Saturday the kids and I drove up to Tilden Park in Berkeley for
our regularly scheduled White Stag Leadership Development
Weekend.
Saturday the kids and I drove up to Tilden Park in Berkeley for our regularly scheduled White Stag Leadership Development Weekend. I had not been up to Berkeley or San Francisco for months, and the experience was a little shocking.
I had grown accustomed to seeing the Women in Black keeping their macabre vigil, but I am also used to seeing flags and now yellow ribbons, at a ratio of about 10 Old Glories for each funereal female.
In the People’s Republic of Berkeley, the ratio was inverted: about one flag for every 10 or so items protesting the war: signs, posters, bumperstickers, and graffiti.
It was intensely comforting to arrive at the parking lot and find our large group of uniformed Scouts, each with the flag on his or her right shoulder, intensely moving to hold opening together, complete with flag ceremony and Pledge of Allegiance.
All weekend, in between plotting with my co-adult staff and tending fire, I pondered a recent column in The Dispatch, written, if memory serves, by Tom Elias. In it, Mr. Elias noted that many of the Iraqi scientists and terrorists, including an Iraqi woman scientist who heads their biological-weapons program, were educated in the United States and western Europe.
Mr. Elias mentioned the merest tip of the iceberg. A 2002 study conducted by Georgia State University demonstrated that many students from terrorist nations – 502 in 2001 – get their technical training from American universities; 10,234 people from terror-sponsoring countries received science and engineering doctorates in American universities in 1981-1999.
For example, Iraqi nuclear physicist Khidhir Hamza earned a master’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate at Florida State, before being ordered by Saddam Hussein to return to Iraq in 1970 to work on nuclear weapons.
Obviously, this is a problem. We really should not be educating the best and brightest that terrorist countries can send us to kill large numbers of us efficiently. Mr. Elias’s solution is to require them to take an American history course while they are here. Then they will see the value of human life, and the advantages of liberty, freedom, and western civilization, and they will no longer wish to destroy us.
I imagine that Mr. Elias has not been to Berkeley recently. Nor to Columbia University, where Nicholas De Genova, a professor of anthropology and Latin American studies, recently called for U.S. soldiers to frag their officers, and expressed a wish “for a million Mogadishus.”
Alas, Dr. De Genova is not alone in his sentiments; his co-professors Eric Foner, Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Gary Sick, George Saliba, and Joseph Massad routinely rant against evil America.
Even at Gavilan College, the mandated American history textbook is “The People’s History of the United States,” written by a communist, and one of the teachers of the course is an avowed socialist who rails against America.
Even in Gilroy High School, a sophomore English teacher recently asked the class, “What were the greatest evils of the 20th Century?” A girl responded, “Racism, sexism, homophobia, conservatism, and white males,” at which the teacher beamed and replied, “Very good!”
No, the problem is far deeper than Mr. Elias imagines. The problem is the Culture War. The problem is that for 30-plus years American universities and public schools have been systematically teaching hatred of America: that America is imperialist, America is racist, America is evil incarnate.
All lies. Were America imperialist, we would already have established a worldwide empire. Were America racist, Condaleeza Rice and Colin Powell would not be household names. Were America evil, we would have torture chambers and rape rooms, like Iraq’s.
We may soon see ourselves winning the war in Iraq and losing the war for America. The Culture War is cannibalizing our country. And I don’t have any glib solutions. It would take 50 years and thousands of impassioned Americans to win back the hearts and minds of our people for liberty and justice for all. But Eldridge Cleaver was completely correct when he said, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
