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On The King’s Agenda for Reform in Jordan: The American ESL Center, A Professional Nightmare, Video)
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Republished from BeforeIItsNewshttps://beforeitsnews.com/international/2013/03/on-the-kings-agenda-for-reform-in-jordan-the-american-esl-center-a-professional-nightmare-video-2454290.html?currentSplittedPage=0
The story entails a language center in Amman, Jordan which has since 2006 continuously defrauded foreign teachers and students, severely abused its employees, sold copyright infringement, refused to pay its employees and fulfill promises, assaulted its employees, possibly spied and distributed personal information of its employees, and committed immigration fraud. This article attached to this e-mail is a product of Jordanians and Americans working together to stress the importance of labor reform needed in the country of Jordan. We hope with the recent article published in the Atlantic about the King of Jordan emphasizing his desire for reforming Jordan, this will be a positive message.
Below is one of the undercover videos we at Collective Consciousness have taken of the owner of this language center. Its contents reveal the owner, Khaled Allouzi, speaking horribly about other employees and also engaged in conversation about paying instructors to bring in students to cheat on the TOEFL exam (immigration fraud).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiLtRKVa9Hg
We have also attached photos of the location to this e-mail. There are photos of the back of the center, the front of the building where the center is located next to Majdi Mall, and the inside of the center.
Our evidence comprises of over 12 affidavits by former students and employees, public blog posts, and undercover video evidence. Education Testing services, the US Embassy, and the National Center of Human Rights are privy to this investigation.
The American ESL Center in Amman, Jordan:
A Professional Nightmare
The American English as a Second Language Center (AESLC) is filled with bustling students eager to improve the speaking and listening comprehension skills not available at the traditional four year universities. Wonderful personalities, avid enthusiasts of the English language, and ambitious young adults seek an avenue to explore new opportunities they may ascertain with the English language. On the surface of this apotheosis, the appearance is one of a great business location which buttresses the potential talents of language students. Albeit the cliché involving appearances and deception is a tiring one to read or hear, its veracity has not exhausted as much significance as its waning popularity.
The AESLC has a stature equivalent to most infamous establishments, and it is a poignant example of why labor laws are often beneficial not solely to employees, but to customers and a country. The AESL Center is owned by a husband and wife who claim both American and Jordanian citizenship. Since 2006, the center has promulgated public complaints in blogs and discussion posts on social websites, private and public verbal condemnation, and also formal grievances against the center. The chatter on this place is proliferating and can no longer be ignored. What are the conundrums? The following is a result of a year-long discreet investigation by human rights organization, Collective Consciousness.
Abuse
The abuse of employees and customers encompasses more psychological than physical offenses, yet the damage is just as insidious. The criticism by former employees in a plethora of sworn testimonies range from personal insults of a humiliating manner by the husband-wife martinet owners of this establishment, to being contemned at for false accusations, and to mendacious threats. The only positive aspect of the owners’ severe abuse is they are at least not ribald when humiliating their employees. Several secretaries have been witnessed by teachers and customers, crying and shaking after being hollered at for such trivial mistakes as asking the female owner if she desired coffee, requesting salaries after the center was several months delinquent in releasing the funds to employees, or making a minor error such as forgetting to inform a customer of a TESOL class or a special discount by the center. One former employee stated,
“There are two other examples of unacceptable managerial behavior I witnessed, as did other teachers and students, openly in the center. The first one was a specific incident in which #### [female center owner] yelled and reprimanded a secretary in public while class was in session, sending her to tears. I can’t claim knowledge of the conflict, but feel compelled to mention the sight of the secretary crying. There was a student beside me who asked what had happened. I won’t forget that moment.”
A former coffee boy was sadly seen by two former employees being aggressively slapped, spit on, and chased out of the center by the male owner of the business on more than one occasion.
Teachers have also been menaced and threatened in front of students including one incident where the female owner chased a fleeing teacher out of her office after he repeatedly begged her “please #### , just leave me alone.” This employee was being admonished and mocked in front of the owners’ children and the Lead Instructor, within the confines of her dirty small office for over a time length of an hour. During the course of this interrogation, this employee had answered his phone and acted as if he had hung up his cell phone, when in fact, he kept the phone line open. A colleague on the other line heard the female owner screaming while the victim continuously brooked and requested in a polite and calm manner that he be treated as a human being. When he decided to leave, the female owner yelled, “You’re not going anywhere” and proceeded to hunt him down like prey from her office into the cafeteria area to commence scolding him in front of many students. Another former employee stated, “I have witnessed many experiences where teachers were yelled at, called stupid in many ways, where teachers were threatened by management to not get paid.” Other encounters by past employees enumerate persistent paranoid accusations by the owners against teachers for stealing textbooks, teaching outside of the center, he-said/she-said logomachy, and more.
Other expostulations by several former employees involve the two owners playing a childish game of divide-and-conquer where teachers would be secretly called into the office of either owner and ingratiate the employee with a warning that another instructor is spreading horrible gossip about him or her, that a co-worker is trying to steal or cadge their students or purloin their opportunities for promotion, and more. This type of strategy does well in creating an unhealthy environment where the staff are more concerned about their colleagues’ perfidy and fighting each other rather than on querying why their salaries are late despite the center declaring at a teacher’s meeting the opening of a new AESL center in Irbid city and the purchasing of brand new technologically advanced time clocks by the owners/parvenuses who own the AESL Center, why the printers and computers are suddenly not working immediately prior to deadlines for staff paperwork, why their students have no textbooks two weeks before the end of a six week course, why spurious promises by the owners are not fulfilled, why there is a high rate of employee turnover or signs of abuse in employees, and more. However, there is a plus for the employment of such management strategy, though for the owners. It increases the temporary competitiveness of teachers against each other, and thus augments the productivity of the center’s employees until the antagonist or protagonist of a puppeted conflict quits. As one former employee stated,
“I was also put in the office several times with ####, where she told me about other teachers talking badly about me to my students and to the management. Things escalated (by this I mean this behavior continued and got really uncomfortable) and management was always trying to put blame on the teachers. The teachers started feeling very uncomfortable and for some reason the management liked that and fed off of that. They would try to purposely turn teachers against each other even though it really doesn’t make sense to make the work atmosphere of your own center unbearable!!”
Another employee stated,
“She [the female owner ####] proceeded to talk about another teacher at the center – ##### ##### [instructor and former employee] – and how he was to blame for these behavioral issues with the students. She had reason to believe, she said, that the two students and ##### [instructor and former employee] were in some sort of cahoots, and that in general ##### [former employee] had been spreading misinformation throughout the center in order to stir up trouble. I tried to diffuse the situation, and noted that even if ##### [former employee] had said something offhanded, I’m sure it wasn’t malicious. #### [female center owner] looked at me quite seriously and, I quote to the best of my memory, “No, I know ##### [former employee]. He’s been doing stuff like this for a while.”
I proceeded to tell her that those two students in particular do not talk to ##### [former employee] much, and seeing as we spend all of our breaks in the cafeteria together, that ##### [former employee] is a friend of mine and I know him quite well now as both a friend and a teacher, I think I would know best. #### [female owner] persisted with her version of the story, at which point I told her, as softly as I could, that she was wrong, that this specific event has nothing to do with anyone other than myself and the two troublesome students, but thank you very much for helping me deal with the matter.
I was arrested by the unprofessionalism – to think that a manager would talk about an employee to another employee, a relatively new employee at that, and in such an openly antagonistic and divisive manner. It seemed to me her motive was purely factious: she wanted to pit one teacher against another on ad hominem evidence. Such was my suspicion. The facts are all that speak, and whatever the intention was, I took no part in the game.”
Worse, the owners develop special relationships with certain instructors and malign other employees in discreet conversations. Many former employees recall that the owners of the center share amazing and exaggerated stories of past teachers. One malicious and callous tale is of two former instructors who they claim regularly slept with students, one becoming pregnant from this relationship. This myth has gained popularity because of the owners’ persistent camp fire and Boy Scout like tales of indoctrination to newly employed teachers and students every session. As one former employee demonstrated his knowledge of this popular myth, “Some teachers are unfornately dating some of the center’s students while the students are enrolled. This “word” is getting around about the center. This is also common knowledge amongst the center employees and all involved.”
Another disturbing complaint by prior instructors is that the vertically challenged male owner uses his armed guard to occasionally intimidate and abuse the teachers. One past instructor asserted that she was sexually assaulted by one of the guards. Another teacher affirmed he was physically restrained once for no apparent reason. In a report filed with the US Embassy of Amman, Jordan, a past employee corroborated such behavior. This employee stated that he was threatened verbally and physically to sign a notice of termination. This employee refused to sign the unwonted document when he found irrelevant and personal information on this document about his former spouse. When he proceeded to leave, the owner threatened, “If you leave my office” twice and also commented “you won’t make it past my front guard!” According to this same report, a student distracted the guard long enough for this teacher to escape.
Although the majority of the verbal aspersions originate from the virago female of an owner, do not let her seemingly distant relationship with her husband deceive you. Although the married co-owners decline to publicly state or demonstrate their relationship so as to keep the public guessing, several employees have averred that the husband and wife co-owners plot together in regards to targeting their employees. Sometimes the owners fight each other and the employees are unwillingly dragged into the malaise. It is also salient to highlight that the Lead Instructor of the center is an instrument of their harassment and abuse of other teachers. She is either gullibly manipulated or connivingly complicit, as she hides under the guise of nascent rules to be enforced while granting special attention for disciplinary reprimand toward those employees the owners do not favor. For example, one employee testified he was late for a meeting and consequently castigated for it while being reprimanded with having his class canceled the next day. However, two other employees who were also not present during the same meeting were never acknowledged or reprimanded. This was verified via interviews of both employees who missed the appointment. In another example, a teacher was criticized for not having his displays on his classroom walls organized well enough, while a different instructor received no reprimand despite having less than the minimum amount required. A different former instructor was told to tuck in a portion of his shirt on his side that happened to stick out and then witnessed a favored teacher stroll into the cafeteria to grasp a glass of water with his entire shirt out of his pants. The list continues and the effects of the owner’s targeting against unfavored employees against his favoritism toward specific teachers are more than evident in the latter’s sinecures.
Espionage
More complaints also pertain to allegations which are very unethical and insulting to those workers who have been observant and perceptive to espy abnormalities in their environment. A public blog claims, “…this place is packed with cameras so be very careful.” Another former employee stated, “The center uses spyware on the teachers’ computers, but doesn’t tell them nor is this mentioned in the Employee Handbook. This angered many of the teachers that later left.” These accusations havebeen verified to be true.
Worse, an affidavit by a former employee indicates that the fatuous female owner brought up his friend’s name and continued to request more information in relation to his cohort. He could not contemplate how she ascertained this knowledge and was bewildered as to why this person was of interest to her. He later became disturbed and felt insulted that she furthered her unwonted curiosity by questioning him on this matter repetitively, as if the female owner had the subtle supposition that an employee is obligated to respond to such probing elicitation about an employee’s personal life. A different employee testified that he was asked about particular details from his personal past history by the female owner as well. This employee swore that he was given an unwonted notice of termination to sign that had deceitful disclosure within its contents about comments he supposedly made about his past former wife in the center. Even worse, there is sworn testimony that the center regularly avoids reprimands for its unethical and illegal behavior since 2006 by sharing the personal information of its customers and employees with outside interests desiring to accumulate data on Palestinian activists or anyone who may be of interest. Whatever the derivative is for such unethical and strange patterns of behavior, it is very clear that an investigation has shown that many former employees are very concerned that their personal information has been compromised and shared with others for the benefit of the center’s owners.
Service and Quality
The service and quality at the AESL Center is also atrophied by the owners. As one student posted in Arabic:
المركز أخذت عندهم دورة وطبعا اللي اعطتنا هي ربة منزل امريكية وكان سعرها110 بس المنهاج كان ركيك وما كملناه ….اما الإستقبال مش مريحين في التعامل والكفتيريا أسعارها فلكية.. مواصلاته سهلة ولكن ما بنصح حد ياخد دورة فيه
“The Cafeteria is expensive and doesn’t have a variety of selection. The reception is not comfortable…I don’t advise anyone to take lessons there.”
This complaint is also true.
Prices are exorbitant accompanied by low quality and diversity. The cafeteria charges double the normal rate for beverages than can be purchased in nearby places. Of course, the small amount of time during class breaks indirectly restricts teachers or students from taking a stroll to the next door cafe shop. The only menu selection is coffee, tea, or drinks. The cafeteria is not the sole enigma of this place though. Students have complained that the local newspapers advertised a certain price for classes only to discover they were charged a higher price after registering for classes. In addition, when teachers are enjoying breaks in the cafeteria, where they may puff a cigarette and enjoy coffee in front of gigantic duplicate signs which state in large print “Pay first”, a teacher may find his or herself answering questions by students or fulfilling requests to help with homework until one of the owners arrives enraged that an employee is teaching English for free. One teacher claimed that when he was defending his decision to aid one of his students with her homework during break, his defense was answered by the owners with the retort, “this is bad for business” and “Jordanians always want something for nothing!”
According to former employees; teachers without degrees or experience teach advanced level courses, classes are awarded to those who are savvy in maintaining good relations or remaining obsequious to the owners in contrast to their class performance and credentials, non-native speakers of English are presented as native scholars, lecturers with a modicum of or without any business background are suddenly perspicacious instructors of Business English, and infringed books which can easily be purchased on Amazon.com are copied page-to-page and sold with the courses. The center’s standards also do not meet third party establishments they do business with. For example, the EBC company that approves TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) courses for customers desiring to be certified for instructing a second language, advertises on its website that its TEFL instructors possess an average of ten to fifteen years experience, but the center regularly endorses TEFL instructors in their TEFL program with zero or null familiarity with teaching a foreign language or who want of adequate academic accolades or degrees. Furthermore, some students have complained that their peers with a close connection with the owners may tread pass the requirements for advanced courses of English. For instance, one former employee stated it was normal for certain pupils of lower English levels to attend the TOEFL preparatory classes he taught even though the center’s policy restricted many others until they reached the upper echelons of the center’s advanced ranks.
The unfulfilled and tumid promises made to instructors employed at the center also trickles down to the students too. According to former clients, many promises of quick and magical improvement in English are made to prospective customers which are often impossible to ascertain. Furthermore, the teaching methodology and style of the center under the tutelage of the center’s female owner is described by former employees and customers as appropriate for young children as opposed to the majority adult specimens in this center’s exploratory English lab of nascent and inchoate pedagogy. One former employee stated,
“I worked at the American ESL Centre on University Road and I don’t recommend it at all. There are no standards in teaching and no conformity. The lessons are poorly organized and a waste of time and money…The owners give students a lot of promises about the classes which aren’t true and don’t end up happening. They are also abusive to teachers.”
Students have other persistent lamentations. Sometimes class books are not given to the students in a decent amount of time or not at all. Just as unfulfilled promises trickle down from employees to customers, the abuse occasionally does as well. In one circumstance, a former teacher testified in his affidavit that the female owner of the center suddenly pulled him to the side one day and demanded he intentionally make a conglomeration of students who had complained earlier about the center, feel stupid in the classroom. Other punishments in the nefarious chain of molestation by the owners entail using teachers as a conduit for retribution against students who have offended them or their business in the slightest manner. This revenge comprises of demanding some instructors to give certain students lower marks, apply rules strictly toward specific students while being lax with the majority, ignoring students within the courses, and more.
Salaries
The aleatory salaries of teachers are the most outstanding problem and cynosure of the stigmatization which plagues this center. Since 2006, many former employees have made remonstrations against the center for receiving their pay late or not getting paid at all. The amount of money owed can extend to such lengths as 1,732 Jordanian Dinars over periods of months with another former employee owed 1,500 dinars for over a year. One former employee sued the center in court as she averred about her civil litigation case:
“I was employed by two of the most disgusting con artists in Jordan. They strictly hire US citizens who are not familiar with the country and fail to pay them their salaries. Fortunately for me, I had dual citizenship and my mother took the bastards to court for my four months of salary. Finally after nearly two years in court, I finally won the case and got my money. For those who are not familiar with the country lost their money and time. It’s tragic to see foreigners have such a horrific experience. I hope the center gets shut down ASAP by the Jordanian government. The US Embassy will not protect any US citizen against these thieves because the center is not approved by the US Embassy so please beware.”
Many empty guarantees are made to the laborers of the center involving payments of courses and private lessons, salary increases, future promotions, and also Jordanian residency in exchange for employment. This fraud does not commence in the beginning, but slowly makes victims of those the owners are not fond of over time for any particular reason. As one former employee stated, “I will say that at my time at the American ESL Center next to Majdi Mall, I was treated very nicely in the beginning and got my pay on time. However, things later (sooner than later really) turned sour.” Another instructor and customer commented after finishing the TEFL courses for training to be an instructor, “Promises of pay raises were promised, teachers took classes online (TEFL) to be certified, with a 20-25JD raise per class being promised, only to find out that once the course was completed (and paid for by teachers themselves) that pay raises were not granted.” An entirely different employee commented in her affidavit about the psychological ramifications on instructors resulting from the center delaying the payment of salaries and the plausible impetus behind such antics:
“They keep promising they will pay and then postpone paying ultimately keeping their staff working for them ‘for free’. Because ultimately, we are afraid to leave because we worry that she will not pay us. Again, keeping us there for free. It is a type of psychological blackmail. “
A different former employee stated,
“Though the employee handbooks, word of mouth promises by the administration, and contracts claim payment is the 5th of every month, the salaries are nearly always late. Often and disturbingly, the salary may not be paid for employees for a period of a month or two. Occasionally, some may never get paid at all. “
Another different employee stated, “Pay was mostly always late, with many excuses given and always putting blame and lying about money being stolen, money not being enough, students not paying etc even though all the teachers and the people working at the front desk, including the accountant who had an office next to the teachers office would say there was money available for the teachers to be paid.”
