How To Create More Terrorists 101

[khaosworks]

Fla. May Ban Aid for Some Foreigners
Sun Apr 6, 8:56 AM ET
By DAVID ROYSE, Associated Press Writer

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - A bill before the Florida Legislature would ban state aid to university and college students who are citizens of countries on the State Department's list of nations that sponsor terrorism.

The proposal was drafted by state Rep. Dick Kravitz, who said he doesn't like the idea that the United States is educating people who will return to regimes that oppose America.

"In these hard times we need to put as much taxpayer money as possible into programs for residents of the state of Florida who are citizens."

The bill would bar state aid from going to university students from six of the seven countries on the State Department list: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya and North Korea.

Cuba is also on the list but was amended out of the bill. Florida, of course, has a large Cuban population.

Muslim students say it unfairly targets them. Hadia Mubarak, the president of the Muslim Students Association at Florida State University, says it is discriminatory because most countries on the list are Islamic.

"What he's saying is if you're born in Libya or Syria you're more likely to be a terrorist than anyone else," Mubarak said.

According to the Department of Education, state universities and community colleges used $308,717 to provide financial aid to 822 students from the original seven countries on the federal list in 2001 and 2002.

The bill has been approved by the House Higher Education Committee but still needs the OK of four other committees.

Victor Johnson, public policy director at the Association of International Educators, which promotes international education, said he didn't know of any other states targeting aid to foreign students.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations calls students from the affected nations "innocent bystanders," said Ahmed Bedier, the group's spokesman in Tampa. "They have nothing to do with terrorism," he said.

Kravitz argues that students from terrorist dictatorships aren't poor and may even be related to government officials.

"It is naive to think that any of them are not well-to-do or connected to the regime in power," he said.

I'm sitting here just plain sputtering, trying to come up with a decent reaction that doesn't consist of expletives. Please contact your congress-creature and tell them to let this die in Committee, or failing that, on the House floor. This is blatant targeting, considering five of the countries are Islamic countries. If you really want to piss off more people of Arab descent and make them more likely to resent America and start building bombs, that's a step in the right direction.

(I do like the fact that Royse manages to get in: "Florida, of course, has a large Cuban population." Nice one, David.)

The Florida ACLU is already getting steamed, as it did last year when this same piece of steaming crap was tried, saying that this may violate the students' rights to equal protection.

After all, why not include Saudi Arabia (funds Bin Laden), or Pakistan (Al-Qaeda ran from Afghanistan to Pakistan and back again), or Somalia (which some say hides Al-Qaeda terrorist camps)?

I mean, it's not as if we need Saudi Arabia for its proven reserves of 266 billion barrels of oil, right? Right? (well, actually, some say it's more like 160 billion proven with 100 billion inferred, that is, can be gotten at but it's gonna cost you)

And as for Pakistan... well, ask me about Unocal and their involvement with a pipeline from the Caspian Sea, through Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and down to the Pakistani port city of Karachi someday. It's a nice little bedtime story. On top of that, though, there's another little story about how a US-UK power company with the help of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and the IMF/World Bank got Musharraf into power in the first place.

And Somalia has always been strategically important since its port of Berbera sits on the Persian Gulf, which is why the US has been sticking its nose in it since WW II.

Sorry I can't soundbite any of these things, but political motives in the real world have become so much more complicated than simply trying to invade the other guy's territory. In the meantime, try some of the links above and below and see if you can piece it together - the Kazakhstan to Pakistan pipeline story is particularly juicy, since it explains a lot about US foreign policy in Central Asia (the new "Great Game") over the last ten years or so, especially Afghanistan and how the Taliban came about. As a counterpoint to the conspiracy theory, though, see this BBC report, which kind of really misses the point - just because it may not work doesn't mean Bush isn't going to try...

But anyway, that's another story. Right now, this Florida bill just plain sucks. It died last year in committee. Let's hope it does so again.

Comments

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

One can certainly hope it will. And if it doesn't, that the Senate will ignore it and let it die that way.

There are times I really despair of living in the times I live.

Love,
-R

[filker0.livejournal.com]

The current political climate, where stating ones opposition to the policies of the administration is treated as treason by the justice department, where the president openly targets foreign leaders for assasination, where the military takes foreign political prisoners and calls them "non combatents", puts them in a concentration camp on foreign soil and denies them any legal council or contact with the outside world, where the administration condones torture of captured alleged terrorists to get information, and where a mistake by a soldier in a tank resulting in the death of two journalists who were pointing their cameras at the tank from a fair distance away is blamed on the journalists, and not on the soldier thinking that the rather large lenses being pointed at them were grenade launchers (which is what probably happened) makes proposals like this common. They are reprehensible, counter-productive, and stupid, but so is much of US foreign policy since Mr. Bush was granted the office he now holds.