White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

‘American’ Middle East Universities in Danger

September 1, 2016 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

By Linda Gasparello

The attack on the American University of Kabul opens a new chapter on impeding access to liberal education in Afghanistan. It is a chapter that could be opened in as many as 18 American universities across the Middle East and North Africa.

The American University, located on five acres in the Afghan capital, opened in 2006. It is the only private, not-for-profit and co-educational university in the war-devastated country. It offers its 1,700 full- and part-time students a liberal arts and sciences curriculum taught in English. Many receive U.S. government-funded scholarships.

In 2008 then-first lady Laura Bush — who made access to education in Afghanistan one of her causes — helped to secure $42 million in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development for the American University. The State Department reportedly considers it to be an important symbol of the partnership between the United States and Afghanistan, and it has educated many Afghan government and non-government group officials who are trying to build a modern country.

Other American universities in the Middle East and North Africa – between nine and 18 – that receive U.S. government support also promote critical thinking and a liberal arts and sciences curriculum. The oldest of these, the American University in Beirut, has been doing so since its founding by American missionaries in 1866 as the Syrian Protestant College. Its mission statement says, “The university believes deeply in and encourages freedom of thought and expression and seeks to foster tolerance and respect for diversity and dialogue.”

As Michelle Evans, student life coordinator at the American University in Cairo (AUC), the second-oldest American-brand institution in the Middle East, told U.S. News & World Report, “The mission and values of an American university is to cultivate a well-rounded, independent thinker who is ready for the challenges of the world.”

As a graduate student on a U.S. government-funded scholarship to AUC in the late 1970s, I saw how important it was to have such an institution in a country that was trying to modernize. AUC students were exposed to so many more courses and ideas than students at the national universities, including Cairo University, who took classes only within their discipline. I felt they would be the most ready and able to carry out the “opening up” (or infitah) to the West that President Anwar Sadat was beginning in 1977.

Remarkably, as strongholds of Western education and values, AUC and other universities did not suffer lethal attacks during the civil wars in Lebanon, Arab anger at President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, or the Arab Spring. But there have been attacks on them, and I experienced one at AUC in 1977.

On a January afternoon, I was enjoying coffee with friends in the interior garden of the university when we heard a faculty member shout,“There’s a riot outside. Go home! Go home now!” Rioters pelted the university with stones, breaking windows. The stoning stunned everyone because the university — and America — was held in such high esteem in Egypt. The school’s librarian, a well-born Egyptian matron, said to me, “Who would do such a thing?”

We soon learned just who.

Thousands of poor Egyptians took to the streets in anger over Sadat’s economic liberalization, specifically a government decree lifting price controls on bread and other basic necessities, acceding to an International Monetary Fund request. The countrywide Bread Riots lasted for two days, and rioters destroyed 120 buses and hundreds of buildings in Cairo alone. But the American University was spared.

The Bread Riot protesters threw rocks; today’s Islamists, motivated by ideology, will toss bombs.

The attack on the American University of Kabul was a seminal event. Now the venerated American universities in the Middle East and North Africa will be even more vulnerable than they already are. — For InsideSources


Filed Under: Gasparello's Articles, Random Features Tagged With: Afghanistan, Anwar Sadat, AUAF, AUB, AUC, Beirut, Bread Riots, Cairo, intifah, Islamists, Kabul, Middle East, North Africa

Remembering a Generation Defined by Duty

May 15, 2015 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Seventy years ago, we celebrated the end of World War II in Europe. That celebration is not the first memory of my childhood, but it is one of the clearest.

I was a five-year-old boy in Cape Town, South Africa, proudly displaying a paper Union Jack, the familiar British flag, and watching the victory parade. I often wonder where the flags came from – before offset printing and photocopying – in time for the parade. Someone knew victory was at hand.

There was a palpable, universal happiness – though more subdued, I am told, than the outbursts which greeted the end of World War I. For me, that was the best parade ever. It was wonderful to see people grabbing each other, doing little impulsive jigs in the street.