Another employee stated,
“But twice a week the teachers were told to expect pay in the coming days, and it never came. When I finally took offense at the excessive false promises – after all, many of us teachers had been avoiding our landlords for weeks, and enough was enough – they, the management, were extremely apologetic and promised payment within two days. It did not come for at least another four, and none of the managers in charge of payroll were seen in the building during this time. I do not claim to know why the American ESL Center withheld money for so long, but I refuse to believe any excuse is a valid one. The pedantic scrutiny of our otherwise sufficient work only exacerbated the matter.”
There also exists ‘special taxes’ or missing money that magically emerge and disappear on the receipts of salary payments and from the mouths of the owners. One former jobholder stated that after threatening the owners to pay him his salary,
“#### ###### calculated my pay for the 10 lessons to be equal to 145 JOD, and noted that this amount is tax-deductible. Later when I got paid, I received 125 JOD only. That’s way more than a tax deduction.”
Another employee stated that his employment contract expressed he was supposed to be paid 250 Jordanian Dinars for every class but was only paid 200 JDs, with a verbal oath from the owners to be compensated the remaining balance at a later date and time. However, that remaining balance vanished from the memories of the owners. A huge number of former employees swear an oath that the center promised and blandished them an exact amount of money, this money and more never materialized.
In addition to defrauding instructors, the rules of the center are occasionally strictly enforced via deductions from teachers’ aleatory salaries for the most minor of infractions coincidentally and sequaciously when salaries are delinquent. Otherwise, the enforcement of these rules are ignored or omitted completely, when financial circumstances for the center are up. However, during the downs, if a teacher is not within a classroom five minutes before class the teacher is docked 7 Jordanian Dinars for each offense. Teachers are also deducted pay if lesson plans are not up to par despite the fact that they may be more qualitative than other teachers’ who ingratiate the owners. One former employee stated,
“During my time at the American ESL Center, there were several managerial problems with which I took major issue. I brought some of these to attention, namely the unprofessional and clearly dishonest delay of payroll. The entire staff received their checks over a month late, after repeated false pay dates given from the management. During the month-long period without salary, regulations and restrictions to monitor the teacher’s performance were increased threefold. Management told us that every new rule, regulation, and bit of scrutiny came directly from the Ministry of Education.”
A different employee stated,
“I will, however, state that I witnessed another teacher, ####, be withheld payment for not completing menial paperwork. The rest of the staff was paid, and it was clear that #### had not been, and she was distraught about it. Again, when I inquired about how such a small issue as a few scraps of paper could warrant the withholding of salary, I was rebutted by remarks about “the ministry’s standards” and so forth. I claim no expertise in the matter, but I sincerely doubt the Ministry of Education mandates such delays in the case of a few lesson plans gone askew: there are more far pressing matters in the world of education. There are bookless schools to fill, teacher-less classrooms to fix, and administrative corruptions to unearth. Yet I doubt a ministry of high regard, faced with a hardworking teacher short dotting a few I’s and T’s, would call for such extreme measures.”
In addition to low pay and sporadic deductions of portions of salaries, the center also requires each instructor to donate extra unpaid office hours and attend long and ineffectual workshops. One former employee stated,
“Each teacher is required to do a lot of extra work and attend workshops for which there is no monetary compensation. The workshops at the center can be a few hrs in length, too. Teachers are made to work plenty of overtime without getting paid for it. They don’t pay on time (sometimes not even at all). There is a large turnover of teachers and students because everyone leaves.”
Salaries are not the only disappointing ghosts employees chase. The center does not follow through with expectations advertised. The center fails to fulfill promises of a one year residency card to their employees, comfortable and Western type housing, exciting trips to historical sites, future promotions, pay raises, placement in jobs, and more. Some former employees have stated the pull of such advertisement inevitably led them to a nightmare instead. As one former employee stated,
“Once through immigration [arrival in Jordan], I found there was no one at the airport to bring me to my studio apartment (the one provided in the accommodation package). Slightly confused, I managed to purchase an international calling card and contact Mr. ###### – the individual whose son was initially supposed to pick me up from the airport. I managed to get directions to my temporary residents, and took off to find a taxi. According EBC, transportation to and from the airport was should have been approximately 25 Jordanian Dinars, I paid 35.”
Expecting a three bed room apartment in Jordan that appeared semi-decent according to pictures sent from the female owner of the center to him in the United States, he instead arrived in Jordan and stumbled upon a favela, “I was provided with a studio, a one bedroom studio with no hot water, a broken bed, and no clean drinking water. The fridge did not work and most of the electrical outlets were inoperable.”
This former employee continues, “The EBC website also promised, a two night stay in Pertra and a city tour of Amman. Again, these promises were not upheld by the American ESL Center’s administration or staff.”
He ends,
“The accommodation package was priced at $800, but for what? I was not provided with any of the specifications professed by EBC. So, the ancillary inquest is simple, where did the extra money go? It certainly was not spent on trips and tours, nor was it allocated towards proving me with a proper living arrangements.”
The sidereal dreams of fresh undergraduate students were not the only aspirations crushed by the lies from the charlatans of this center. The former coffee boy illegally worked here for years past his visa expiration, anticipating a promised residency card for him and his family. However, this coffee boy’s employment at the place ended before his ambitions could arise. Another former employee stated that he engaged in a discussion with this employee in front of the center one day and elicited information about his welfare. This same employee testified that the former coffee boy stated that he no longer worked at the AESL center, his wife was in the hospital, and he needed money owed to him from the center from over a year; in order to get his wife out of the hospital.
Attempts to ascertain salaries have always been met with more broken tumid promises and sometimes even threats. As one former employee stated, after arguing with the male owner with a pulchritudinous over-sized belly, “Because of the heated argument with Mr. ##### where I told him I would go see a lawyer about my pay, he threatened that if I were to bring a lawyer, he’d have a 100 lawyers defending him and that I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it because of his family name and money.”
Immigration Fraud
It would be construed as an accurate assessment to assert that the lines of ethics and professionalism have been torn asunder by this center. The center has also breached those demarcation lines pertaining to laws as reports and affidavits have recorded such illegal acts as sexual and simple assault and a reported kidnapping in the preceding paragraphs, and now also immigration fraud. Two former instructors of the center have sworn that the male owner bribed them to provide him crackpot test-takers to score high on the TOEFL exam on behalf of other students. Both teachers testified that they were punished afterwards when they did not carry out this request. The reprimand consisted of the male owner manipulating or ascertaining the complicity of his wife and the Lead instructor of the center to make the worker’s employment at the center unbearable in order to coerce him or her to quit. If the teacher did not resign, he or she would be ultimately fired.
Authenticity
Many former employees were verbally told that the center is affiliated with the American Embassy. Personal visitation to the authentic language institute which ‘is’ affiliated to the US Embassy, the American Language Center, and direct contact with the US Embassy of Amman, Jordan have determined that this spurious claim is not true. Nevertheless, this fabrication brings in customers and teachers.
One public blog post by someone under the name Sand Teacher from the American Language Center which ‘is’ connected to the American Embassy stated,
“I am connected with the American Language Center (http://www.alc.edu.jo), an extension of the Public Affairs section of the Embassy of the United States in Amman, Jordan.
If you hear the name American ESL Center, PLEASE DO NOT confuse them with the AUTHENTIC American Language Center–we are two entirely separate and unrelated entities, though some would like to take advantage of our excellent reputation by sowing seeds of identity confusion.
We would cringe at any of the above-mentioned things being done in our center. If these things are true, and they are being done by Americans working in Jordan, it is shameful and unacceptable. I apologize on their behalf for tarnishing the reputation of Americans.”
Another comment on the discussion forum stated,
“To repeat a previous post from 2009, the American ESL Center is not AMIDEAST or the American Language Center. The ESL Center has had a bad reputation for some years now.”
A totally different blog post stated,
“Please note that the phone number listed is NOT their number, but is the phone number of the American Language Center (552-3901) located off Madina Munawara Street next to Queen Alia College. The ALC is affiliated with the U. S. Embassy in Amman, and does NOT have any other branches in Amman.”
It is pertinent to also briefly mention that the center regularly copies page-to-page Longman’s Preparation for the TOEFL Exam: The Paper Test by Deborah Phillips and consistently distributes those replicas for sale to students. A query as to whether the center has a license or permission to do this by a phone call to Longman’s company representative has revealed the center does not have the legal authority to do so. Copies of the books they have sold with the center’s logo on it are now circulating among authorities.
Conclusion
Reiterating a point made in the beginning of this article, the labor laws of Jordan must be improved. It is an awesome country with kind hearted people and an amazingly large and unequaled hospitality. However, its tourism and educational services cannot reach its potential when stymied by crooked places as in this article, taking advantage of the foreigners with dreams and open minds and hearts, who come to explore the great Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan only to be vexed and victimized to augment the pelf of the avarice. When one attempts to imagine the consequences of such an atmosphere, one can assume this is one of the many reasons that the employee turnover rate at this center is higher than any sidereal pinnacle in the mountainous region of Amman, Jordan. But this center has to be shut down before this cancer grows! The Jordanian people’s heart is well known, as it sustains refugees of all types despite the detrimental effect on its own economy. There are other countries such as Bangladesh that refuse to succor those who are fleeing danger. Many have to extend a sincere thanks to the people of Jordan for following their heart and religion. But we still can use progress.
As one former employee of the center stated,
“Keep in mind that the center is owned and operated by Americans who live here in Jordan. Some of the things stated above wouldn’t be allowed in the States, but they happen here. Rules are different. Labor protection is different. Certain situations were taken advantage of in the minds of many of the center’s former teachers.”
Why do some workers endure such treatment for a while before quitting? Many of the employees do not complain because they need the money. Others don’t care as long as they eventually get paid because they do not have the experience to get a better and more reputable job. And others fall for the initial cadging and lies without having the acumen or common sense to see past the words and acts of professional charlatans. Another exigent question is how can the center get away with such acts for so long? Some say it is because the owners’ family who are in higher and more affluent positions within the Jordanian government have enabled them, by protecting them. Others say it is because they share the personal information of its employees with others to avoid reprimand. Perhaps it is a combination of both. Finally, why have past employees not filed a civil litigation suit or complained louder or plighted to battle this monster? It is because some feel they don’t have the time nor money for the long drawn-out court process, others say that the Jordanian people and government are desensitized to endemic corruption because it is the norm here and thus neither the former or latter will care or help, a larger proportion are afraid of the repercussions by the owners’ large and affluent family, and a smaller portion just do not care for people’s rights including their own. One former employee stated,
“Dear ESL Cafe Subscribers,
This is a warning to anyone considering a position at The American ESL Center. It is a center located on Queen Rania Street near Jordan University. I worked there from September through December and received NO SALARY! People warned me before I got the job there that others, who worked at the center, did not receive their salary either, but I did not listen.
I worked my tail off, and the owner of the place, along with her husband completely cheated me. They particularly choose American citizens because the owners assume that most Americans who work there will leave the country and not fight for their rights. Furthermore, the owners of the center come from a huge family. Because Jordan is such a tribal country, big families with power can get away with lots of criminal acts (like hiring people and not paying them a salary).
Please take what I have written under considertation. These people are liars and thieves!!”
Regardless of the differences of opinions as to the answers to the questions above, what matters now is will this microcosm of corruption, the American ESL Center, be allowed to persist here in Jordan with impunity? Or is justice and truth principles that the government and people of Jordan not only enforce, but also protect and reward those who strive for such traits to be attributed to the great Kingdom of Jordan? Or will Jordan demonstrate it doesn’t possess such large distinctions from some of its neighbors? This investigation and article was made possible because a combination of Jordanian and American paladins worked together to make a stand when many refused to. It is a mystery as to why Educational Testing Services and the US Embassy in Jordan have been munifecent to the American ESL Center in not shutting them down to preclude more harm to other innocent victims. As one former employee stated,
“As an Arab American, this was a disgrace to have to go through all of the humiliation and see teachers continually not get paid, get yelled at, called names and promised many things that never ever were fulfilled by the management there. Yes I only quit and went to get my money weeks later and didn’t go to make a complaint even though I knew and still know that what goes on at that center is disgusting, illegal, and immoral. I am glad that someone had the guts to stick up for what has happened and what continues to still happen at the American ESL Center and I am happy to get to state only some of the things that happened at this center that I have honestly witnessed. All of the teachers that start at the center leave after they witness these things and we are a large team, glad that we can finally take a stand together against these injustices.”
According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, the adjective professional means “characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession or exhibiting a courteous, conscientious, and generally businesslike manner in the workplace.”
None of the preceding traits can infer that the American ESL Center is professional, diametrically and more accurately, it is a professional nightmare which must be condemned.
(Sources derive from public posts on discussion boards, video evidence, and many affidavits.)
http://jo.jeeran.com/en/p/the-american-esl-center-amman/
المتطرفون المسيحيون الأمريكيون في كردستان American Evangelicals in Kurdistan
ا هذا المنشور هو ترجمة لمقال سابق. كتبه مايكل رينولدز. رينولدز مراسل أخبار رويترز.. يعمل أيضًا في منظمة في أمريكا توثق العنصريين والإرهابيين الدينيين في أمريكا. https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2010/07/12/american-evangelicals-kurdistan/
Evangelicals have established schools, radio stations and churches in northern Iraq — all with the blessings of the Kurdistan government and assistance from U.S. taxpayers.
وفقًا لمايكل رينولدز ، المتطرفون المسيحيون والعنصريون من أمريكا ، بدولارات الضرائب الأمريكية والمدارس المبنية ومحطات الراديو والمزيد في شمال العراق / كردستان بأموال أمريكية بعض المتطرفين المسيحيين والعنصريين الذين أسسوا مدارس مسيحية في كردستان / شمال العراق هم جورج غرانت ودوغلاس ويلسون ودوغلاس لايتون وستيفن مانسفيلد وهاري شوت. تسمى المدارس المدرسة الكلاسيكية للميديين في أربيل ودهوك والسليمانية.
July 12, 2010
12 يوليو 2010
مايكل رينولدز
The Classical School of the Medes in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq | Credit: REBAZ MAHMOUD
المدرسة الكلاسيكية للميديين في الصورة
On a barren hillside outside Sulaymaniyah in southeast Iraqi Kurdistan sits a small compound of buildings clustered behind battered gray and ochre walls. Atop one wall is a large white sign glittering with gold and azure lettering that reads in English and Arabic: Classical School of the Medes. It is one of three new private schools in the region that teach a “Christian worldview,” the handiwork of American evangelicals from Tennessee.
على تلة جرداء خارج السليمانية في جنوب شرق كردستان العراق يقام مجمع صغير من المباني الطويلة ومن وراء الجدران الرمادية وفوق جدار عال تقف لوحة كبيرة بيضاء تلمع باللون الذهبي والأزرق السماوي مكتوب عليها بالحروف وباللغة الإنجليزية والعربية: المدرسة الكلاسيكية - الميديين. وهي واحدة من ثلاث مدارس خاصة جديدة في المنطقة التي تعلم النظرة العالمية "للمسيحية" ومن عمل الإنجيليين الأمريكيين من ولاية تينيسي. أنشأت هذه المدارس مع محطات الإذاعة والكنائس الانجيلية في شمال العراق وكلها بمباركة من حكومة كردستان وبمساعدة من دافعي الضرائب في الولايات المتحدة. ففي عام 2012 ، قتل طالب مدرسًا أمريكيًا يُدعى إرميا سمول. ثم قتل الطالب نفسه. وقالت وكالة الأنباء الأمريكية إن الطالب كان يعاني من مشاكل شخصية. ومع ذلك ، ذكر والد الطالب أن إرميا سمول حول ابنه من الإسلام إلى المسيحية. ورغم أن المسيحيين في العراق أناس طيبون ، فإن المعلمين المسيحيين الأجانب في هذه المدارس "أسوأ من إرهابيي القاعدة". https://ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2012/3/state6004.htm
Since the US occupation took hold, American evangelicals have established not only schools, but printing presses, radio stations, women’s centers, bookstores, medical and dental clinics, and churches in northern Iraq, all with the blessings and assistance of the Kurdistan government. Many of these efforts were funded in part by US taxpayer dollars, channeled through Department of Defense construction contracts and State Department grants.
منذ الاحتلال الامريكي تولى الإنجيليين الاميركان ليس بناء المدارس فقط ولكن المطابع ومحطات الإذاعة، والمراكز النسائية، والمكتبات، والعيادات الطبية وخدمات طب الأسنان، والكنائس في شمال العراق، ومع كل الدعم والمساعدة من حكومة كردستان وتم تمويل العديد من هذه الجهود كجزء من أموال دافعي الضرائب الأميركية، من خلال توجيه وزارة الدفاع لعقود البناء ومنح وزارة الخارجية.
In September 2003, just four months after US forces took down Saddam Hussein’s regime, 350 evangelical pastors and church leaders assembled in Kirkuk, where they were warmly welcomed by Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government.
في أيلول 2003، بعد أربعة أشهر فقط من غزو القوات الأمريكية وإزالة النظام، تم تجميع 350 من قساوسة وزعماء الكنيسة الإنجيلية في كركوك، حيث استقبلوا بحفاوة من قبل مسعود بارزاني، رئيس حكومة إقليم كردستان.
At that gathering, George Grant, a leader of Servant Group International, the evangelical organization in Nashville that set up the chain of Christian schools, declared that “Jesus Christ is Lord over all things; He is Lord over every Mullah, every Ayatollah, every Imam, and every Mahdi pretender; He is Lord over the whole of the earth, even Iraq!”
وفي ذلك الاجتماع، أعلن جورج غرانت، وهو زعيم مجموعة الخادم الدولية، والمنظمة ألانجيلية في ناشفيل عن إعداد سلسلة من المدارس المسيحية، على أن "يسوع المسيح هو الرب على كل شيء، فهو الرب على كل ملا، كل آية الله، وعلى كل إمام، وعلى كل الزعماء المهديين، فهو الرب على كامل الأرض وحتى على العراق!
