-By Warner Todd Huston
–Foreign Student Visas, Easy Avenue for Terrorists Entry to US
Directly following the monstrous attacks of 9/11, the US government took a step back from the routinely lightly vetted approvals for student visa applications, especially from Saudi Arabia. Previous to 9/11, Saudi citizens were also offered quick entry to the USA with a policy called “visa express” where their applications routinely escaped close scrutiny and were easily rubber stamped ahead. Three of the 9/11 hijackers took advantage of this easy access.
After 9/11/01 the quick visa approval slowed. It was also a prudent policy to approve fewer foreign students from certain segments of the world after 9/11 (as it would have been before), but it is a policy that seems to have come to an end.
In 2003 I wrote an Op Ed (What is wrong with Foreign Student Visas?) warning that the student visa program offers an easy access to our shores for faux students who are really terrorists seeking an unguarded entry. In 2004, according to Stephen Schwartz of the Weekly Standard, only about 1,000 visas were granted to Saudi men wishing to attend an American University as a result of our government’s 9/11 heightened concern.
But, that number could climb to as much as 10,000 Saudi students in the 2006/2007 fall semester. And that climb is being blessed by a Bush administration initiative to increase the number of Saudi men approved for these student visas.
How soon we forget.
15 of the 19 barbaric, murderers that hijacked planes and destroyed the World Trade Center and other targets were Saudi citizens and these extremists were driven by the official religion that is still to this day sponsored by that very same Saudi government; Wahhabism.
And now Bush wants to give the go ahead for 10,000 more people driven by the evil of Wahhabism to come to our shores? He wants to roll out the red carpet and hand them an education at the best schools we have, schools that are out of the reach of most of our own citizens?
The Saudis hope it will be even more than 10,000.
Nail Al-Jubeir, spokesman for the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington, D.C., said the leaders of the two nations are committed to reversing the recent trend of Saudi students staying out of the United States.
“Hopefully, the goal is to get something like 20,000 in the United States in all fields,” Al-Jubeir said.
As Schwartz notes, the Saudis have a singular failure in their educational system as it is geared to dispense an indoctrination into Wahhabism as opposed to any useful knowledge. And that is why the Saudis want to send their young men to our Universities. Theirs are unsuitable to the task.
So, what is the Bush administration’s policy, why would they throw open the doors for 10,000 young men trained all their lives to hate everything this country stands for?
The Bush administration’s idea is the kind of feels-good, empty multiculturalism that has opened the west up to these kinds of attacks in the first place. Apparently, the plan is to open the doors wide for these Wahhabi infused students to give them an introduction to “American values”. It is those same values, we seem to need reminding of, those that the 15 Saudis that perpetrated 9/11 were here to destroy, the American values that the hijackers were taught to hate in the same schools in which the 10,000 to 20,000 students the Bush administration is suddenly warming to were also taught.
And we are about to let them flood into our country to bring that hatred with them at our invitation?
It is nonsensical at best and suicidal at worst.
As the Democrats in Congress who are advocating a cut and run strategy in the Global War on Terrorism reveal, too many Americans have already blanked the horrible morning of 9/11/01 out of their memories. Now, even the Bush administration is sponsoring a policy to allow many hundreds more times those 19 terrorists into our country in the guise of “students”. Even if that worry is somehow overblown or absurd to some, Bush is opening wide the doors of our Universities to people who have been brought up on a state sponsored program of hatred for the USA.
The question can only be, why? Why be so quick to such suicidal policies?
This is just one more example of why the west could possibly lose this war against Islamofascism.