Adam Goodman | Education isn't always harmless

Question: Which of these universities receives aid from the U.S. government?

Penn, where Hillel and the Muslim Student Association hold interfaith dialogues aimed at fostering discussion and promoting understanding?

Or, Al-Quds Open University, where last January the Hamas student group on the Nablus campus inaugurated the "Shahid Engineer Yahya Ayyash Week," in order to honor the Hamas leader known as the father of suicide bombing?

If you answered "both," well done.

According to a Washington Times story published last week, the U.S. Agency for International Development has been channeling, both directly and indirectly, millions of dollars over the past several years to the Islamic University in Gaza, which has strong ties to Hamas, and to branches of Al-Quds University.

In September 2006 - despite strict U.S. sanctions against the Palestinian Authority and Hamas' place on the U.S.'s official list of terror organizations - USAID announced $100,000 of direct in-kind assistance to Al-Quds and $2.2 million of aid in the form of student scholarships.

IUG received about $135,000 from USAID in 2005 and the university continues to be funded indirectly through multi-million dollar USAID grants to the American Near East Refugee Aid - an NGO which has worked with IUG in the past and is currently building a high-tech facility for the school.

The funding certainly raises issues of legality. The 2006 Foreign Operations Bill prohibits funding to any educational institution that advocates terror, and the potential violation of this law hasn't escaped Congress's attention.

"Had you entered into a dialogue with Congress, we would have told you, for example, that providing U.S. assistance to a terrorist-controlled university in Gaza was out of the question and, in fact, violates U.S. law," said House of Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos at a congressional hearing last Thursday.

But the State Department denies any wrongdoing on the part of the agency.

"USAID requires of all of its contractors and subcontractors to go through a careful vetting process," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack in his daily press briefing last Monday. "It involves going through various U.S. Government databases to ensure that any of the recipients of U.S. Government monies are not affiliated with terrorist organizations."

But ignore the legality question, for a moment. Regardless of whether USAID broke the law, IUG and Al-Quds are clearly not the sort of universities the U.S. should be funding.

In asserting that IUG is "independent" of Hamas, as McCormack did later in the briefing, the State Department conveniently bypasses some interesting facts to the contrary.

Namely, 16 faculty members double as elected Hamas representatives in the parliament. The current head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, sits on the Board of Trustees. Multiple Hamas leaders, including Haniyeh, have used the school as a base and Hamas recently hosted a tribute event at IUG for their founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

Oh, by the way, Yassin managed to found IUG itself when he wasn't too busy trying to figure out how to wipe Israel off the map and murder innocent Israeli civilians.

Last week, Palestinian Media Watch, a pro-Israel watch-dog group, released a special report detailing what the group perceives as support and glorification of terror on Al- Quds's campuses. The group clearly has an agenda, but the vast amount of evidence they quote from Palestinian sources is extremely compelling.

Stories of administrators and students commemorating "martyrs" and praising terror frighteningly abound in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida - an official daily newspaper of the Palestinian Authority.

One striking example of the university's extremism: the Al-Quds student council's official symbol depicts a map of Israel completely covered by the colors of the Palestinian Liberation Organization flag.

"Education is education regardless of what it is," said Sheri Abdel-Rahman, an Israeli Arab and a freshman at Penn. "If you want to be able to deal with people in the future, then you need to be able to with educated people."

Abdel-Rahman is correct in hitting on USAID's good intentions, but what she and the agency fail to realize is that "education" isn't inherently good, particularly if it is used as a vehicle to preach hate, venerate suicide bombers and advocate terrorism.

Sadly, many of the students and administrators at IUG and Al-Quds are unflinching in their loathing of Israel and the West. By sponsoring these institutions and appearing on their campuses - as USAID did in September - the U.S. only legitimates their values, violates U.S. law and undermines the open-mindedness and liberal values we seek to promote in the region.

The fact that USAID continues to unapologetically spend our tax dollars in this manner is inexcusably misguided. Greater Congressional oversight over the agency is the only way to ensure that organizations supporting terrorism don't receive U.S. dollars in the future.

And I didn't need a "careful vetting process" to figure that one out.

Adam Goodman is a College sophomore from La Jolla, Calif. His e-mail address is goodman@dailypennsylvanian.com. A Damn Good Man appears on Wednesdays.

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