any other Arabic speakers/students who'd like to work on getting non jihadi Arabic classes in schools?

Submitted by Ann Marlowe (United States), Apr 25, 2007 at 02:35

I've been trying to locate heads of school in the charter schools who might be sympathetic to adding Arabic language classes - period, no Islamic anything - to their curriculum. The motivation would be that the US needs accomplished Arabic speakers to better deal with the Arab states on many fronts, from public diplomacy, education and business to intelligence-gathering. It would be fantastic to offer kids from poor backgrounds a ticket to a secure, prestigious and interesting career.

Arabic is also the gateway to Farsi, Urdu and to some extent Turkish, so kids from these backgrounds might be interested to learn the intellectual structure of the languages they speak but perhaps don't read at home. Again, no ideology, no PC feel-good motivations, just knowledge-building. And we ever get visas to the many Iraqi translators who've helped our troops in Iraq, some of them might want to teach Arabic here. Any thoughts?

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Daniel Pipes replies:

Sounds like a good idea to me, so long as there is a careful scrutiny of the Arabic-language instruction.