CENTCOM documents show that between 2005 and 2007, DOD’s Joint Contracting Command Iraq/Afghanistan paid the Kurdish company Daban Group at least $465,639 for the construction of Grant’s School of the Medes. Two years earlier, tens of thousands of dollars from a State Department-funded program called Healthcare Partnerships in Northern Iraq also made their way into a variety of Servant Group evangelical and humanitarian projects.
تظهر وثائق وزارة الدفاع أن القيادة المركزية الأمريكية بين عامي 2005 و 2007، دفعت من قيادة التعاقد العراقي المشترك الى مجموعة الدبان وهي شركة كردية لبناء مدرسة غرانت للميديين بما مجموعة 465،639 $. وقبل عامين، كانت هناك العشرات الآلاف من الدولارات من البرنامج التي تمولها وزارة الخارجية لشراكات الرعاية الصحية في شمال العراق أيضا في طريقها إلى مجموعة متنوعة من المشاريع والإنسانية لمجموعة الخادم الإنجيلية.
In return for the Regional Government’s support for this evangelical presence in Kurdistan, Doug Layton, another Tennessean and a Servant Group founder, served as a crucial liaison for the KRG in Washington during the Bush years. There, he ran Kurdish public relations efforts and recruited evangelical businessmen to invest in the region.
وفي مقابل دعم الحكومة الإقليمية لهذا الوجود الانجيلي في كردستان، قال دوغ لايتون، وهو من ولاية تينيسي وأحد مؤسسي مجموعة الخادم، وخدم كضابط اتصال مهم مع حكومة إقليم كردستان في واشنطن أثناء سنوات حكم بوش. ومن هناك، كان يدير العلاقات العامة للأكراد وجهود تجنيد رجال الأعمال الإنجيليين للاستثمار في المنطقة.
“Since the run up to the Iraq War, [Massoud] Barzani and the KRG played to the Bush administration and its right-wing evangelical Christian base,” said Mike Amitay, a Middle East senior policy analyst at the Open Society Policy Center. “That’s where they saw the power and the money. Barzani was going to let them set up schools and churches and get what he needed.” But, Amitay adds, “given the rise of the Islamic parties in Kurdistan and Assyrian Christian resentment of American evangelical exceptionalism and proselytizing, they’re playing with fire.”
"منذ الفترة التي سبقت حرب العراق، قام [مسعود البارزاني] وحكومة إقليم كردستان مع إدارة بوش والجناح اليميني لبناء القاعدة المسيحية الإنجيلية"، ويؤكد مركز سياسة المجتمع في واشنطون "بان كردستان العراق هو المكان الذي شهد صعود نفوذ السلطة والمال. فالبارزاني ذهب إلى السماح لهم بإنشاء المدارس والكنائس والحصول على ما يحتاجونه". ولكن، "نظرا لصعود الأحزاب الإسلامية في كردستان والاستياء المسيحي الآثوري من تمييز التبشير الإنجيلي الأمريكي جعل هؤلاء كمن يلعبون بالنار".
Tennessee Waltz
In the years since Saddam Hussein’s 1988 assault on the Kurds that culminated in the chemical weapon attack on the village of Halabja, some 14,000 refugees from Kurdistan made their way to Nashville, now home to the largest Kurdish population in the United States. In 1992, a cadre of Nashville evangelicals from Servant Group International, including large numbers of Kurdish believers, trooped out of their base at Belmont Church, a megachurch occupying several blocks on Music Square, and made their way to the mountains of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, where they set up shop. They were packing Kurdish-language bibles, bags of cash, medical equipment and a long-range game plan to establish their “Father’s Kingdom” between the Turkish border and Iran. Since arriving in northern Iraq some twenty years ago, Servant Group has widened its global presence, establishing offices, ministries and schools in Turkey, Central Asia, Indonesia, Germany, and Norway.
منذ هجمات صدام حسفي السنوات التي تلت عام 1988 قام اكثر من 14000 لاجئ كردي بالرحيل من كردستان إلى ناشفيل، والتي تعد اليوم أكبر جالية الآن نسبة إلى عدد السكان الكرد في الولايات المتحدة. في عام 1992، قام كادر من الانجيليين في ناشفيل من مجموعة الخادم الدولية، بما في ذلك عدد كبير من "المؤمنين الأكراد"، وتقاطروا من قاعدتهم في كنيسة بلمونت، وكنيسة ميغا بمجموعات عدة للتحضير لإعادة الاحتلال في طريقهم إلى جبال كردستان في شمال العراق، حيث فتحوا مقرا صغيرا هناك كموطئ قدم لهم. وكانت التعبئة لذلك التوجه عبارة عن طباعة عدد كبير من الأناجيل باللغة الكردية، وأكياس من النقود، والمعدات الطبية، ووضع خطة طويلة المدى لوضع كل "مملكة الأب" بين الحدود التركية والإيرانية. ومنذ وصولهم الى شمال العراق قبل نحو عشرين عاما، اتسع وجود مجموعة الخادم العالمية، وقامت بإنشاء المكاتب والوزارات والمدارس في تركيا وآسيا الوسطى، وإندونيسيا، وألمانيا، والنرويج.
After seven years of American dominance in the region, they have burrowed deep inside the Kurdistan Regional Government, the ruling coalition of Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). With help from Layton at the Kurdistan Development Corporation and aided by connections with Republican lobbyists and Congressmen in Washington, they have brokered international business concessions and oil drilling contracts and funneled USAID and DOD money into their missions, setting up their chain of Christian schools. In turn, the KRG has backed Servant Group’s ministries and schools with grants of land, buildings and other favors.
واليوم وبعد سبع سنوات من الهيمنة الأميركية في المنطقة، تسللت هذه المجموعة بشكل عميق داخل حكومة إقليم كردستان، فالائتلاف الحاكم الكردي المؤلف من مسعود البارزاني (الحزب الديمقراطي الكردستاني) وجلال الطالباني (الاتحاد الوطني الكردستاني). وبمساعدة من لايتون في مؤسسة تنمية كردستان يقومون بالمساعدة لتحقيق الاتصالات مع جماعات الضغط وأعضاء الكونجرس من الجمهوريين في واشنطن، وقد توسطت الامتيازات التجارية الدولية وعقود التنقيب عن النفط وحولت الأموال لمهامهم من وزارة الدفاع والوكالة الأمريكية للتنمية، لإنشاء سلسلة من المدارس المسيحية. في المقابل، دعمت وزارات حكومة إقليم كردستان مجموعة فريق الخادم بان تم منح الأراضي والمباني وغيرها للمدارس بشكل مباشر وبعيدة عن المجاملات.
Servant Group and its partners are distinguished by their military model of evangelism (what they call “spiritual warfare”); their covert action tactics such as “tent making” or “Kingdom Business” (they enter a country to establish seemingly secular businesses as a cover for evangelism); their intelligence gathering, which they call “spiritual mapping” (where teams of evangelicals conduct full-spectrum “field research’” that includes demographic, historical and geographic data from the neighborhood level to entire countries); an ingrained animosity to Islam; and their dominionist “Kingdom Now” worldview (a fusion of neo-Calvinist authoritarianism and “New Apostolic” Pentecostalism, a millenarian sect of the Assemblies of God whose best known adherent is Sarah Palin).
وتتميز مجموعة الخادم وشركائها بنموذجهم العسكري للتبشير (او ما يسمونه "بالحرب الروحية") ؛ من حيث تكتيكات العمل السري مثل صناعة غطاء لعملهم أو ما يعرف "بالمملكة التجارية". فقد دخلوا البلاد لإنشاء مؤسسات علمانية على ما يبدو على أنها غطاء للتبشير؛ وتم تجمعهم من قبل المخابرات، والتي يسمونها "برسم الخرائط الروحية" (حيث يكون سلوك الفرق من الانجيليين الكامل هو في البحث الميداني" والتي تتضمن جمع البيانات الديموغرافية والتاريخية والجغرافية على مستوى بلدان بأكملها)؛ وهذا الأمر ليس بجديد لهذه الطائفة فهو منهج كانت قد درجت كذلك يجمعها العداء المتأصل للإسلام، وهدفها تحقيق السيادة "للمملكة الانجيلية" لقيادة العالم الآن (في انصهار كالفيني سلطوي جديد و "بالرسولية الجديدة للطائفة الخمسينية لجمعيات الله" واشهر المعروفين المنتمين لهذه الجمعية هي سارة بالين مرشحة الرئاسة الأمريكية الأخيرة لمنصب نائب الرئيس.
Servant Group missionaries shrewdly established themselves as valued assets to the KRG ruling families and the Bush/Cheney Iraq War effort. The group had close ties to the Bush administration: Stephen Mansfield, the author of The Faith of George W. Bush, a 2004 bestseller that portrayed Bush as “God’s man” in the White House, served for five years, until 2002, as the pastor of the Belmont Church in Nashville that serves as Servant Group’s home base. Prior to taking the pulpit, Mansfield traveled to northern Iraq with Servant Group to bring bibles and the Jesus film, a widely used evangelical proselytizing tool, to the Kurds. Together, Mansfield and Grant serve as advisers to a consortium of “openly Christian business executives” called American Destiny, who invest in development projects in Kurdistan.
هؤلاء المسيحيون من كنيسة بلمونت في ناشفيل بولاية تينيسي مرتبطون بجورج بوش وديك تشيني من خلال ستيفن مانسفيلد الذي يصف جورج بوش بأنه نبي. حكومة كردستان تحبهم لأن لديهم الكثير من المال.كذلك أنشأ المبشرون التابعين لمجموعة فريق الخادم بذكاء لأنفسهم أصول قيمة مع الأسر الحاكمة، كحكومة إقليم كردستان ومع بوش وتشيني وأمراء الحرب على العراق. فكانت هذه الجماعة على علاقات وثيقة مع ادارة جورج بوش: كستيفن مانسفيلد، مؤلف كتاب إيمان جورج دبليو بوش، وهو من أكثر الكتب مبيعا عام 2004 والذي يصور فيه بوش بأنه "رجل الله" في البيت الأبيض، وكان قد عمل لمدة خمس سنوات، حتى عام 2002، كراعي لكنيسة بلمونت في ناشفيل قبل أن يخدم كمؤسس لمجموعة فريق الخادم.هؤلاء المسيحيون من كنيسة بلمونت في ناشفيل بولاية تينيسي مرتبطون بجورج بوش وديك تشيني من خلال ستيفن مانسفيلد الذي يصف جورج بوش بأنه نبي. حكومة كردستان تحبهم لأن لديهم الكثير من المال. وقد سافر مانسفيلد الى شمال العراق مع مجموعة فريق الخادم لجلب الأناجيل وتوزيع فيلم عن يسوع، وهي وسائل عادة ما يتم استخدامها على نطاق واسع كأداة للتبشير الإنجيلي بين الأكراد. وقام مانسفيلد بمنح فرص عمل لمستشارين لمجموعة من "المديرين التنفيذيين يعملون علنا للأعمال المسيحية" ودعا أمريكا لتكون هي القدر، التي تستثمر في مشروعات التنمية في كردستان.
كتب ريتشارد مانسفيلد كتابا بعنوان "معجزة الأكراد".
يوسف ماتي ، مدير المدرسة الكلاسيكية لميدي كان في الكتاب. كما ظهر في الكتاب أفين هورامي ، المدير السابق للمدرسة الأمريكية الدولية في كردستان في أربيل. تم إغلاق مدرسة أفين هورامي بسبب الاعتماد المزيف وشكاوى الطلاب من بيع الدرجات أفين هورامي هي أيضًا صديقة مقربة لهاري شوت. https://www.knnc.net/en/Details.aspx?jimare=685
In a 2002 interview in the Association of Classical and Christian Schools bulletin, Classical Schools teacher and trainer Mary Yacoubian said that she joined the Servant Group mission because “they weren’t content with just setting up a church in every city. Their goal was to truly ‘disciple’ the nation — establish Christ’s Kingdom in every area of society: government, arts, medicine, education, law, etc.” After calling Islam “a religion based on fear,” Yacoubian gushed, “We also get to witness believers being baptized in a little plastic pool in our garden! Just think about it. Men and women who have been steeped in Islam are turning to Christ!”
في مقابلة أجريت معها عام 2002 في رابطة المسيحية الكلاسيكية في نشرة المدارس تقول ماري يعقوبيان المدرسة في المدارس الكلاسيكية إنها انضمت إلى بعثة مجموعة الخادم لأنها "لم تكتف فقط لإعداد بناء كنيسة في كل مدينة. لكن هدفها هو التلميذ والأمة وإنشاء مملكة المسيح في كل مجال من مجالات المجتمع: الحكومة، والفنون، والطب، والتعليم، والقانون، الخ". فبعد إظهار الإسلام "كدين يقوم على الخوف" ، تندفع يعقوبيان للحصول على "الشاهد المؤمن" حيث الرجال والنساء الذين لهم جذور في الإسلام بدؤوا يتحولون الى المسيحية
Yacoubian’s statements reflect the dangerous heart of the evangelical exceptionalist conviction — their “Kingdom of God” excludes all possibilities but their particular American brand of Christian society, governance and capitalism.
بيانات يعقوبيان تعكس تقلب خطير للاقتناع باستثناء الاضغاء إلى الإنجيلية وعن "ملكوت الله" وهو يستبعد كل الاحتمالات الأخرى غير العلامة التجارية الأمريكية المعينة من المجتمع المسيحي، والحكم والرأسمالية.
Doing Well by Doing Good
Douglas Layton is central to these successes. In his January 2002 publication, The Forerunner, longtime Christian Reconstructionist Andrew Sandlin, a close colleague of George Grant, praised Layton for his ambitious incursions into Kurdistan. “If we are going to support missionaries, let’s support missionaries who are going around the world to recapture cultures, not simply win a few souls here and there,” wrote Sandlin. “[C]onsider Doug Layton in Kurdistan, northern Iraq, who is re-building a Christian culture: new Christian schools, new Christian businesses, and more. He is not content to build churches; he wants an entire Christian culture.”
دوغلاس لايتون هو مركز هذه النجاحات. في تقريره المنشور في كانون الثاني 2002، يؤكد على إشادة أندرو ساندلين بالتنظيم المسيحي الجديد منذ فترة طويلة وهو زميل مقرب من جورج غرانت، ودعا لايتون لشن غارات مشروعة الطموح في كردستان. حيث يقول "وإذا أردنا دعم المبشرين، دعونا ندعم المبشرين الذين هم في جميع أنحاء العالم لاستعادة الثقافات، وليس لمجرد الفوز بالنفوس القليلة هنا وهناك"، وكتب ساندلين الى دوغ لايتون في كردستان، شمال العراق، "الى الإعداد لبناء ثقافة مسيحية: فالمدارس المسيحية الجديدة، والأعمال التجارية المسيحية الجديدة، وأكثر من ذلك، وان لا يكتفي ببناء الكنائس وانما يريد ثقافة مسيحية بأكملها ".
Layton coauthored a book, Our Father’s Kingdom: The Church and the Nation, in 2000, in which he explicitly lays out his mission: “If communists and Muslims can take nations — so can our God!”
لايتون المشارك بتأليف كتاب، "أبانا في المملكة: الكنيسة والوطن"، في عام 2000، والذي ينص صراحة على مهمته : "إذا كان الشيوعيون والمسلمون يمكن لهم أن يقيموا الدول فان ذلك يعني حتى يمكن لنا الله من إقامة مملكته!" في هذا الكتاب يعلن المؤلف فيه الأهداف العامة والحقيقية لحركة الحرب الروحية، وهو الجيش الذي يصف نفسه بأنه من الانجيليين في معركة ضد "الشياطين الإقليميين" لإقامة "مملكة المسيح".
That book’s co-author, George Otis, Jr., is a true general in the Spiritual Warfare movement, a self-described army of evangelicals in a battle against “territorial demons” to establish “the Kingdom of Christ.” He heads a global evangelical intelligence agency, The Sentinel Group, that deploys “field cells” with laptops to gather demographic data in countries the movement has targeted for conversion — currently, Uganda, as well as several countries in Central America and the Middle East, including Iraq. The data is forwarded to Sentinel’s computer banks as part of its “spiritual mapping” project.
Layton لديه صديق اسمه George Otis يمتلك Sentinel Group. مجموعة Sentinel هي خدمة الاستخبارات الإنجيلية العالمية ، وهي منظمة تنشر "خلايا ميدانية" مع أجهزة كمبيوتر محمولة لجمع البيانات الديموغرافية في البلدان المستهدفة حاليًا ، مثل أوغندا ، وكذلك في العديد من البلدان في أمريكا الوسطى والشرق الأوسط ، بما في ذلك العراق. يتم إرسال البيانات إلى America and Servant International في تينيسي كجزء من مشروع ضخم كبنك بيانات لرسم خرائط للمشروع "الروحاني".
Layton has pushed evangelism in the Middle East to its legal limits. According to German court documents, Layton was arrested in 1993 in the northern Iraqi town of Dohuk for publicly preaching that Kurdistan would have their “promised country, if the Kurds followed Jesus” and that “Islam would not bring them anything but war and misfortune.” His speech sparked angry street protests, and after his arrest, Layton was ordered out of the country. He apparently sought to make amends by personally lobbying in support of the KDP in Washington where he made speeches at the Council for National Policy and testified at Congressional hearings, championing US support for an independent Kurdistan, investment in the region and Barzani’s KDP, in particular. By 1996 he was back in Kurdistan.
