Sigh. The utter stupidity and ignoramce of our media is contributing to the perception that Barack Obama made a "gaffe" yesetrday when he claimed we need more Arabic translators in Afghanistan.

The fact is, that statement is absolutely true.

The New York Times ran a really horrifying story yesterday on Daniel Pipes' successful campaign to oust Debbie Almontaser as the principle of the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn.  

While we debate endlessly about the race card in the Dem primaries, it's alive and well on other fronts: There is an anti-Semitism already strong in this country that now targets Arabs instead of Jews.  

Debbie Almontaser dreamed of starting a public school like no other in New York City. Children of Arab descent would join students of other ethnicities, learning Arabic together. By graduation, they would be fluent in the language and groomed for the country’s elite colleges. They would be ready, in Ms. Almontaser’s words, to become “ambassadors of peace and hope.”

Yesterday's New York Times shows how Arab educator Almontaser and the Kahlil Gibran International Academy were sabotaged by the Sun and the Post, and, yes, the Department of Education. The future of our world, and our hopes for peace and understanding, rest with our seeing other people as people, and not as inherently worse than we are. This kind of racism is affecting all of us. read the article, substitute "Jew" for "Arab," and you'll see what I mean.

Critics Cost Muslim Educator Her Dream School

More below the fold.

I have been urging more Mandarin and study abroad programs in Oregon's public schools and universities since the summer of 2006. This is part of that effort. It was originally posted on BlueOregonhere.

The movie "Lions for Lamb" (seehere) directed by Robert Redford and starring Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise, is just out on DVD. It’s a political thriller about the war in Afghanistan, but the dialogues raise many issues. Rent it, see it.

In the middle of the movie there is a scene which slips in a profound proposal for US education. Because I am now developing similar legislation, several component proposals for a high school study abroad program, I found the scene riveting.  Let us in Oregon take the movie proposal seriously. Let us not mandate it, nor limit it to the Junior year, as in the movie, but let us see what parts we could make as options for our students.

This letter, in today's New York Times, says it all, but. . . :

November 3, 2007
Letter: Welcome the Translators

To the Editor:

Re "Help Wanted" (editorial, Oct. 31):

Translators, interpreters and others who have helped United States troops and diplomats now want to resettle in the United States. They speak many strategically important languages of the region. The United States does not have an adequate number of interpreters and translators who are proficient in these languages.

Therefore, we need them. Q.E.D.

We need their contribution, and they have demonstrated their loyalty and should not be left to fend for themselves.

Oswald Werner - Albuquerque, Nov. 1, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/...

On occasion we will receive emails regarding Operational Security. This article was sent out to us as a bulk email submission.

It's a very interesting article and in my opinion it's very insightful. It also goes to show how important it is to have a greater understanding of cultures outside our borders. We can never have successful foreign policy if we don't understand the world around us.

This was provided by defenselink.mil, and thus, I'm going to provide the entire text. It's public domain and not subject to private copyright laws.

When the political circles began clamoring over the firings of allegedly or possibly gay (gasp!) linguists in the military, the signs pointed to incompetence blinded by conservative religious ideology.  But the Bush-Cheney Administration--to borrow this right term from Al Gore--is incompetent the way Rhoda Penmark feigned innocence in The Bad Seed.  

Iraq's infrastructure is broken, it's peoples splintering into civil war?  These aren't defeats for the Bush Cheney Administration.

They're getting exactly what they want.

Gen. Pace, you can take a big step to begin to make up for your insensitive remarks about gays by doing the practical thing: Resupply our armed forces with the Arabic/Farsi linguists it desperately needs -- including decorated sergeant Bleu Copas, who volunteered out of patriotism after 9/11 and who was fired despite having the indispensible task of "helping translate intercepted messages from possible terrorists."  First, from Keith Olbermann's Countdown newsletter today:

Senior aides to the chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday that Marine Gen. Peter Pace won't apologize for calling homosexuality immoral - an opinion that gay advocacy groups deplored. "General Pace's comments are outrageous, insensitive and disrespectful to the 65,000 lesbian and gay troops now serving in our armed forces," the advocacy group Servicemembers Legal Defense Network said in a statement on its Web site. (MSNBC)

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has only six (6) fluent Arabic speakers out of 33 who speak Arabic.

