Misgivings Expressed Over New Saudi Student Exchange Program
by Jim Brown
September 18, 2006
(AgapePress) - - An author and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution is expressing concern over an educational exchange program brokered by President Bush and Saudi King Abdullah that is allowing 15,000 Saudi students to enroll on America's college campuses. On Friday, Saudi Arabia -- a nation not known for its religious tolerance -- was named as a "country of particular concern" in the U.S. government's annual report on international religious freedom. (See related story) It was third consecutive year the oil-rich nation had received such a designation. The report cites prohibition of the public practice of non-Muslim religions, even though the Saudi government says it guarantees and protects the right to private worship for all, including non-Muslims, who gather in homes for religious practice. That guarantee, however, is not defined in law.
Yet the Bush administration has arranged an educational exchange program that reportedly will quintuple the number of Saudi students and scholars in the U.S. by the end of the year. The State Department, which issued the religious freedom report, says the program is a way to build ties with future Saudi leaders and young scholars.
Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, a professor emeritus at Fresno State University, wrote a column four years ago titled "Our Enemies, The Saudis." Hanson says although he understands the liberal utopian logic behind the exchange program, petro dollars and naiveté are involved.
"We're not talking about people from cosmopolitan Beirut who would go to Salt Lake City or Milwaukee," he says. "We're talking about somebody from the most reactionary, eighth-century existence possible in Saudi Arabia and then going to a place in the postmodern 21st century -- Berkeley or Madison or Bloomington." The problem, he explains, is that "we're asking people from a very traditional society to be plopped down in the most untraditional parts of a very untraditional West -- and that's a very big disconnect."
In addition, Hanson asserts the program presents a national security risk. "The practicalities, naiveté, and realpolitik about oil are involved," he contends, "and I think it misreads human nature that, when you don't have any standards and you really don't have an idea of national sovereignty or borders that are not to be crossed illegally, as we do in Mexico, there's sort of an insidious feeling that we in the United States will let anybody come in."
Hanson says he is not sure the Saudi royal family or the U.S. immigration service, which cannot track 11 million illegal immigrants -- can guarantee one of the 15,000 Saudis is not a Mohammed Atta, who was one of the terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks. The Hoover fellow says the only way the U.S. can be hurt now is not by a missile from the Middle East, but by allowing a stealthy terrorist to enter the U.S., take up residence, learn American customs and language, and then have an extreme reaction to the nation's liberality.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