دفع لايتون الكرازة في الشرق الأوسط إلى حدودها القانونية. وفقًا لوثائق المحكمة الألمانية ، تم القبض على لايتون في عام 1993 في مدينة دهوك شمال العراق بسبب التبشير العلني وإعلان أن كردستان سيكون لها "دولة كما وعدت ، إذا اتبع الأكراد عيسى" وأن "الإسلام لن يجلب لهم سوى الحرب ، الدمار والخراب ". أثار خطابه احتجاجات غاضبة في الشوارع ، وبعد اعتقاله ، أُمر لايتون بالخروج من البلاد. بعورغم ذلك سعى على ما يبدو لتدارك تلك الأحداث بتنظيمه حملة لكسب التأييد لدعم الحزب الديمقراطي الكردستاني في واشنطن حيث ألقى خطبا في مجلس السياسة الوطنية وأدلى بشهادات في جلسات الاستماع في الكونغرس، لدعم نصرة الولايات المتحدة لإقامة دولة كردية مستقلة، والاستثمار في المنطقة، وللحزب الديمقراطي الكردستاني ولا سيما للبرزاني. بحلول عام 1996 عاد لايتون الى كردستان
Up until late 2009, Layton served as the Erbil director of the Kurdistan Development Corporation, a KRG-sponsored venture launched in 2004 “to promote, facilitate and establish business and investment opportunities in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq.” Before taking his job at the KDC, Layton held a post at the KRG Ministry of Health, where he wrote speeches for the minister and ran field operations for the USAID-backed Healthcare Partnerships in Northern Iraq.
عمل حتى أواخر عام 2009، مديرا لهيئة التنمية الكردية في أربيل، وهو المشروع الذي ترعاه حكومة إقليم كردستان وبدأ في عام 2004 بهدف "تعزيز وتيسير وإقامة الأعمال التجارية وفرص الاستثمار في إقليم كردستان في العراق". قبل توليه منصبه في هيئة التنمية الكردية، شغل لايتون وظيفة في وزارة الصحة في حكومة إقليم كردستان، حيث كان مساعدا لوزير الصحة للعمليات الميدانية وسعى لشراكات الرعاية الصحية التي تدعمها الوكالة الأمريكية للتنمية في شمال العراق.
In 2008 the KRG folded the KDC into a new entity, Kurdistan Investment. It is unclear what role — if any — Layton plays in this revamped bureau. (He is not listed on its board of directors.) Layton currently directs a project called The Other Iraq Tours, which arranges junkets for American businessmen and politicians into Kurdistan. His partners in the company are fellow Servant Group leader Bill Garaway and Jason Atkinson, a conservative Republican state senator from Oregon and occasional Tea Party speaker. The Other Iraq also has strong ties to the military in the United States and Kurdistan. The company is a subsidiary of Point 62 Consulting, headed by retired US Army Col. Harry Schute, who was chief of staff for the Coalition Provisional Authority in northern Iraq from 2003 to 2004 and now serves as a senior security adviser to the KRG.
يمتلك دوغلاس لايتون أيضًا شركة توستفي عام 2008 أدمجت حكومة إقليم كردستان هيئة التنمية الكردية في كيان جديد، وهو "كردستان للاستثمار". ومن غير الواضح ما هو الدور الذي يلعبه لايتون في هذا المكتب بعد تجديده. وفي مجلس إدارتها.
يدير لايتون حاليًا مشروعًا لجولات أخرى في العراق ، حيث ينظم رحلات ترفيهية لرجال الأعمال والسياسيين الأمريكيين في كردستان. شركاؤه في الشركة هم بيل غاراواي ، رئيس مجموعة Servant Group ، وجيسون أتكينسون ، عضو مجلس الشيوخ الجمهوري المحافظ من ولاية أوريغون. فالعراق وكردستان كدولة أخرى لها ايضا علاقات قوية مع جيش الولايات المتحدة. فشركة بوينت 62 هي شركة فرعية للاستشارات برئاسة العقيد المتقاعد هاري شوت في الجيش الأميركي ، الذي كان رئيس هيئة الأركان لسلطة التحالف المؤقتة في شمال العراق 2003-2004،
According to its website, Point 62 “provide(s) security and political advice to several elements of the KRG, principally the Prime Minister’s office and the Ministry of State for the Interior” and “security services to the oil and gas industry.”
ويشغل الآن منصب مستشار أمني بارز للحكومة في إقليم كردستان. وبوينت62 تقدم الأمن والمشورة السياسية لعدة عناصر في حكومة إقليم كردستان، وبصورة رئيسية لمكتب رئيس الوزراء ووزارة الدولة للشؤون الداخلية" و"خدمات لصناعة النفط والغاز". https://www.aihitdata.com/company/007DC754/point-62-consulting/overview
Col. Schute, who appears to wear many hats, is also executive vice chairman of VSC Security, a joint venture with the KRG, headed by Keith E. Schuette, a well-connected Republican Party player and up until this year, a lobbyist with Haley Barbour’s BGR Group; Schuette now serves as a senior advisor to the KRG.
العقيد شوت ، الذي يبدو أنه ارتدى العديد من القبعات ، هو أيضًا نائب الرئيس التنفيذي لشركة VSC Security ، وهي مشروع مشترك مع حكومة إقليم كردستان برئاسة كيث شويت ، المرتبط بالحزب الجمهوري ، مع جماعات الضغط مثل Haley Berber من جمهورية العراق. مجموعة BGR. شويت الآن كبير مستشاري حكومة إقليم كردستان.
In 2005, Bill Garaway joined Layton at the KDC to launch a promotional campaign, Kurdistan: The Other Iraq, a series of video, print, and Internet ads and emails featuring smiling Kurds waving American flags and thanking the United States for its invasion of Iraq. They also touted the ripe investment opportunities that awaited multinational corporations in northern Iraq. To script and produce the campaign, Garaway and Layton brought in Sal Russo, who heads Russo Marsh & Rogers, a Republican PR firm based in Sacramento. The contract would bring the firm “millions of dollars over the next few years” from the KRG, according to Russo. A year earlier, the firm had produced a pro-war media campaign echoing Bush administration claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had “extensive ties” to Al Qaeda. The ads memorably attacked Democrats who opposed Bush’s war as “willing to undermine support for the war on terrorism to selfishly advance their shameless political ambitions.”
تعاون بيل جارواي ودوغلاس لايتون من منظمة سيرفانت إنتفي عام 2005 ، انضم بيل غاراواي إلى لايتون لإنشاء هيئة التنمية الكردية لإطلاق حملة ترويجية في كردستان للدعوة إلى أن كردستان بلد آخر ، من خلال سلسلة من مقاطع الفيديو والمطبوعات والإعلانات عبر الإنترنت ورسائل البريد الإلكتروني التي يظهر فيها الأكراد مبتسمين ويلوحون بالأعلام الأمريكية و شكر الولايات المتحدة على غزوها للعراق.
هذه الشركة هي أيضا مرشحة لفرص الاستثمار ، التي جاء دورها كشركة متعددة الجنسيات في شمال العراق. من أجل السيناريو لإنتاج هذه الحملة ، استأجرت Garaway و Layton Sal Russo ، الذي يترأس شركة Russo Marsh & Rogers ، وهي شركة علاقات عامة جمهورية مقرها سكرامنتو. وبموجب العقد ، ستحصل الشركة على "ملايين الدولارات خلال السنوات القليلة المقبلة" التي تقدمها حكومة إقليم كردستان ، بحسب روسو.
للمساعدة في الحملة الدعائية لكردستان لخلق كوردستان غير مستقرة. قبل ذلك بعام ، أنتجت نفس الشركة حملة إعلامية مؤيدة للحرب كررت مزاعم إدارة بوش بأن صدام حسين يمتلك أسلحة دمار شامل و "علاقات واسعة" بالقاعدة. وتصف الإعلانات هجوم الديمقراطيين الذين عارضوا حرب بوش بأنه "استعداد لتقويض دعم الحرب على الإرهاب والتقدم بأنانية لطموحاتهم السياسية الوقحة".
Garaway also produced another, very different, propaganda video, A Journey To Iraq, financed by Servant Group and tailored specifically for American evangelicals. This one featured “faithful Christians answering God’s call to help spread Christianity to the Arab and Kurdish people.”
كما أنتج غاراواي مقطع فيديو دعائيًا آخر ، مختلف تمامًا ، "رحلة إلى العراق" ، بتمويل من مجموعة سيرفانت ومصمم خصيصًا للإنجيليين الأمريكيين. في هذا الشريط يظهر أحد "المسيحيين المؤمنين يستجيب لدعوة الله للمساعدة في نشر المسيحية بين الشعبين العربي والأكراد".
The Money Trail
In June 2002, as the Bush administration began prepping for the US invasion of Iraq, Congress green-lighted $3.1 million for a State Department-funded program called Healthcare Partnerships in Northern Iraq, ostensibly an effort to improve healthcare in the Kurdish region, but primarily viewed by Middle East policy experts in the United States and local NGO observers as a way to bring the KDP and PUK together under a unified governing body. And who was hired as field operations director for this team-building USAID project? Douglas Layton.
في حزيران 2002، بدأت ادارة بوش الاستعداد للغزو الأميركي للعراق، وأعطى الكونغرس الضوء الأخضر مبلغ 3.1 مليون دولار لتمويل البرنامج التي تمولها وزارة الخارجية ومنها الشراكات للرعاية الصحية في شمال العراق، بزعم المحاولة لتحسين الرعاية الصحية في المنطقة الكردية، ولكن في المقام الأول كان خبراء السياسة في الشرق الأوسط في الولايات المتحدة، والمراقبون في المنظمات غير الحكومية المحلية ينظرون على أنها كانت وسيلة لتحقيق الوحدة بين الحزب الديمقراطي الكردستاني والاتحاد الوطني الكردستاني معا تحت هيئة حكم موحدة. والذي تم التعاقد معه لمنصب مدير العمليات الميدانية لهذه الوكالة وبناء فريق المشروع هو دوغلاس لايتون.
Two-thirds of the Partnership money was swallowed up by Meridian International, a politically connected NGO whose board, at the time, included the wife of then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and its subcontractors, according to an analysis by one of the program’s participants. That left about $1 million for Layton to personally direct into Kurdish health programs. According to published reports by Servant Group and sources in northern Iraq who were involved with the program, Layton funneled much of it into Servant Group operations such as its mobile dental service, health clinics, and into the pockets of KRG officials with whom he was currying favor. Layton also used funds to rent an office in the KRG Ministry of Health for $1,000 a month-another kickback to KRG officialdom-where he wrote speeches for Health Minister Dr. Jamal Abdul Hamid Abbas. According to two NGO sources who were then in Kurdistan, Layton also handed out cash and equipment from Healthcare Partners to Abbas’ cronies.
بسبب الفساد المروع ، قامت شركة تسمى "ميريديان إنترناشيونال" يملكها السناتور "بيل فريست" بسرقة الكثير من الأموال الممنوحة لدوغلاس لايتون لمنظمة سيرفانت إنترناشونال. خسر لايتون 2 مليون دولار من تلك الثلاثة ملايين دولار حسب السجلات.
حصلت زوجة رئيس الأغلبية في مجلس الشيوخ بيل فريست على ثلثي سجلات المنح المالية للحكومة الأمريكية. استخدم لايتون حوالي مليون دولار فقط من أموال الحكومة الأمريكية لبرامج الصحة الكردية. ووفقا لتقارير نشرتها مجموعة الخادم ومصادر في شمال العراق الذين شاركوا في البرنامج، حول لايتون الكثير منها إلى عمليات مجموعة الخادم مثل الخادم المتنقلة لطب الأسنان والعيادات الصحية، وإلى جيوب مسؤولي حكومة إقليم كردستان. واستخدم لايتون أيضا الأموال لاستئجار مكتب في وزارة الصحة في حكومة إقليم كردستان بمبلغ 1000 $ شهريا وكرشوة لحكومة إقليم كردستان الرسمي، حيث كان مساعدا للدكتور جمال عباس عبد الحميد وزير الصحة. ووفقا لمصادر المنظمات غير الحكومية فان اثنين من الذين كانوا آنذاك في كردستان، كان لايتون يسلمهم أيضا الرشاوى النقدية والمعدات الطبية لشركاء مقربين لعباس.
Beyond the self-dealing and influence peddling, Layton seems to have run a poor operation. Under his guidance, for example, the Partnership set up Internet connections at local clinics and medical schools, then required the organizations to pay $1,000 a month to continue the service — money, of course, they did not have.
كان لايتون أبعد عن التعامل الذاتي واستغلال النفوذ، ويبدو أنه كانت له فكرة عملية تشغيل الفقراء. تحت قيادته، فعلى سبيل المثال، قام بإعداد الشراكة في مجال الاتصالات والإنترنت وفي العيادات الطبية والمدارس المحلية، وبعد ذلك يتعين على المنظمات أن تدفع 1000 $ شهريا لمواصلة دعم مجموعة الخادم لهم وبطبيعة الحال، لم يكن لديهم هذا المبلغ الواجب دفعه وبالتالي تبدأ عمليات الابتزاز.
A field director for an international NGO involved in health programs in Kurdistan from 2002 to 2004 was not much impressed with Layton or with the Partnership. “HCP was full of shit,” said the field director, who, due to his ongoing work in the politically volatile region, asked not to be named. “Our NGO conducted a series of nursing trainings in all three major hospitals, and we heard of no activity in this area by the HCP.
بين 2002-2004 اشترك لايتون ومجموعته مع منظمة غير حكومية مجهولة. صرحت هذه المنظمة غير الحكومية المجهولة أن لايتون أن فريقه لم يفعل شيئًا بأموال الولايات المتحدة لكردستان لمساعدة صناعة الصحة. لقد كذبوا واستولوا على المال.
”You look at the HCP final report and one thing that jumps out is the fuzzy math. They say they gave twenty-six grants averaging about $13,000. That comes out to about $338,000, not nearly the $1 million they say went into the grants programs. As far as reports on grant activities go, this is one of the shoddiest pieces of garbage I have ever seen.“
وفقًا لهذه المنظمة غير الحكومية المجهولة التي عملت مع Servant Group و Layton. ادعى لايتون أنه قدم 26 منحة من حكومة الولايات المتحدة إلى كردستان لبرامج صحية تكلف في المتوسط حوالي 13000 دولار. هذا يساوي حوالي 338000 دولار. تشير تقارير لايتون إلى أنه أنفق ما يقرب من مليون دولار على صناعة الصحة في كردستان. أين باقي المال؟
Mike Amitay is a well-regarded expert on Kurdistan who worked with a number of NGO relief programs in the region during the 1990s. He now serves as senior policy analyst on the Middle East at The Open Society Institute in Washington, D.C. In an email interview, Amitay wrote, ”I find it troubling that, given Douglas Layton’s background and his activities on behalf of extreme Christian evangelists, he would be selected to administer significant US government aid programs in Iraqi Kurdistan.“
”I am disconcerted that despite the ineffectiveness of programs previously implemented under Layton’s direction, and knowing of his evangelical activism, Kurdish authorities continued to facilitate his prominent role in the Kurdistan Development Corporation,“ he continued. ”Despite the threat to Kurdish society posed by Layton’s less-than-hidden agenda.“
مايك أميتاي هو خبير مشهور في كردستان عمل مع عدد من المنظمات غير الحكومية في برامج الإغاثة في المنطقة خلال التسعينيات. الآن ، وهو محلل سياسي كبير في الشرق الأوسط في معهد المجتمع المفتوح بواشنطن ، كتب: "أجد أنه من المقلق ، نظرًا لخلفية دوجلاس لايتون وأنشطته نيابة عن المتطرفين المسيحيين ، أن يتم اختياره لإدارة مساعدة كبيرة للحكومة الأمريكية برامج في كردستان العراق ". ويقول "أنا مستاء إذ أنه على الرغم من عدم فعالية البرامج المنفذة سابقا تحت توجيه لايتون، ومعرفة نشاطه الإنجيلية، واصلت السلطات الكردية تسهيل دوره البارز في مؤسسة تنمية كردستان"، "على الرغم من التهديد الذي يتعرض له المجتمع الكردي من جدول الأعمال الخاص بلايتون المخفي".
The School of the Medes
The principal of the Sulaymaniyah Classical School is Kawa Omer Qadir, a friendly forty-something man with a graying buzz cut and a massive Arabic-language Bible resting in front of him, who welcomed this reporter into his pink office. He says the Classical School of the Medes runs three schools in the region: his in Sulaymaniyah, plus schools in Erbil and Dohuk, each serving grades kindergarten through ten. All classes are in English, he explains, and the programs are funded by the government, through the Ministry of the Education, and by ”churches outside Kurdistan.“ His 800 students come from upper- and middle-class families, many of them the children of KRG officials. Most are Muslim, making them ripe targets for Servant Group missionaries. ”You can count the Christians on the fingers of one hand,“ he says.
مدير المدرسة الكلاسيكية في السليمانية كاوة عبد القادر عمر، وهو رجل في الأربعين وهو ودي مع شيب منتشر في رأسه، والكتاب المقدس باللغة العربية موضوع أمامه، يقول من مكتبه الوردي. ان المدرسة الكلاسيكية " الميديين" تدير ثلاث مدارس في المنطقة : المدارس في السليمانية، وفي أربيل ودهوك، وتخدم كل منها من مرحلة رياض الأطفال حتى الصف 10. وكل المراحل يكون التدريس فيها باللغة الإنجليزية، وهو ما يفسر، تمويل هذه البرامج من قبل الحكومة، ومن خلال وزارة التربية والتعليم، و"الكنائس خارج كردستان". في هذه المدارس 800 طالب يأتون من عائلات عليا وبعضهم من الطبقة الوسطى ، وكثير منهم من أبناء المسؤولين في كردستان. معظمهم من المسلمين ، مما يجعلهم أهدافًا جاهزة لمجموعة من المتطرفين والمبشرين المسيحيين. يقول: "يمكنك عد المسيحيين من أصابع يد واحدة".