Marching in the parade was the handsomest man I had ever seen, or have seen since: my father in his best Royal South African Navy uniform of a chief petty officer, engine room. My father was a wonderful man in many ways. He was not lettered, but extremely kind and dutiful, and loved for those things — not for being handsome. But I tell you, that day he was handsome.

It was not until 1998 that Tom Brokaw called them “The Greatest Generation,” in a book of that name. Maybe all who go to war are the greatest generation. Maybe, every father who survives is unbearably handsome to someone.

Memorial Day is upon us and our veterans — maybe veterans everywhere — will be briefly remembered. The Greatest Generation was, perhaps, the last time a generation was defined by its sense of duty. That was true of the men and women who peopled my young life.

My father sold our home and few possessions, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, to serve. He was turned down for the British army in Rhodesia because an arm he had once broken had not mended properly. He had heard that the Royal South African Navy would be more tolerant. His acceptance by the navy was not a certainty, and we had no money. But we made the long, hot, six-day journey to South Africa by train to no known future; my father, mother, brother and myself, all going off to war because that is what was done. That is what the men of the Greatest Generation did because it was your duty to serve.

My father was not alone. I grew up hearing other stories of how people had gone to great lengths to serve and, having gotten into the armed services, how they did everything they could to get into the fight, not to serve at a distance in a British dominion, as South Africa then was. That is how South African pilots came to serve in the Battle of Britain.

In those days, patriotism was organic here in the United States and around the globe. Not every last man of military age was a patriot, but most were. It was the deep-seated culture.

When it was over, those who survived WWII were welcomed home with celebrations, appreciation and reverence. Alas the warriors from more recent wars, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq and lesser conflicts, have come home to cold comfort. No parades, no five-year-olds with flags — and little place in the tapestry of the national memory. No recognition of their inalienable right to honor.

War is not everyone’s business anymore. Vietnam was the first war where patriotism was not part of the equation. Today, with a professional military, it is not the business of the armchair patriots with their slogans, urging others to take up arms.

When the World War II Memorial opened on the Mall in Washington in April 2004, I went there. I did not like it, architecturally; I was disappointed. But then men with canes and in wheelchairs began arriving, smiling and shedding occasional tears. It was important and moving to them, those handsome men. My father would have loved it; now, I like it well. Memorial Day weekend is at hand.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Afghanistan, Battle of Britain, D.C., Greatest Generation, Iraq, King Commentary, Korea, Kuwait, Memorial Day, Royal South African Navy, Tom Brokaw, Vietnam, Washington, World War I, World War II, World War II Memorial

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
The Shady, Sometimes Wacky World of State Secrets and Security Clearances

The Shady, Sometimes Wacky World of State Secrets and Security Clearances

Llewellyn King

Beware: Classified documents don’t always hide state secrets, and security clearances are used as tools of manipulation and vengeance. Before Xerox, if you wanted to keep a copy of something, you had to type it with a carbon sheet backing every page. In 1969, I was commissioned by a long-gone consultancy, the Arctic Company, to […]

The Case for Prescribed Burning: Fighting Fire With Fire

The Case for Prescribed Burning: Fighting Fire With Fire

Llewellyn King

Wildfire takes no prisoners, has no mercy, knows no boundaries, respects no nation and is a clear and present danger this and every summer as summers grow drier and hotter. The American West is burning; across Canada there are wildfires; and swaths of France, Spain, Portugal and Greece are ablaze. In 2022, faraway Siberia was […]

Will AI Stimulate Shadow Government?

Will AI Stimulate Shadow Government?

Llewellyn King

“This Time It’s Different” is the title of a book by Omar Hatamleh on the impact of artificial intelligence on everything. Hatamleh, who is NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s chief artificial intelligence officer, means that we shouldn’t look to previous technological revolutions to understand the scope and the totality of the AI revolution. It is, […]

Sorry, Europe Is Full, Tourists Are Told

Sorry, Europe Is Full, Tourists Are Told

Llewellyn King

This was the summer when much of Europe said to the ever-increasing flow of tourists, “Sorry, we are full.” Of course, Europe isn’t full at all. It is just those places that we all want to go, that have been tugging at our imaginations since we began imagining, are hopelessly crowded — and some are […]

Copyright © 2025 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in