslim men could go abroad, but only to soak up
the secrets of the West’s technological prowess and bring them back
to Islamic lands.
It’s an interesting theory. Even today, one is hard pressed to
find a foreign Muslim student at a U.S. or European college
majoring in art, history or English lit. (The exception that proves
the rule is Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, the Iranian UNC graduate
recently charged with nine counts of attempted murder after he
ploughed his SUV into a crowd of university students. Taheri-azar
was both a psychology and philosophy major.)
Now the Los Angeles Times is reporting that there is an “effort by terrorist
networks to use universities…to replace former training camps in
Afghanistan.” Apparently the sheer numbers of Muslims studying in
engineering departments provide excellent recruitment opportunities
for jihadists. The Times reports that a group of Moroccan
college students in Montpellier, France, have been studying
electronics, computer technology, and telecommunications under
orders from al Qaeda leader Abu Musab Zarqawi. French intelligence
was tipped off when it traced cell phone calls from the students to
a militant leader in Fallujah shortly after the murder of four
American contractors there in March 2004. The Times notes
that the Moroccan students’ course work and hard partying were a
cover for “acquiring expertise and designing explosive detonators
for the [terrorist] network.”
The link between university science and technology departments
and terrorists is by now well documented. In The Next Attack, authors Daniel Benjamin
and Steven Simon note that nearly all of al Qaeda’s top men have
engineering backgrounds from Western schools. And then there is the
strange case of Rahmatullah Hashemi, the Taliban’s former
spokesman. Hashemi is currently a student at Yale (while having
only a fourth-grade education and a high school equivalency
certificate, according to the Wall Street Journal.) While
a “non-degree student,” Hashemi has excelled in one course:
“Terrorism: Past and Present.” In a bit of priceless and doubtless
unintended irony, Hashemi told the New York Times: “I’m
the luckiest person in the world. I could have ended up in
Guantanomo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale.”
I WAS REMINDED OF these and similar buffooneries when I read this
week about the appearance in federal court of Ehsanul Islam
Sadequee. You may remember Sadequee and his sidekick Syed Haris
Ahmed. The two allegedly planned to bomb U.S. oil refineries and
military targets, until they came to the attention of the FBI when
they traveled to Canada to meet with other terror suspects. Would
it surprise you to learn that Ahmed was a Georgia Tech student
majoring in … mechanical engineering?
So just how profound is the jihadist presence on Western
university campuses? Anthony Glees, director of Brunel University’s
center for intelligence and security studies in West London, issued
a report last year stating that “extremists and/or terror groups”
have been operating in more than 30 universities in Britain, the
Guardian reports.
You would think that with a record like this Muslim university
students would be closely monitored. After all, many of the 9/11
terrorists were traveling freely around the West on student visas.
More importantly university students are at that tender age when
Muslims tend to blow themselves (and others) up. American
universities, however, have been extremely reluctant to monitor
Muslim students, and, as we’ve seen in the case of Hashemi,
actually compete amongst themselves to bring former terrorists to
their campuses. The irony is that students like Hashemi, Ahmed and
Taheri-azar are likely to get even more radicalized on U.S.
campuses with their steady drumbeat about how racist, sexist, and
immoral the U.S. is.
So what is the U.S. doing about this? Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice has announced that in an effort to spread
democracy to the Middle East more Iranian students will be issued
visas. Hmmm. Iranian students. Where have we heard that before? How
about the U.S. embassy hostage crisis? Time for a reality check.
Does anyone seriously believe that Iranian students will gain a
deeper appreciation for democracy, capitalism, and diversity of
opinion at Bard or Berkeley?
If the U.S. government’s goal is to teach Middle Eastern
students about freedom and democracy it should provide visas to
students interested not so much in bomb-making (sorry, I mean
engineering), but history, political science, economics, art and
philosophy and preferably not enrolled in one of the top ten
liberal colleges. And if it’s true that
universities have become the new terrorist training camps, then
Western governments need to step in. And any university official
that tries to frustrate intelligence officials from gathering
information should be locked up for obstructing national security.
Or would you prefer, professor, the military did to your campus
what it did to the training camps in Afghanistan?