The schools are part of Classical Development Services International, whose governing board is based in Nashville. The school’s pastor, Yousif Matty, sits on that board, along with George Grant and Bill Garaway.
المدارس جزء من خدمات Classic International Development ، ومقرها ناشفيل. راعي الكنيسة والمدرسة ، يوسف ماتي ، يجلس على ظهر السفينة ، جنبًا إلى جنب مع جورج غرانت وبيل غاراواي.
The school enjoys central heating and air conditioning and its own generator, a luxury that spares teachers and students the routine power outages that plague the city and most of the region. The classrooms are painted pink, like Qadir’s office. In one, eighteen eighth graders were getting a math lecture from a Kurdish teacher from Sulaymaniyah University.
لمدرسة تتمتع بالتدفئة المركزية والتكييف والمولدات الخاصة، وهو نوع من الترف الذي قطع عن المعلمين والطلاب بانقطاع التيار الكهربائي الروتيني الذي يعاني منه معظم المدينة والمنطقة. والفصول الدراسية مطلية باللون الوردي، مثل مكتب عبد القادر وفي محاضرة للرياضيات لطلاب الصف الثامن يتكون الصف الواحد من 18 طالبا والمعلمين من جامعة السليمانية الكردية.
”Most teachers are from Kurdistan,“ Qadir says. ”But the staff from Classical Development Service Schools International provides us with international teachers who train our teachers and organize the curriculum and program.“ One young American teacher encountered at the school, who refused to share her name, says she is a member of Classical Development Schools International but doesn’t receive a salary. She was here ”trying to help,“ she says, because she believes that ”the US has a responsibility toward this country.“
يقول عبد القادر: "معظم المعلمين من كردستان ، لكن هناك موظفين من منظمة التنمية الدولية الكلاسيكية ومن مدارس مجموعة سيرفانت في أمريكا. هؤلاء المعلمون الدوليون يدربون مدرسينا وينظمون المناهج والبرامج". حد المعلمات تقول إنها عضو في المدارس الكلاسيكية للتنمية الدولية لكنها لا تحصل على راتب. إنها هنا "في محاولة للمساعدة"، كما تقول، لأنها تعتقد أن "الولايات المتحدة تتحمل مسؤولية القدر تجاه هذا البلد".
”The government helps us through many ways,“ Qadir says. ”They gave us this building. They provide security. But we pay their salaries.“ That money comes out of donations from American evangelicals through the Belmont Church and other missionary organizations. Between 2002 and 2006, Servant Group pumped $2 million into its Kurdish evangelical operations with the help of Partners International, an evangelical outfit based in Spokane, Washington. Global Hope, another particularly aggressive evangelical organization from Tennessee, is building a $2 million high-tech facility, complete with an Internet cafe called Freedom Center Iraq. The project is headed by Heather Mercer, best known for getting herself arrested by the Taliban in August 2001 when she and another missionary were caught handing out bibles and showing the Jesus film.
ويقول عبد القادر “ان الحكومة تساعدنا من خلال العديد من الطرق فقد قدموا لنا هذا المبنى، ووفروا الأمن، لكننا من يدفع الرواتب” فأن المال يأتي من تبرعات من الانجيليين الأمريكيين من خلال الكنيسة والمنظمات التبشيرية في بلمونت.
بين عامي 2002 و 2006 ، ضخت The Servant Group مليوني دولار في عملياتها الإنجيلية الكردية بمساعدة الشركاء الدوليين ، وهي مجموعة إنجيلية مقرها في سبوكان ، واشنطن. وترأس منظمة "إنترناشونال بارتنرز" هيذر ميرسر ، التي اعتقلتها حركة طالبان في أغسطس 2001 عندما حاولت تحويل طالبان إلى مسيحيين.
هيذر ميرسر
Qadir doesn’t go into specifics about his school’s curriculum and teaching philosophy, but George Grant is far less reticent. A Christian Reconstructionist for decades, Grant guides the Classical Schools from his office half a world away at King’s Meadow Study Center, twenty miles south of Nashville. On Franklin Classical School’s website, Grant lays out exactly what he means by classical Christian education. ”Our foundational worldview is the unchangeable Word of God-the Bible…. We strive to practice biblical living and teaching everywhere, not only in our curriculum, but also in our administration and our staff…. The students consequently live in a Christian culture dominated by the authority of the Word of God.“
لا يستطيع قادر أن يشرح منهج المدرسة وفلسفتها التربوية ، لكن جورج غرانت يؤكد أن المنهج مسيحي. سيتعلم الطلاب العيش في ثقافة مسيحية يهيمن عليها سلطان كلمة الله.
Michael Gunter, a political science professor at Tennessee Tech University, has authored twelve books on Kurdistan; his latest, The Kurds Ascending, deals with the region in the post-Saddam era. Gunter called these American evangelical efforts in Kurdistan ”alarming.“
”The Kurds are Muslims, they don’t identify as Christian,“ Gunter says. ”While they are tolerant of Christians, even the nominal Muslims don’t care for evangelism, especially this aggressive brand. I find it strange that the KRG is allowing this.“
But Bill Garaway has a different take on the Kurds’ religious views. In a podcast interview last July, he brushed aside any evangelical problems inside Kurdistan by saying, ”Most Kurds don’t even like Muslims.“
وقد ألف مايكل غونتر، وهو أستاذ العلوم السياسية في جامعة تينيسي للتكنولوجيا، اثني عشر كتابا عن كردستان؛ كان الأخير، بعنوان: صعود الأكراد، وهو يتعامل مع المنطقة في عصر ما بعد صدام. وقد سمى غونتر هذه الجهود الأميركية الإنجيلية في كردستان "بالمثيرة للقلق" "الأكراد مسلمون ، وهم لا يعرفون هؤلاء المسيحيين المتطرفين الذين يمتلكون ويديرون هذه المدرسة" ، يقول جونتر. "هؤلاء المسيحيون المتطرفون هم أقل تسامحا مع الديانات الأخرى ويمكن أن يكونوا عدوانيين. أجد أنه من الغريب أن تسمح حكومة إقليم كردستان لهؤلاء المبشرين بالعمل في كردستان". لكن بيل غاراواي من Servant Group لديه وجهات نظر مختلفة حول الدين والأكراد. وفي مقابلة ، قلل من شأن أي مشاكل إنجيلية داخل كردستان ، قائلاً: "معظم الأكراد لا يحبون الإسلام".
مايكل غونتر
Racist Ties
Grant is the author of The Blood of the Moon, a book first published in 1991 and reprinted in 2001. In his book, Grant calls for conquering the Islamic world by military might in order to bring about Muslim conversion, an obvious prerequisite for achieving his uncompromising theocratic worldview. In his 1987 Dominionist polemic, The Changing of the Guard, Grant wrote: ”Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land — of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ. It is to reinstitute the authority of God’s Word as supreme over all judgments, over all legislation, over all declarations, constitutions, and confederations.“
نشر جورج غرانت كتابا بعنوان "دم القمر" في عام 1991. وفي هذا الكتاب يدعو غرانت إلى غزو العالم الإسلامي بالقوة العسكرية من أجل تحويل المسلمين إلى المسيحية ، وهو شرط واضح لتحقيق ذلك. من النظرة الدينية لبلاده التي لا هوادة فيها ". في عام 1987 ، نشر جرانت مقالًا بعنوان "تغيير الحرس" ، حيث قال ، إن الهدف الرئيسي للمسيحية هو احتلال الأرض والرجال والعائلات والمؤسسات والبيروقراطيات والمحاكم والحكومات في ظل مملكة يسوع. المسيح ، وليسترد سلطان كلمة الله السامية على جميع الأحكام وعلى كل التشريعات وعلى جميع الإعلانات والدساتير والأمم ".
In an April 2004 lecture at fellow Dominionist R.C. Sproul’s Highlands Study Center in Virginia, Grant said, ”We’re to make disciples who will obey everything that He commanded, not just in the hazy zone of piety, but in the totality of life…. It is the spiritual, emotional, and cultural mandate to win all things in the name of Jesus.“
وفي محاضرة في نيسان 2004 في روتردام قال غرانت في مركز دراسات في ولاية فرجينيا، " سوف نجعل التلاميذ يطيعون كل ما هو أمر، ليس فقط في المنطقة الضبابية من التقوى، ولكن في مجمل الحياة.... وهذه هي الولاية الثقافية والروحية والعاطفية، هي للفوز بكل شيء باسم يسوع ".
Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and far-right social movements, is well acquainted with Grant and his schools, which, he argues, ”are deeply influenced by white supremacist ideas.“ He points, in particular, to Grant’s close association with Douglas Wilson, who founded both the Association of Classical and Christian Schools (of which Grant is a longstanding member) and New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, which provides teachers to the Classical Schools in Kurdistan.
مارك بوتوك ، مدير مركز قانون الفقر الجنوبي ، الذي يتتبع المتطرفين الدينيين والإرهابيين والحركات العنصرية ، على دراية جيدة بغرانت ومدارسه. ويشير ، على وجه الخصوص ، إلى ارتباط جرانت الوثيق بدوغلاس ويلسون ، الذي أسس الرابطة الكلاسيكية للمدارس المسيحية (التي كان عضوًا فيها منذ فترة طويلة) وكلية سانت أندروز الجديدة في موسكو-أيداهو ، والتي ترسل مدرسين مسيحيين أمريكيين متطرفين إلى مدرسة ميديس الكلاسيكية في كردستان.
Wilson also coauthored a disturbing book, Southern Slavery: As It Was, a neo-Confederate fantasy disguised as history. The book argues that Southern slavery was sanctioned by the Bible and that slaves enjoyed a wonderful life due to the patriarchal benevolence of their evangelical masters. ”Slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the [Civil] War or since,“ it reads. ”There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.“ According to Potok, Grant and Wilson are in the leadership of a movement within Christian Reconstructionism called ”Celtic Sunrise“ that is deeply influenced by white supremacist ideas.
كتب دوجلاس ويلسون وصديقه ستيف ويلكينز كتابًا بعنوان "العبودية الجنوبية: كما كانت". في هذا الكتاب ، يقول ويلسون وويلكنز ، إن العبودية الجنوبية في أمريكا كانت مدعومة من قبل يسوع والكتاب المقدس ، وأن العبيد كانوا يتمتعون بحياة رائعة بسبب أسيادهم الإنجيليين. ويلكنز عضو مجلس إدارة منظمة "رابطة الجنوب" في أمريكا والتي توصف بالإرهابيين المسيحيين العنصريين. دوغلاس ويلسون هو أيضًا قس في كنيسة المسيح التي ظهرت في الأخبار الأمريكية مرات عديدة. لقد بشر بالبغض. يعلم أتباعه أنه لا يمكن للمرأة أن ترفض أي طلب من الأزواج. وأن تستسلم المرأة للرجل. وفقًا لبوتوك ، فإن جرانت وويلسون هما قادة التفوق الأبيض. https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ezwx/inside-the-church-that-preaches-wives-need-to-be-led-with-a-firm-hand https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/league-south
Few Answers
Though I spent months in pursuit of interviews for this story, the evangelical leadership in northern Iraq remained resolutely, uniformly unresponsive. Yousif Matty, the Servant Group pastor in Erbil, begged off repeatedly, first citing health reasons and then saying he would talk, but not for publication. Pastors at two new evangelical churches in the region, the Kurdzman Church and the Free Evangelical Church, were more blunt: ”We don’t talk to the media.“
وعلى الرغم من كل ما ذكر ، ظلت القيادة الإنجيلية في شمال العراق ثابتة ولم تستجب بشكل موحد لجميع طلبات صاحب البلاغ لإثبات الهوية الشخصية. على سبيل المثال ، يوسف ماتي ، راعي مجموعة Servant Group في أربيل ، بعد سؤاله مرارًا وتكرارًا ، كان يعتذر لأسباب صحية ، أو يقول إنه سيتحدث بعد ذلك ، ولكن ليس للنشر. أما رعاة الكنائس الإنجيلية في المنطقة ، مثل كنيسة كوردزمان والكنيسة الإنجيلية الحرة ، فقد كانوا أكثر صراحة عندما قالوا: "نحن لا نتحدث إليكم".
Layton also declined to be interviewed in person for this article and requested that all questions be emailed to him. Seventeen questions covering his role as an evangelical, his performance in the USAID program, how he landed his job at the KDC, and his relationships with several specific individuals were sent; Layton refused to answer any of them.
رفض دوغلاس لايتون أورفض لايتون أيضا إجراء مقابلات لهذا المقال، خشية معرفة قيمة أدائه لبرنامج المساعدات الأمريكية، وفي الهيئة الكردية للاستثمار، وعلاقاته مع أفراد معينين في كردستان.
”Your questions are so full of falsehoods and misrepresentations that I do not think it would be productive to comment further,“ he wrote in an email. ”My activities in Kurdistan have been to help the Kurds to develop a thriving economy and a democratic society.“
رد دوغلاس لايتون فقط بأنه يحاول فقط خلق ديمقراطية في كردستان / العراق هذا الموقف من قبل رجالات العمل الانجيلي في كردستان العراق يؤكد حقيقة ان جدول الأعمال لايتون وزملائه الانجيليين في المنطقة يقومون بما يعرف عندهم بلعبة. وفقط الأكراد يأخذون هذا الأمر بصورة جدية.
When asked about his longstanding relationships with Servant Group leaders George Grant, Stephen Mansfield, Bill Garaway, Yousif Matty and the coauthor of his book, George Otis, Jr., Layton’s strange response was, ”I have never heard of most of the incidents or people you describe and only know slightly most of the other people you mention, and there is simply no truth I have involvement in the issues you raise.“
Because such a blanket denial flies in the face of the facts, it casts a cloud on Layton’s true agenda and that of his fellow evangelicals in the region. ”Everyone knows it’s a game. The Kurds just want to cash in,“ says Amitay. ”The KRG isn’t concerned about what evangelicals say over here. English reports in the US aren’t going to be read over there.“ He then points out that the KRG ”will draw the line“ if the evangelicals pursue aggressive conversion efforts. ”A priority for the KRG is a decent relationship with Tehran,“ he says. ”And there is a rising pro-Islamic movement responding to the economic disparities between wealthy Kurds and the majority of working poor. There is resentment out there that the Islamists can tap into.“
حكومة إقليم كردستان ليست قلقة لأنهم يعتقدون أن التقارير في أمريكا لن تقرأ في كردستان أو العراق. ومع ذلك ، قد تكون هناك نية من قبل حكومة إقليم كردستان لـ "رسم الخط" بينها وبين الإنجيليين في حال استمرار المساعي العدوانية للإنجيليين ، أو إذا كان موقف الحكومة الأمريكية هناك ضعيفًا وهناك نقص في التمويل. للمشاريع الخاصة هناك. فهناك اليوم أولوية لحكومة إقليم كردستان وهي العلاقة "اللائقة مع طهران"، إذ ان هناك حركة ارتفاع إسلامية موالية للاستجابة لأوجه التفاوت الاقتصادي بين الأكراد القليل منهم أغنياء وغالبيتهم من الفقراء العاملين، وهناك استياء كبير
All they’d have to do is read Layton’s comments in a 2003 interview with the evangelical magazine World, a champion of the Christian push into Kurdistan, in which Layton confirmed Amitay’s worries with an inflammatory observation regarding the political dynamics in a post-Saddam Iraq. ”Americans made a mistake because of their misunderstanding of Islam,“ Layton wrote. ”Shia and Sunni will never like us. They will always hate us and our view of government. They don’t recognize inalienable rights.“
ورد دوغلاس لايتون على تعليقات مايك أميتاي بأن الأمريكيين لا يفهمون المسلمين والإسلام. وقال: "الشيعة والسنة لن يحبونا أبدًا. سوف يكرهوننا دائمًا ويكرهون نظرتنا إلى الحكومة. إنهم لا يعترفون بالحقوق غير القابلة للتصرف"
عند قراءة تعليقات لايتون في مقابلة أجريت عام 2003 مع مجلة Evangelical World ، ادعى لايتون أنه البطل الذي يدافع عن المسيحيين في كردستان. قال لايتون: "لقد أخطأ الأمريكيون لأنهم أساءوا فهم الإسلام" ، قال لايتون. "الشيعة والسنة ليسوا مثلنا ، والكراهية ستوجه إلينا دائمًا حسب وجهة نظرنا في الحكومة. الإسلام لا يعترف بالحقوق".
The presence of someone like Layton inside the Kurdistan government, brokering foreign investment in the region and setting up Christian schools with the goal of proselytizing to Muslims strikes Michael Gunter, the Kurdistan expert at Tennessee Tech, as a dangerous proposition given the current volatile political climate in Iraq. ”The stability of Kurdistan is very fragile right now,“ he said, citing the fractious state of affairs in northern Iraq between Kurds, Assyrian Christians, Yazidis, Turkomen and Sunni Muslims that has produced a wave of bombings and assassinations over the past several months. The national elections in March have left Iraq fragmented along political, tribal and religious lines-and have left unanswered the pressing question of who will control the oil-rich regions of Tamim, which includes Kirkuk, and parts of the Nineveh plain.
إنه لمن دواعي القلق البالغ أن وجود شخص مثل لايتون داخل حكومة كردستان بشأن قضايا الاستثمار الأجنبي والسمسرة في الإقليم وإنشاء مدارس مسيحية بهدف تبشير المسلمين سيضع الجميع في موقف خطير بالنظر إلى الوضع الحالي. مناخ سياسي مضطرب في العراق. حتى الآن ، تركت الانتخابات الوطنية الأخيرة في العراق منقسمًا على أسس سياسية وقبلية ودينية ، وتركت بلا إجابة السؤال الملح حول من سيسيطر على المناطق الغنية بالنفط.