I see the tide rising now!   Finally some reason begins to dawn in politics with the discussion turning to COMMUNICATION, which is critical while we are at war. Hmmm... a little late in coming, but hey, ya know, the "Wizard of Rove" all that...
So the firing of translators  according to CBS, which still uses past figures, perhaps hurts the war on terror. Oh, and suddenly now it seems that there were more gay translators discharged than were cited. Instead it seems, almost 30 Middle East Language specialists   and at least 800  
 other critical job specialists have been discharged for being gay.

Um... how exactly does is this helping in fighting the War on Terror?

You are over 10 times more likely to choose a human at random across the planet that speaks Arabic than you are to find an Arabic speaker in the FBI.

FBI Agents Still Lacking Arabic Skills
33 of 12,000 Have Some Proficiency

Five years after Arab terrorists attacked the United States, only 33 FBI agents have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of them work in the sections of the bureau that coordinate investigations of international terrorism, according to new FBI statistics.

Counting agents who know only a handful of Arabic words -- including those who scored zero on a standard proficiency test -- just 1 percent of the FBI's 12,000 agents have any familiarity with the language, the statistics show.

Yes, I think this sums up the war on terror.

To fight this war we need to remove the right of habeas corpus, we need to destroy our moral standing and allow torture, we need to allow warrantless wire tapping - but hire more Arabic speakers - you freaking kidding me?!!??!!

The Washington Post reports today that only 33 out of 12000 FBI agents have even a glancing knowledge of Arabic. This is one of those yawn stories. Yeah, yeah, we all know that Americans are bad with languages and can't find France on a map and can't divide 4 by 2. I watch Leno, too.

We've all heard the stories about all the American ambassadors who don't know the language of the country to which they're assigned. Yeah, I read The Ugly American in high school, too. We're arrogant and inept and that's why we keep getting into so much trouble. Old story.

Still true, of course, but it's an old story.

But it make you wonder--the President is busy accusing everyone who opposes the Patriot Act or illegal wiretapping of "not wanting to listen to the terrorists," well, it turns out that we actually can't listen to the terrorists.

Just came across two instances of discrimination on airliners from the last couple of days.   I don't think they've been covered here.

You remember a couple of weeks ago I posted this diary and an update about my local tv station slugging (captioning) a news story about teaching Arabic to high school students "Language of Terrorism".  But I didn't get back to telling you that I got an apology from the person who tagged the story.  It took four days, but it was over the weekend, so maybe she was off.
Well and good, huh?
But today, there was one of those "Around the Heartland" kinds of interviews with a local evangelist with the Church of Christ, named Eli something, who is a native of Israel, about the situation in the Middle East.  And I am starting to wonder if this slip-up from before represents a common theme at my local tv station.
All together now:   Argggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Yesterday I posted this diary about my horror at my local news presenting an item about kids doing a summer camp at the University of Iowa to learn about Arabic.  The horror came with labeling Arabic on-screen as "language of terrorism".

I don't usually complain to my local tv station. They sometimes misspell things on screen, and they sometimes slip and run packaged commercials as news.  But it is local covereage and they take their job of informing a very large, spread-out area seriously.  We have our local political scandals, "heartland heroes" and villains, murders and drug busts, and good coverage of education (generally), both school and higher ed.  But sometimes they just don't think, you know?  Today they captioned a story on the 5 p.m. news as "Language of Terrorism."  About what language?  I'll bet you could guess.

http://www.globam.org/ "The classics of American thought and history have been little translated into Arabic. Worse, even when they have been translated, they have appeared in small editions and fairly quickly go out of print. Worse still, the distribution system for Arabic books is poor, and there are few public libraries, so that many books that have been published in the past are no longer available to most readers."

I went to Juan Cole's site for the straight talk, and encountered this sincere tidbit of effort. Just thought I'd give a shout out for what certainly seems like a well-intentioned program. I expect I'll give regularly to it.

Remember Hi Magazine?  You know, that State Department financed propaganda rag that was supposed to improve our image  with young Arabs?

Read on..

You have to read this story, which contains some of the sharpest reporting yet on specific instances of cultural incompetence in Iraq. Just staggering. And we're firing Arabic linguists in the military because they're gay?