Back in May, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice publicly raked Israeli officials over the coals after they refused to let seven Palestinians who’d won US-sponsored Fulbright scholarships leave Hamas-controlled Gaza.
Israel insisted the seven had ties to Hamas terrorists and were security risks. Faced with Israel’s refusal to let them leave Gaza, the State Department revoked the scholarships for study at US institutions.
That had Rice fuming.
“If you cannot engage young people and give complete horizons to their expectations and their dreams,” she declared, “I don’t know that there would be any future for Palestine.”
Under heavy pressure from Washington, Israel agreed to give exit visas to four of the Palestinians, letting them accept their US-taxpayer-funded scholarships.
But the Israelis remained adamant about the other three, all of whom were either students or teaching assistants at the Islamic University of Gaza – a notorious Hamas stronghold.
Now State has taken a closer look, and guess what? Washington has notified all three that “information has come to light that you may be inadmissible to the United States” – and their visas once again have been revoked.
No one’s saying precisely what that information is, but we can well imagine.
Islamic University, after all, is where Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier whose kidnaping by Hamas helped fuel the 2006 Lebanon war, initially was held, according to Israel’s largest newspaper. The paper also reported that a raid last year by Fatah forces at the university found a cache of rocket launchers and rifles.
A professor at the school told The Baltimore Sun in 2006 that “Hamas built this institution. The university presents the philosophy of Hamas. If you want to know what Hamas is, you can know it from the university.”
(Sadly, that sounds just like the sort of training ground most of American academia likely would consider appropriate.)
Fortunately, wiser heads appear to have prevailed. Secretary Rice’s protests notwithstanding, the last thing US taxpayers need to be wasting their money on is prestigious scholarships for terrorists-in-training to come to America.
And next time, Rice might want to give Israel a bit more credit when it comes to ferreting out security risks before she issues public broadsides in the name of “education.”