US military commanders have said that tensions between Kurds and Arabs are the greatest threat to Iraq’s security as American troop withdrawal accelerates. A cadre of US Kingdom Now evangelicals in the mix — especially with ties at the upper levels of the KRG — can only provide more fuel to an increasingly flammable situation.
صرح القادة العسكريون في الولايات المتحدة أن هؤلاء المتطرفين المسيحيين قد يصبحون قال قادة عسكريون أمريكيون إن التوترات بين الأكراد والعرب هي أكبر تهديد للأمن في العراق في ظل تسارع وتيرة انسحاب القوات الأمريكية. يوجد اليوم على أرض كردستان العراق ألف كادر من المتطرفين المسيحيين الإنجيليين من الولايات المتحدة. وهم الآن مرتبطون بالمستويات الأعلى في حكومة إقليم كردستان ويمكن لهذه العلاقات أن توفر المزيد من الوقود لدولة قابلة للاشتعال بشكل متزايد.
Rebaz Mahmoud contributed reporting from Kurdistan. This article was reported in collaboration with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, now known as Type Investigations.
ABOUT THE REPORTER
MICHAEL REYNOLDS
مايكل رينولدز
Michael Reynolds writes on terrorism, violence, crime, politics, money, and religion for numerous publications.
Complaint about South Carolina Department of Child Services
The following addresses received copies with no response rom any of these self proclaimed rights organizations:
lcomar@charlestondiocese.org,info@carolinapeace.org,info@answercoalition.org,executive@aila.org,admin@solidarity-party.org,admin@borderangels.org,info@cirnow.org,info@immigrantslist.org,clearinghouse@immcouncil.org,inquiries@refugeerights.org,NEVERAGAINACTION@GMAIL.COM info@ushrnetwork.org,info@publicjustice.org,info@nesri.org,contact@globalrights.org,info@cartercenter.org,hrights@advrights.org,info@acfc.org,dadscentral@hevanet.com,info@tfrm.us
To whom it may concern,
I need help with my ten year arrears for Child Support I’ve accumulated while in the Middle East.
I provide a brief background while asking for the following:
- The South Carolina Department of Child Services has refused to communicate with me in regards to Child support since 2017, as if to pursue more arrears rather than settlement.
They also refuse to provide me documentation, copy of my signature and documents pertaining to DNA paternity testing, proving or refuting, my paternity and agreement to any Child Support award.
I would like the above documentation immediately.
- I was trafficked and exploited in Amman, Jordan for six years, due to an over-stay visa. Some of the employers had direct relations with the U.S government.
In Kurdistan (Northern Iraq) , I was finally paid according to my education and experience. However, I was wrongfully terminated from my employment, by an employer connected to the United States Consulate in Erbil.
According to my lawyers, I am owed $40,000, but the school closed instead, in order to abscond from my lawsuit.
Nevertheless, I am getting back on my feet.
Therefore, I would like to begin payments while avoiding criminal penalties.
- It is my firm belief that the Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) and South Carolina Department of Child Services were simultaneously enacted against me for my political activism in South Carolina, to destroy me and my Palestinian Syrian Muslim wife, Tharwat Alasadi, in 2009.
As of now, I have honored Tharwat Alasadi’s request for divorce. I have remarried to an Iraqi Assyrian Christian wife, Ameera, a survivor of the US invasion of Iraq and the Islamic State genocide.
I feel the United States government and a good portion of American people, hate refugees today. I am willing to fight whatever empire, for this one refugee, as I did for the prior.
However to avoid such scenario which I feel the South Carolina government desires nonetheless, I request to be allowed a renewal of my passport, since it will expire soon, on a temporary annual basis, as long as I make payments.
This is to avoid coerced separation again from another refugee wife, by the gracious and humanitarian United States government.
Before the above can even be resolved, I first request aid and advice in preserving my rights, ascertaining what I request from the South Carolina Department of Child Services, and documenting the following violations please.
- I feel the South Carolina Department of Child Services and ICE were used as an instrument of silencing dissidence in America, manipulated against me, as punishment for my political activism in South Carolina.
- I also contend the South Carolina Department of Child Services commenced its process against me in a mentally unfit state, intentionally.
- The South Carolina Department of Child Services also refuses to be transparent toward me so I may be able to confirm it has integrity and if I am even obligated to fulfill payments for a child.
- The South Carolina Department of Child Services also refuses to acknowledge my extreme hardship due to being a victim of human trafficking and exploitation in Amman, Jordan and wrongful termination in Northern Iraq/Kurdistan.
I feel it also intentionally seeks my coerced separation from another refugee wife, this time by refusing to cooperate with me in regards to arrears.
- I also feel that certain American employers in the Middle East, some connected indirectly and directly to the United States government (no need to be specific), purposely sought to exploit and traffic me and wrongfully terminate or fire me, while keeping me in arrears intentionally.
As a punishment for my political activism abroad.
In consequence: I strongly feel that the South Carolina Department of Child Services, and other agencies or agents of the United States government abroad, have continuously in discreetly grossly inhumane and undeniably emetic fashion, violated my constitutional and human rights.
If they still exist in the United States.
Synopsis
Around 2008, I was a graduate student fulfilling my own aspirations and a single promise to my handicapped, indigent mother. That promise was to finish graduate school. She unfortunately died during my education. I was also simultaneously heavily involved with political activism in South Carolina. I met my Palestinian Syrian Muslim wife, Tharwat Alasadi, who was a professor at Clemson University.
Around 2009 (my dates and recollection may be losing me), Tharwat became pregnant. I married her and I consequently submitted paperwork to the USCIS and Department of Homeland Security to keep her and my child in the United States. I was fulfilling my obligations as a husband.
Despite doing everything I possibly could do, legally, my wife Tharwat Alasadi, was unexpectedly arrested in handcuffs and incarcerated.
The arresting DHS agent, Paul Anderson, told my wife I didn’t love her, told her I had several girlfriends, joked and laughed and taunted us about deporting her while she was incarcerated, asked why the Clemson Islamic Center was helping us and if we knew anything about terrorists, instructed us to blame 9-11 and terrorism for what was occurring to us, and more.
Ultimately, Tharwat was deported. To make matters worse, I lost my child due to miscarriage in consequence to all of the stress.
This tragedy was covered by the news. http://archive.independentmail.com/news/local/fulbright-scholar-at-clemson-university-faces-deportation-ep-415110137-350224581.html/
What wasn’t reported in the news was my simultaneous harassment by the South Carolina Department of Child Services, which I kept silent about, until now.
I honestly feel, on instinct and on the nature of the cruelty I experienced, while careful not to commit post hoc, that my personal immigration tragedy with ICE and the actions of the South Carolina Department of Child Services, was indicative of a malicious plan to punish my political activism in South Carolina.
The event which may have possibly been the tipping stone or event which promulgated the whole entire debacle I faced, was me visiting Senator Lindsey Graham’s office in Seneca, South Carolina, and challenging him to a debate on Palestine.
I’m not sure of the preceding. I have no proof of that. But the ICE and South Carolina Department of Child Services actions in tandem against me and my former wife, immediately occurred shortly afterwards in very quick and escalating manner.
I do know that I recently FOIA requested ICE, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the FBI for any files pertaining to me or Tharwat. ICE and DHS had no files on me and requested Tharwat’s signature for access to her files.
The FBI refused to respond at all. I requested records from the FBI due to advice from a third party.
Nevertheless, I also feel that a former roommate, Chris Parris, was also arrested at my apartment at 811 Isaqueena Trail in Pickens South Carolina, due to the same harassment, at the same time all of this transpired. But it’s another story.
I attest that the cruel behavior of the South Carolina Department of Child Services was akin to ICE’s behavior when arresting my wife Tharwat Alasadi. Their childish and malicious comments and palpable abnormal distaste toward me, was also near to what my wife experienced.
It was equivalent to the incredulous and emetic eye-rolling drama as John C. Calhoun’s Petticoat Affair during Andrew Jackson’s presidency.
Shortly after ascertaining my United States passport, determined to follow my deported wife and return with her to the United States, as any husband should, the South Carolina Department of Child Services unexpectedly served me with a summons to appear for paternity testing, shortly prior my already scheduled departure date.
They brought in media and unknown suited individuals to witness the hearing, they served me with a no contact order for a woman, they mentioned other women’s names I had no vague idea about, they rushed through the process of coercing me to sign some document, they told me to sign documents under threat of punishment without explanations as to what the documented represented, etc.
It was a gossamer shameful and a pathetic insult to my deep injury. Simply disgusting!
While attempting to meet my obligations as a husband to my deported wife, they proudly paraded my obligations toward other unknown females and children, while appending extra burdens upon my already fragile situation.
Perhaps they felt a refugee wife is unimportant.
Nevertheless, since traveling to the Middle East, I’ve survived a Syrian revolution. I was human trafficked and stuck in Amman, Jordan for six years. I was wrongfully terminated from a job in Northern Iraq/ Kurdistan. And finally, when I am able to just start getting back on my feet, the South Carolina Department of Child Services has decided to break all correspondence with me since 2017.
I have attempted to settle the balance, but the South Carolina Department of Child Services has resorted to not responding to my communication. Additionally, it has refused to provide the following, which are all reasonable requests by any human.
The South Carolina Department of Child Services:
1) Refuses to show me a copy of my signature, on documents, in regards to my Child Support order.
I don’t recollect signing my name on any document. I’m certain anyone would concur, that it is at least reasonable, to verify any financial agreement, prior dispensing monetary payments.
2) Refuses to name the DNA testing company which performed a DNA test upon me or release any paperwork pertaining to my DNA testing, in order for me to confirm the tests both possessed integrity and were administered correctly.
I do recollect that I was administered a DNA test, but the results were given to me within thirty minutes.
I don’t think that is even possible. I am suspicious that I was told the results were positive, just to attempt to secure a signature from me.
I would like receipts and documentation to confirm I am mistaken.
3) Refuses to modify or temporarily halt my Child Support payments despite the fact:
I was human trafficked and exploited and stuck in Amman, Jordan for six years. I couldn’t pay my arrears. I was paid significantly and noticeably lower than expats with less experience and education than me, at several business locations, wherein the owners were associates or/and friends of each other.
Due to being out of immigration status, I was treated in akin fashion as illegal Mexican and Latin American employees in the United States. I was exploited to simply put it accurately.
It’s important to note that this exploitation was enacted by a couple employers who continuously lied about renewing my residency, convinced me to over stay my residency with promises, and also had relations with the United States government coincidentally.
Eg. Kara Murphy former director of the American ESL Center, and my boss, was a former employee of the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan. Her husband was the director of the institute.
I recorded him attempting to convince me to supply students to cheat on the TOEFL exam for money, and I sent it to Randolph Cline of ETS, which resulted in their TOEFL license being revoked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiLtRKVa9Hg
I also have testimonies augmenting the preceding.
In consequence, I accrued over-stay fees for six years at a rate of $2 a day, which I couldn’t pay with my low salary. According to Jordanian law and my employers, I was not permitted to leave the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, until I paid. My focus was not on child support arrears, but getting the hell out of Jordan, some how ,some way.
I have documentation from a Human Rights NGO substantiating the preceding claim of human trafficking as well.
In addition, I was not permitted to leave Amman, Jordan, also because I secured a financial agreement with the government to allow the entry of my current wife, Ameera, into Jordan from Syria, in order for her to escape the Syrian revolution. I had to also pay that bill, fulfilling my obligation as a husband.
I have an NGO to verify this as well.
I was eventually deported from Jordan without having to pay anything (thank God), based upon the National Security interests of Amman, Jordan.
I came across information, while performing field research on refugees, pertaining to the United States and Jordan relationship, which apparently was sensitive.
I was lucky I guess or God helped me out.
I have the recording of the Jordanian intelligence that called me on the phone and paperwork proving this. No. I’m not crazy 🙂 Sorry, had to say that
After being deported from Jordan, I commenced employment at the American International School of Kurdistan in Erbil, Northern Iraq (Not to be confused with the American international School of Kurdistan, Duhok).
My employer was Aveen Hawrami from Michigan, also connected to the US Consulate in Erbil. Unlike Jordan, she did pay me a salary according to my experience and education.
This allowed me to begin getting back on my feet as I began accruing savings to decide the best option of meeting my past obligations.
However, and I believe it was an order she received from a third party based on the capricious and sudden change of her demeanor from positive to negative toward me, she unexpectedly and wrongfully terminated or fired me from my employment.
I hired the Khoriyasa Law firm and sued her. According to my lawyers, she owes me $40,000.
She closed the American School in order to avoid meeting her financial responsibilities to me.
https://www.knnc.net/en/Details.aspx?jimare=685
I have WhatsApp and Viber message, legal documents, voice recordings, and sworn affidavits attesting the above.
4) Refuses to provide me the information or satisfactory means required to pay my remaining balance.
I asked Pamela Cummings and others of the South Carolina Department of Child Services in 2017, how to pay my balance, but the only responses I received entailed only the total balance and a request for my physical address and current employer’s contact.
No information has been provided to allow me to pay the Child Support balance. Now, the South Carolina Department of Child Services refuses to reply to my communication.
Although some may deem it a hyperbole, I am a simple man. If I ask how can I pay you, and you don’t provide the information, my assumption is that payment is not what you strive to obtain.
It makes me then afraid of what one’s real intentions are.
5) Refuses to acknowledge the extreme hardship I was placed under, and they placed me under, in regards to their monetary demands, in consideration of my circumstances.
They took advantage of my psychological weakness due to personal tragedy and performed an act of entrapment with malice and with intent to injury, while poised to claim unintentional neglect or the ends justify the means defense, if questioned upon the preceding.
I was absolutely not in appropriate mental condition in 2009, due to a recent miscarriage of a child and due to a recent deportation of my wife, Tharwat Alasadi, immediately prior the South Carolina Department of Child Services, shaking me down, for money at the time, the former and latter occurred.
Even during Hurricanes like Dorian, legal procedures are normally halted until the traumatic event dissipates. Not with me.
They never even bothered to offer or provide a psychiatrist despite the fact that national television (WSPAA, WYFF) publicly aired me crying in tears, in cause of Tharwat’s deportation and our child’s miscarriage.
During the deportation of my wife, Tharwat, and miscarriage of our child:
- I experienced many sleepless nights and uncomfortable nightmares
- My roommates took me to the emergency room due to dehydration and self inflicted starvation and reported my speech was incoherent and slurred
- I destroyed my apartment completely while staying up at nights speaking to myself
- I alienated friends and family accusing them of being informants or spies
- I took out loans I couldn’t afford in order to pay legal fees and travel costs, and worse.
- My life was destroyed completely.
Then, the South Carolina Department of Child Services decided to play the part of a gallant vulture, swooping down on near dead prey, in the name of child welfare, to psychologically and financially destroy the suspected father of a child and his wife.
I was also not provided a lawyer or even vaguely aware of my rights when the South Carolina Department of Child Support Services suddenly targeted me in this fragile state, which absolutely necessitates the argument within a civil litigation court, U.S. Supreme Court if permissible, for my Constitutional Right of Due Process.
In the U.S. Supreme court case, Gideon Versus Wainright, the indigent were eventually allowed free representation because the preponderance of the evidence indicated a severe gap in court outcomes, between the indigent and others who could afford legal representation.
I aver, from my own research, the same status quo exists today within the Child Support system.
Finally.
It is completely understandable that the South Carolina Department of Child Services would rush to prove paternity and award payments, immediately after learning of a potential father ascertaining a passport.
It is difficult to enforce Child Support orders to those who willfully indulge in a vacation or travel experience on their own discretion, or purposely abscond, under normal circumstances.
My situation was very far from normal.
I did not voluntarily choose to travel abroad. On the contrary, news publications prove I was reluctant and scared to travel abroad. I was trying to keep my wife in the United States.
Nor did I ascertain my passport after the Child Support Services contacted me, but prior.
The normal cognitive functioning human can deduce from the preceding that I did not intentionally desire to abscond. But it appears so now, in consequence to circumstances, out of my control, due to an unstable environment in the Middle East and a greedy South Carolina Department of Child Services.
On the contrary, after the tragic deportation of Tharwat and obtaining a passport solely to travel abroad to be with her and bring her back, the South Carolina Department of Child Services immediately, with shameless agog, commenced child support proceedings in quick callous fashion.
I believe they also had a police officer, illegally take my passport at the Clemson University Library, in which he only returned it after I personally complained to the U.S State Department by phone, while blocking his police vehicle.
The South Carolina Department of Child Services also served me with a no contact order with the mother in regards to her child, prior paternity testing, disallowing me to make any arrangements to preclude the interference of the South Carolina Department of Child Services.
I was also ordered to not contact her or the child indefinitely, afterwards.
When I took the paternity test, I asked what was the name of this child, both the mother, Jamie Dill, and the South Carolina Department of Child Services refused to inform me. I don’t even know the child’s name!
I am supposed to pay for a child who I don’t and won’t know, nor can I contact that child in the future to practice my right as a parent.
Additionally, the South Carolina Department of Child Services claimed I had other children with different women, but failed to produce these women and children at a hearing when I requested.
No one showed up.
I would strongly argue the above is a list of violations of my human rights, spousal rights, and a conniving form of nasty entrapment
Conclusion
The South Carolina Department of Child Services can’t deny that they knew that I was neither in correct or/and adequate financial or mental state due to a recent tragedy. Thus, unable to cognizantly and rationally agree to whatever obligations it would maliciously enforce upon me.
I was mentally unfit! It was all over the news too.
I would also argue its callous and cruelly insensitive action was specifically designed to entrap me into reneging, from its very first application against me.
I was traveling to a developing nation in order to secure the return of a wife.
I’m certain the South Carolina Department of Child Services is run by morally repugnant and incompassionate evil brutes , Jesus hypocrites. But my only curiosity, is if the South Carolina Department of Child Services is also run by brainless asinine people, with equivalent intelligence as a Homo Habillis, that are completely incapable of realizing a developing nation’s salary is insufficient to meet the financial bills of a developed nation, while caring for a wife?
The South Carolina Department of Child Services must have known arrears was the most likely outcome but instead desired to meet what quota appeases the Federal government for state funding and maliciously enacted the process to harm my wife and me intentionally.
A rational and fair person or government doesn’t rush to secure financial burdens upon an injured victim. One does so with those without injury and those normally functioning. They could have waited as child support responsibilities don’t disappear. Instead, after the first $5,000 arrears, the threat of incarceration only deterred or protracted such return.
I personally feel that the South Carolina Department of Child Services was wielded as an instrument of silencing and punishing my political dissent in South Carolina.
The South Carolina Department of Child Services doesn’t care about preserving families or for children in my opinion. Especially the child I lost. It is only concerned about money. The rest of us humans could die tomorrow like South Carolinian Walter Scott, for all it cares. Such an inhumane and criminal system should be fought at every breath, regardless of victory or defeat.
I use the adjective criminal because even a parent will warn, scorn, and yell at a child, before physical punishment. The South Carolina Department of Child Services has resorted to silence in regards to me without warnings, just as a criminal emotionlessly robs a person with little need for explanation, yet with more force and more violence. To them, might is right. And money is God. Jesus is solely code for an excuse.
I would appreciate any help with my requests. And I also ask you file and document this. Others are now.
American Child Support: Broken, Corrupt, Misandrist, and Inhumane
via American Child Support: Broken, Corrupt, Misandrist, and Inhumane
ModernWestern Feminism = Misandry and a threat to humankind worldwide
The dysfunctional and counterproductive Child Support system in the United States is predicated on myths, which don’t correlate with reality or contemporary America. It’s a misandrist institution due to its creation from the preceding and its foundation was established on greed and hypocrisy.
For the indigent, it is an oppressive system which regularly violates constitutional and human rights, while leading to debtors’ prisons. For others, it’s a corrupt and ineffective enterprise wherein the State and Federal bureaucracies have grown exponentially due to profiting from the separation of families.
Today, the American Child Support system relies too heavily on monetary means and government intervention as the panacea to broken families. Compared to other systems worldwide, it is too slow in reform, while refusing to learn from others. Thus, it persists in proving true former UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s quote, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.”
American Child Support: Broken, Corrupt, Misandrist, and Inhumane
Modern Western Feminism = Misandry – a threat to humankind
Introduction
The dysfunctional and counterproductive Child Support system in the United States is predicated on myths, which don’t correlate with the reality of contemporary America. It’s an institution that is too often an excuse for misandry, due to its creation from the preceding. And its historical precedents through two former American presidents, were established on greed and hypocrisy.
For the indigent, it is an oppressive system which regularly violates constitutional and human rights, while ultimately leading to the archaic internationally banned debtors’ prisons. For others, it’s a corrupt and ineffective enterprise, wherein the State and Federal bureaucracies though perhaps with well-intentions, have grown exponentially via profiting from the cruel coerced separation and tragic alienation of broken families.
Today, the American Child Support system relies too heavily on monetary means and government intervention as the panacea to broken families. Compared to other systems worldwide, it is too slow in reform, while refusing to learn from others. Thus, it persists in proving true former UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s quote, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.”
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/winston_churchill_135259
Background
In history, child support was initially a community action for destitute orphans. The church sought only sufficient compensation from fathers to avoid an orphan enduring penury. Legal actions were only imposed against dads who “willfully” abandoned children.
However, American Child Support has exponentially grown in much more aggressive fashion. While the developing world has too few laws, America always produces far too many.
American laws today
With time, Federal incentives would be awarded to states in coercing parents, whether willful abandonment or not by those parents, to fork over a monthly price the state deemed was sufficient, to care for a child. http://www.childsupportanalysis.co.uk/information_and_explanation/world/history_usa.htm The National Parents Organization states, “Long ago and far away there was a land in which non-custodial fathers paid child support directly to the custodial mother…In the 1970s, child support collection, disbursement and accounting became a function of government instead.” https://nationalparentsorganization.org/blog/20615-fraud-corruption-in-child-support-enforcement
Child Support also eventually became a profitable enterprise for state governments, rather than an altruistic act of eliminating child poverty. Former Director of the South Carolina Social Services, Elizabeth Patterson, states, “Any money collected from the non-custodial payment goes to the state, not the family. That’s generally true nationally, though some states pass on some of the money to the family.” http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/how-falling-behind-child-support-can-end-jail#56748
Money is more important than children and fathers in Democracy and Republicanism. In american Christianity.
Some significant developments which formed the pillars of the modern Child Support system we now know today, were also indicative of its greed and hypocrisy.
In 1975, former U.S. President Gerald Ford enacted the Child Support Enforcement and Paternity Establishment Program (CSE) to establish paternity and collect monthly Child Support. Though this veneer seemed altruistic and morally right, the background of Ford’s own mother reveal the value of greed over family preservation in his rearing, which also influenced Ford’s creation of the Child Support system.
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford was a product of an avaricious mother who valued monetary means, honey trapping, more than preserving a family. Dorothy Ayar Gardner, divorced Ford’s biological father, a simple wool trader named Leslie Lynch, only sixteen days after his birth and after discovering his father was in debt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lynch_King_Sr.
She shortly afterwards remarried Ford Motor Cars millionaire and founder, Gerald Rudolph Ford. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Ayer_Gardner_Ford
Dorothy Ayer Gardner
Ford’s legislation would be followed by the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act enacted by former U.S President Bill Clinton in 1998, which allows the Federal government to imprison poor parents who miss $5,000 worth of court ordered Child Support payments.
Its purpose was to punish “Deadbeat Dads” for the immorality of absconding from responsibility and creating broken homes.
Bill Clinton would later be accused of sexual harassment and rape by four women, who he would discreetly pay off to remain silent, in order to abscond from his criminal responsibility. He would also cheat on his wife, Hillary Clinton, with an intern named Monica Lewinsky, by welcoming oral sex from Monica within the White House. Clinton was pretty irresponsible and immoral. But, he wasn’t a Deadbeat at least, because he had money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton#Sexual_misconduct_allegations
How can immoral US Presidents write moral laws?
Since the foundation of the modern Child Support system was soiled with greed and hypocrisy, it isn’t surprising that it has blossomed likewise into a smelly and ugly Corpse Flower today.
Corpse Flower
The Deadbeat Dad Myth
In order to convince the American public that the governments’ involvement in child support is a necessary evil, as American founder Samuel Adams warned about government, radical feminists and Uncle Tims (men desiring to court female favor by advancing feminist agendas), created the Deadbeat Dad Myth, still prevalent today. https://nationalcenter.org/project21/2013/11/01/has-radical-feminism-achieved-a-deceptive-victory-by-darryn-dutch-martin/
A Deadbeat Dad is the pejorative for a father who refuses to pay child support. Although the neologism is reserved for intentional neglect, it is through common usage, applied toward all fathers who don’t pay. The erroneous hypocrisy is that the majority of fathers, who don’t pay, simply can’t.
Seventy percent of unpaid child support is not owed “by Deadbeat Dads, they’re Dead Broke Dads,” as author Wendy Paris stated. https://qz.com/397579/the-divorce-divide-how-the-us-legal-system-screws-poor-parents/ A study from a Washington think tank found that more than 80 percent of child support debt is owed by indigent fathers making between $10,000 and $20,000 a year — less than half the median income in the U.S. https://us12.proxysite.com/process.php?d=fLlT34YgvjQAChMQAtUib7lSyD%2Fix4snqXRNGndDOjoMsBJqhepfOC5rTOfHtMM3FRYLkcXS91ryt%2By4PYrf%2FQkSAiaLCzf%2Fb%2BNV5HL32AFHA%2BY%2F3DoFGcEvy%2FWbsCk9Nn8%3D&b=1&f=norefer
Writer Joseph E. Cordell explained when, “Child support not paid by fathers is due to an inability to come up with the money, calling all the dads who miss payments deadbeats is painting with far too broad of a brush.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-myth-of-the-deadbeat_n_4745118
Nevertheless, the stigma of Deadbeat Dad is a useful dehumanizing instrument. Just as slurs like Huns, Japs, niggers, wetbacks, terrorists, communists, etc. It inculcates into the lesser perspicacious and ignorant American public, that it’s acceptable to feel no sympathy toward indigent fathers. They’re inhuman.
Such pejoratives inevitably lead to injustice being accepted as, justice. Peruse the following honest reality with Deadbeat Dads, indigent fathers, in America today:
- A female and male, both financially broke, irresponsibly create a child.
- Fathers are not provided the equal opportunity to affect abortion or adoption. The mother alone decides.
- Immediately after a child’s birth, the father must pay Child Support, possibly being garnished up to 65 percent of his wages. This amount mostly goes to the state government, instead of the mother and his children.
- After a Child Support amount is established, the father then must petition and pay legal fees for visitation and custody rights. Even if the preceding is granted, he might be lucky enough to see his children five times a month. The latter, shared custody, is rarely granted in America.
- If he can’t afford the Child Support or the legal fees for visitation or custody, he is consequently labeled a Deadbeat Dad.
- In almost all cases, the mother regularly ends up receiving continuous paychecks and maintains primary custody, till the child is eighteen years of age or more.
The above is absolutely not equal or fair when peering past gender canards, and attempting to sincerely respect the human rights of both spouses. In contrast, it’s oppressive and misandrist.
Some like the FugitiveNation blog call it flat out, “Sex Payments.” https://fugitivenation.wordpress.com/exploitation-extortion-oppression-2/about-2/govt-corruption-and-child-support/
Yet, such legislation is not only justified by the Deadbeat Dad myth, it also is sustained by American gender empowerment, righting the historical discrimination of wealthy white men against women.
But the real victims of the current Child Support system, are poor fathers mostly of color, who had nothing to do with those historical wrongs and also don’t have the money to “willfully” pay child support. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-myth-of-the-deadbeat_b_4745118 Nearly 50,000 fathers are in prison today for failure to pay Child Support, the majority of them, minorities. https://www.wnyc.org/story/when-child-support-becomes-debtors-prison/
The Traditional Family Myth
Another myth which detrimentally affects fathers is the father’s natural role is breadwinners and mothers, stay-at-home moms. The Family Law court system, inundated with uneducated judges and greedy prosecutors, is a firm proponent for such archaic and misandrist stereotype.
In a gender-bias study performed by Science Daily, out of 500 court judges, only 3 percent granted equal time for the father with the children, even if both the mother and father possessed equitable credentials and income. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180403085049.htm
In consequence to the Family Law court’s blind faith in conservative gender family roles with equal asinine alacrity as the common mistaken belief in 300 Spartans against 10,000 Persians at Thermopylae or Christopher Columbus discovering America first, the Child Support system and family courts aid in the separation of families, it simultaneously portends to repair.
Since mothers receive Child Support payments for eighteen years or more, since there are no control mechanisms in how those mothers spend that allocated money, and since Child Support payment is awarded to who has custody more; mothers are nearly always the spouses being paid. Such norm provides women monetary rewards for desiring divorce and separation and engaging in promiscuity. https://supportpay.com/resources/child-support-calculator/
For example, 90 percent of divorces in America end with the mother having primary custody. In other words, five of six custodial parents in the United States are mothers. https://www.wevorce.com/blog/child-support-facts-and-figures/ 90% of Child Support in America now, is owed to mothers, instead of fathers. https://www.liveabout.com/quick-facts-child-support-in-america-1270020
This is precisely why the United States divorce rate is sixth highest in the world. https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/ It is also a part of the reason why 40 percent of child births derive from unmarried couples in America. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/problems-with-paternity-fraud-to-securing-parental-rights_b_9244342 The Child Support system frankly transforms homemakers into ho-makers. Pun intended.
It also severely disadvantages fathers with less opportunity to preserve his household against such financial incentives, less time to spend with children, and reduces him to nothing more than an inanimate inhuman Piggy Bank after divorce or separation. Such unfair status quo can only be accurately described as institutionalized misandry.
In one recent example, Fast and Furious actor Tyrese Gibson publicly cried on the internet over the Child Support system. He was ordered to pay $13,000 a month with limited visitation of his children, was falsely accused of child abuse by his former spouse, and he complained there was no accountability of his former spouse’s expenses for child care, in which he footed the bill. His situation was obviously inhumane, yet many other celebrities in consequence to the Deadbeat Dad myth and traditional family role myth, criticized him for being honest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YMEbCO23rw
The Family Court’s unbridled devotion to the traditional family myth is also completely counterproductive for collecting Child Support and also for the child’s psychological welfare. Research has overwhelmingly proven that fathers who spend more time with children, are unlikely to miss Child Support payments and even pay more than required. https://qz.com/397579/the-divorce-divide-how-the-us-legal-system-screws-poor-parents/
Nevertheless, in Nebraska alone, 72 percent of child custody cases resulted in fathers being allowed to only see their children, 5.5 days a month. According to the Washington State Center for Court Research, two thirds of court cases resulted in mothers being granted significantly much more time than fathers. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-myth-of-the-deadbeat_n_4745118 In Utah, fathers are only entitled to 3 hours of visitation during the week and one visit every other weekend. https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/family-law/visitation-rights/examples-of-visitation-schedules.html
Numerous research findings have also consistently proven that the best psychological scenario for children is shared parenting, yet the Child Support system still refuses to implement it today. https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/26/divorce-shared-parenting-children-health/ The National Parents Organization recently released a Shared Parenting Report Card. This report grades every state on its child custody statutes, in how well they promote shared parenting. Almost all states scored with a cumulative 1.63 on a 4.0 scale. https://dadsdivorce.com/articles/4-problems-with-the-modern-child-support-system/
For indigent fathers, it’s much worse since custody and visitation is awarded only after proof of a father’s income and regular child support payments. There are no states engaging in a 50/50 custody arrangement for poor fathers which would alleviate the financial burdens of such dads (more time with the child equates into less Child Support payment), be fairer toward both spouses (eliminate misandry and promote gender equality), and would be the most beneficial toward children’s welfares. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/23/collecting-child-support-without-making-matters-worse/the-child-support-system-should-support-families-not-government-coffers.
In addition, the traditional belief that women are natural caretakers of infants and men are incapable and should be solely breadwinners, is also anachronistic. It can’t be applied to contemporary American society.
Despite social myths, single fathers can and have been raising children alone. LGBT fathers have been leading in such rise in figures currently. https://mankindprojectjournal.org/blog/2012/06/19/dads-alone-men-choosing-to-raise-children-without-a-partner/ The film, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” starring actor Will Smith, is an excellent example, highlighting the life of a single father. According to the U.S. Bureau of Census, since 2007, single fathers raising a child have been slowly approaching nearly one quarter of households today. https://ifstudies.org/blog/five-facts-about-todays-single-fathers
Additionally, the idea of the woman being homemakers has drastically changed since the mid-twentieth century. Women are much more involved in the workforce since the days of Rosie the Rivoter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter
Nearly 50 percent of the United States workforce is comprised of women today. Their earnings have also significantly increased, while male earnings have decreased. https://statusofwomendata.org/explore-the-data/employment-and-earnings/ According to the Center for American Progress, 42 percent of working women now identify as the family’s primary breadwinners. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2016/12/19/295203/breadwinning-mothers-are-increasingly-the-u-s-norm/
Johns Hopkins University Sociologist Kathryn Edin stated upon the Child Support system and the traditional family myth, “We have a 1970s narrative, about a 2010s reality.” https://dadsdivorce.com/articles/4-problems-with-the-modern-child-support-system/
Criminalizing the Poor
Some Americans may still not admit the gossamer problems with Child Support today. That’s because its victims are mainly indigent fathers who have little voice, stemming from being successfully marginalized. Like many laws in history, Anatole France explained well once, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/361132-the-law-in-its-majestic-equality-forbids-rich-and-poor
Anatole France
In reality, the current American Child Support system for indigent fathers:
- Violates the right of Due Process in the U.S Constitution’s 5th and 14th Amendments (which is also article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights)
- Breaches the 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing the right to vote.
- Contravenes the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution allowing involuntary servitude only as punishment for a crime (Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
- It also defies article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for expats whose livelihoods and family relations depend on freedom of travel.
- Most importantly, it disregards article 11 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which states, “No one shall be imprisoned on the ground of inability to fulfill a contractual obligation.”
American Child Support enforcement regularly criminalizes the poor, under the assumption that the poor are naturally liars and thieves, while the wealthy are not. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-poor-dont-lie-and-che_b_4653044. Fathers who have money for legal representation normally obtain lower Child Support payments when requested, with special consideration of not destroying their present or future livelihood, less or no jail time, and are allotted more time with children. Those without lawyers, are granted the contrary. https://www.twyfordlaw.com/blog/2015/december/how-much-time-do-children-spend-with-each-of-the/
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), states have been regularly enforcing payment obligations, without regard to a father’s financial situation. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/how-falling-behind-child-support-can-end-jail#56748
Autumn Mizer posted in The Medium, “An urban study done over the nine top largest states indicated that 70% of Child Support payers — 85% of those being men- were making less than $10,000 a year, yet courts were expecting them to pay 83% of their yearly incomes in child support.” https://medium.com/@Autam/child-support-a-modern-system-abusing-men-926f585bbfc3
In consequence, indigent fathers are coerced into an inhumane cycle akin to modern slavery. This cycle translates into the following tautology:
(1) Unaffordable payments
(2) Loss of job, family, friends, personal assets, and licenses
(3) Incarceration while debt continues accruing interest
(4) Release from prison
child support debt cycle
Often a released father has a couple months to find new employment, before being arrested again. In South Carolina, a father needs only to be late five days in payments. And usually arrests reoccur with more frequency, after the first.
The American Center for Progress states, “Unrealistic child support orders help no one, trapping parents in a vicious cycle of debt, nonpayment, and even incarceration.” https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/news/2015/06/18/115417/3-facts-you-need-to-know-about-the-obama-administrations-proposed-child-support-rules/
Child Support for indigent fathers translates De Facto, into debtors’ prisons. Although the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) has stated debtors’ prisons were abolished two centuries ago, in America, they exist today. https://www.acluohio.org/archives/cases/james-harris When Child support courts incarcerate fathers for arrears or missed payments, they routinely assume the father willfully refused to pay, rather than inability. Nor do they even attempt to determine the latter.
According to the ChildSupportHustle, the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, warned in a letter that imprisoning indigent fathers for Child Support without determining inability or ability to pay, violates the U.S. Supreme Court Case, Bearden v. Georgia decision of 1983. Therefore, it infringes upon the U.S. Constitutional rights protected under the 5th and 14th Amendments. Nevertheless, the Child Support System continues to do so today. http://thechildsupporthustle.com/frontpage-slider/the-doj-letter-and-child-support-enforcement/
Courtney Lollar wrote in the Alabama Law Review, “Once a state prosecutes and imprisons an indigent father, his odds of being able to pay that debt diminish even more. The criminalization of failing to pay child support is unconstitutional and revives prohibited debtors’ prisons.” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3168653
In addition to suspending driver’s licenses, public shaming, freezing bank accounts, refusing tax refunds, reporting debt to credit agencies, revoking passports despite freedom of travel guaranteed under article 13 of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, revoking the 15th Amendment right to vote as in Tennessee, and more; Child Support enforcement continues counting the debt while the father is even incarcerated.
Former United States President, Barak Obama, attempted to stop debt progression while indigent fathers were imprisoned, but current U.S. President Donald Trump tossed the bill. https://www.governing.com/topics/health-human-services/gov-child-support-obama-trump.html
Former U.S. President Barak Obama
All of the aforementioned Draconian measures consistently fail to produce Child Support payments from indigent fathers. Former South Carolina Director of Social Services, Elizabeth Patterson, states punitive measures as suspension of drivers’ licenses, seizing assets, and more; work on fathers with money. It doesn’t with those without. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/how-falling-behind-child-support-can-end-jail#56748
Nevertheless, the Child Support enforcement vehemently shakes indigent fathers like a cactus in a desert, for any sign of fruit. The Deadbeat Dad myth promulgates an ignorant American public to look away to such insanity. And since 80 percent of the owed Child Support debt is by those earning between $10,000 and $20,000 yearly, its only outcome is modern slavery and debtors’ prisons.
Instead of admitting the system is completely broken for indigent fathers, Child Support enforcement pathetically bugle blows the banal Deadbeat Dad myth tautology as a gossamer defense, while responding irrationally and with even more aggression.
While some criminals are privileged not to have their photos publicly displayed, in states like Arizona, they post photos of indigent fathers to publicly shame them in an effort to coerce Child Support payments. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/arizona-deadbeat-dads-twitter-child-support_n_5696af36e4b0ce496422f90b In New Jersey, law enforcement arrested 1,700 fathers on Father’s Day in what they termed Deadbeat Dad raids. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-haney-fathers-day-child-support-20180615-story.html In South Carolina, they increased an emphasis on imprisonment for arrears. Currently, one in eight inmates in the state of South Carolina are there for child support. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/news/2015/06/18/115417/3-facts-you-need-to-know-about-the-obama-administrations-proposed-child-support-rules/
Author Joseph Cordwell states, “No matter how they try, broke fathers are not able to get back on their feet because the state continues to sweep their legs out from under them.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-myth-of-the-deadbeat_n_4745118
Such aggression and callousness by Child Support enforcement can only result in expected tragedy. And it occurred in 2015 in the state with the harshest Child Support laws. Walter Scott of South Carolina was shot several times in his back by a law enforcement officer, when attempting to flee arrest. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/20/us/skip-child-support-go-to-jail-lose-job-repeat.html He had been stuck in the vicious Child Support cycle.
His brother Rodney stated to the New York Times, “Every job he [his brother Walter Scott] has had, he has gotten fired from because he went to jail because he was locked up for child support. He got to the point where he felt like it defeated the purpose.” https://qz.com/397579/the-divorce-divide-how-the-us-legal-system-screws-poor-parents/ Walter Scott died because he attempted to flee what Elizabeth Patterson describes as, “A modern day debtors’ prison for poor noncustodial parents who lack the ability to pay support.” https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publishing/preview/publiced_preview_briefs_pdfs_2010_2011_10_10_PetitionerAmCuEPattersonandtheSCAppleseed.authcheckdam.pdf.
There also seems to be little reprieve in the procedural process for indigent fathers by Child Support courts.
Often indigent fathers seek modifications to Child Support payments, yet some find the amount raised and more punitive actions taken against them. According to the National Parents Organization, a military soldier who was deployed to Iraq asked for modification. Instead, he and his wife’s bank accounts were seized and he was ordered to pay more. https://nationalparentsorganization.org/blog/146-child-support-enforc
Although the indigent may have free legal representation in criminal cases respecting their Constitutional right to Due Process, poor fathers are not granted public attorneys in Child Support proceedings.
For example, Michael Turner spent a year in jail for not paying Child Support. He argued in the US Supreme Court that he was not provided a lawyer, as promised for the indigent in the Gideon versus Wainright US Supreme Court case of 1963. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_v._Wainwright Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that since Turner’s incarceration was a civil matter, instead of criminal, his imprisonment without a lawyer, was constitutional. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/how-falling-behind-child-support-can-end-jail#56748
Yet the very essence or principle behind the Gideon Versus Wainright decision, was the inequality of legal outcomes based upon the socioeconomic differences between the indigent and poor, which is absolutely evident in the Child Support system today.
“Many states have two systems, one for married parents and one for poor people/welfare cases that are funneled through ‘paternity dockets’ where they barely get to say a word,” says Daniel Hatcher, a Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore. “It’s a tribunal that’s just about child-support and paternity. It’s crowded. Judges are jaded. They face huge case loads.” https://qz.com/397579/the-divorce-divide-how-the-us-legal-system-screws-poor-parents/
Fraud and Corruption
The Child Support system in America is exemplary of a Tammany Hall style corruption and fraud. It immensely profits. It also consistently employs, any and every means, to award exorbitant and numerous Child Support orders to obtain that profit. It doesn’t sincerely care for families, but solely for profit, just as the criminal justice system in America today. https://www.thenation.com/article/profits-prison-system/
While some mothers blame Deadbeat Dads for not providing enough, they might seek a better aim toward a corrupt system instead. Most of the money collected for Child Support is administered to the State.
Three quarters of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) goes to the states. 52% of Child Support debt in the United States is not owed to needy mothers or children, it’s to the selfish states’ governments. In states as California, 73% of Child Support debt is owed to the state. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-haney-fathers-day-child-support-20180615-story.html
Journalist Paul Raeburn states in Psychology Today that of the over $100 billion owed to the nation’s child support, $50 billion goes to the government. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/about-fathers/200812/welfare-and-child-support-nobody-wins The ChildSupportHustle states, “Not only are non-custodial parents being robbed of their freedom and extorted without due process protections, custodial parents are being robbed of the payments made supposedly for the children. The only beneficiary of the child support system is the government.” http://thechildsupporthustle.com/frontpage-slider/the-doj-letter-and-child-support-enforcement/
Author Phyllis Schafley explains in Eagle Forum, “The states share in a nearly-half-billion-dollar incentive reward pool based on whatever the state collects. The states can get a waiver to spend this bonus money anyway they choose.
…The federal incentives drive the system. The more divorces, and the higher the child-support guidelines are set and enforced (no matter how unreasonable), the more money the state bureaucracy collects from the feds.” https://eagleforum.org/column/2005/may05/05-05-11.html
Megan Feldman in the Dallas Observer explains that states like Texas, “Receive federal funds based in part on the amount of child support that it collects and distributes, giving the Child Support Division a budgetary incentive to close as many cases as it can, no matter whose rights it might trample.” https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/family-court-judge-sheds-light-on-unfair-child-support-practices-in-texas-6420102
In other words, separating families, violating U.S. Constitutional and human rights, and creating exorbitant Child Support awards, is profitable for states. And in such a scheme, symptoms of its corruption are destined to reveal itself.
In one instance, a deputy clerk of the Child Support office in Gaffney, South Carolina, pocketed $60,000. In Texas, a private contractor with the Child Support courts stole over $200,000 from debit cards of fathers ordered to pay Child Support. https://nationalparentsorganization.org/blog/20615-fraud-corruption-in-child-support-enforcement
But it’s not just theft alone.
It’s also the shrewd Machiavellian nature in which the Child Support system operates with akin honor and integrity as an amalgamation between Charles Ponzi and San Francisco’s Sally Stanford. Its sole objective is to hustle poor Americans of their rights and money, but with the full backing of the United States Federal government. The States’ courts, judges, officers, case workers, lawyers and more; are all cronies as in former U’S. President Ulyssess S. Grant’s Whiskey Ring and Credit Mobilier scams.
Indigent fathers are regularly without legal representation and callously rushed through a conveyor-belt of signing agreements, some still in a fragile psychological state from divorce or separation. No tests are administered to establish if fathers are mentally fit. In addition, state paternity DNA tests are not 100 percent trustworthy. For example, a Canadian man, Andre Cherky, discovered his state administered DNA test painting him a biological father, was wrong after a second test. https://canadiancrc.com/Newspaper_Articles/Discover_Whos_your_daddy_APR06.aspx
Sometimes DNA tests are not administered at all. Currently, 30 percent of Child Support is paid by fathers whose DNA tests prove they are not the fathers. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/magazine/22Paternity-t.html?_r=0 In Dallas, Texas, the state government disregarded DNA results proving a wife cheated on her husband. Then, the court sanctioned the results to be sealed from the public, while the Child Support order remained enforced on the father. https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/family-court-judge-sheds-light-on-unfair-child-support-practices-in-texas-6420102
In another incident, a mother listed Carnelll Alexander as the father on her child’s birth certificate, in order to get state welfare benefits. He later was unexpectedly hit with a $30,000 back Child Support bill. It took him years to track her down and perform a DNA test. Despite the results, clearing his parenthood, the judge still demanded the back pay from him. https://www.theroot.com/judge-orders-detroit-man-to-pay-30-000-in-back-child-s-1790858861
“If a man goes out and gets DNA testing that says it’s not his child, but it’s after four years, he’s screwed,” says a Texas assistant attorney general. “You’ve got 17-year-old kids signing these things [Child Support Agreements], and they don’t even know what they’re doing.” https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/family-court-judge-sheds-light-on-unfair-child-support-practices-in-texas-6420102 FugitiveNation states, “If the father had a vasectomy that left him with a zero sperm count prior to the birth of the child, this evidence is considered irrelevant.” https://fugitivenation.wordpress.com/exploitation-extortion-oppression-2/about-2/govt-corruption-and-child-support/
Occasionally, the Child Support representative may also lie about DNA paternity results to quickly secure a signature. In other cases, if the indigent father misses a single court proceeding, it results in an automatic Child Support award for the mother.
The National Parents Organization states, “Where there’s money to be had – big money – there’s bound to be corruption…So when it comes to establishing child support, state attorney generals stoop to just about anything to make sure some adult male gets identified as the child’s father. To them it really doesn’t matter if it’s the right guy or not.” https://nationalparentsorganization.org/blog/20615-fraud-corruption-in-child-support-enforcement
Restraining orders, often urged on by lawyers as a legal tactic, are also administered upon the father prior a Child Support hearing, preventing the father from any contact with the children or the mother. Therefore, there’s little chance for spouses to arrive to any mutual agreement, prior government or legal interference. States and lawyers don’t profit if they’re not part of the formula. http://valleypatriot.com/the-abuse-of-restraining-orders-to-gain-an-advantage-in-child-custody-proceedings/
Additionally, restraining orders coerces the father to leave the household with months of no contact with the children. This allows mothers to alienate the children against the father. It also negatively portrays his character in the Child Support courts, which makes it more likely for less custody time and for higher support payments.
Such restraining orders also need no evidence to obtain and mothers are never punished for lying. For example, the famous T.V. host David Lettermen had a restraining order upon him by a New Mexico woman, as his accuser claimed he spoke to her in code on his TV appearances. In West Virginia alone, 81 percent of restraining orders by females against males were discovered to be false. None of the petitioners were punished. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-worst-thing-a-woman-c_b_837636
Attorney Christine Sullivan writes in the Valley Patriot that, “The restraining order is often times used as a legal tactic to gain an advantage in child custody proceedings. It is a page out of the dirty lawyer’s handbook.” http://valleypatriot.com/the-abuse-of-restraining-orders-to-gain-an-advantage-in-child-custody-proceedings/
In Child Support courts, most of the time, a mothers’ accusations are also not thoroughly investigated and the presumption of guilt is nearly always upon the father. Worse, in consequence to the monetary awards entailed, lawyers even seek to ascertain an unfair judgment against the father as well. In an actual custody case, a mother and her attorney faked a domestic violence incident for leverage in court in Fulton County, Georgia. The father’s attorney also cooperated with the duo against the father. https://myadvocatecenter.com/case-studies/attorney-ethics-rules-no-teeth/
Judge David Hanschen of Texas summarized that the constitutional right of Due Process is being regularly violated by attorney generals using deceptive or fraudulent methods in order to coerce indigent fathers to sign away their rights in Child Support cases. https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/family-court-judge-sheds-light-on-unfair-child-support-practices-in-texas-6420102
The most compelling evidence however, exposing the corruption and fraud of the Child Support system, is revealed by Divorce Corp Director, Joseph Sorge. His research focused on the actual costs of raising a child in comparison to what state governments are demanding. He revealed that the amount the State demands, is double to quadruple the actual costs of raising a child. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=196XCAXfqrI SouthFloridaCorruption.com concurs with Joseph Sorge’s findings and states,“Child support is actually child extortion and alimony. It is often four to five times the actual cost of raising a child.” http://southfloridacorruption.com/Download/top_88_divorce_tips.pdf
In addition, Divorce Corp also discovered that some Family Courts are imprisoning American citizens for blogging about the corruption of Child Support. Judges are also holding Facebook users in contempt of court for criticizing the Child Support system. And Child support lawyers are contributing to campaign funds for Child Support judges. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/divorce-corp-documentary_b_4577155 SouthFloridaCorruption.com also revealed that states like Massachusetts where 83% of citizens voted for shared parenting , which is better for children and parents but not profitable for state governments, still have not changed to shared parenting, despite the public’s desires. http://southfloridacorruption.com/Download/top_88_divorce_tips.pdf
Stephen Baskerville, a former member of Virginia’s Advisory Child Support Review Panel, states in the Washington Examiner that Child Support is, “Simply government-organized thievery.” https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/when-child-support-becomes-extortion-families-lose William S.Comanor in, “The Law and Economics of Child support Payments,” with the help of scholars, describes the Child Support system as, “An obvious sham and disaster…the most onerous form of debt collection practiced in the United States.” https://www.elgaronline.com/view/1843761211.xml
Child Support Systems in Other Nations
When juxtaposing the American Child support system to others worldwide, the former fails miserably. In comparison to Europe, nations which have more wealth, the American child support system is completely exploitive, irrational, and inefficient. When compared to developing nations, nations with worse records for women’s rights, the American Child Support system is inhumane and unfair.
A preponderance of contemporary comparative analyses of Child Support systems worldwide usually emphasize the heuristic of how much is collected and administered as a successful system. However, there is more to that heuristic. Successful Child Support systems are humane, replicate an environment prior divorce while collecting money efficiently, and eliminate the criminalization of the indigent.
Journalist Bryce Covert in ThinkProgress states, “American fathers have the highest obligations among 14 of the richest countries, even if they are poor or unemployed (in eight countries, an unemployed father doesn’t owe anything). The U.S. is one of four that doesn’t exempt some portion of the noncustodial parent’s income for basic living expenses. Only five countries are so extreme as to jail fathers who don’t pay.” In addition to European nations such as Austria and Finland not imprisoning for Child Support, Australia also doesn’t
Covert, like many others, rightfully laud the European system of Child Support. Nations like Sweden and the Netherlands provide mothers with Child Support, despite non-custodial parents paying or not. Covert continues, “Such a system seems to work — 95 percent of these parents get child support payments.” https://thinkprogress.org/the-brilliant-idea-from-europe-that-could-revolutionize-child-support-dd3416db9bfb/ In the United States, only 40 percent of custodial parents get their Child Support payments. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/cb18-tps03.html
In Sweden, a 50/50 arrangement entails no child support. Sweden has one of the highest shared parenting rates in the world. Research has proven shared parenting is best financially and psychologically for both parents and children. https://www.childandfamilyblog.com/child-development/share-physical-custody-stress/ While in America, only 17 percent of custody cases involve shared parenting. https://www.deseret.com/2016/2/5/20581666/what-shared-parenting-is-and-how-it-can-affect-kids-after-divorce#sad-child-on-a-swing-inbetween-her-divorced-parents-holding-her-separatedly
While the average monthly Child Support payment in America is $465.00. https://www.wevorce.com/blog/child-support-facts-and-figures/ In European nations as Sweden, it is as low as $137. https://web.archive.org/web/20110719085154/http://www.forsakringskassan.se/privatpers/foralder/separerar/underhallsbidrag/ In addition, most European nations also base Child Support more on the incomes of each parent, rather than time spent with the child or who possesses custody, as in America. http://www.ncsl.org/research/human-services/child-support-and-parenting-time-orders.aspx
But perhaps what is the most effective and humane in the European system is an emphasis on pre-government intervention or what are termed cooperation-dialogue sessions. These sessions entail the spouses conversing on custody and support arrangements with a mediator. For example, in Sweden, according to the ChildandFamilyblog, “Only 2% of custody arrangements in Sweden are imposed by a judge.” https://www.childandfamilyblog.com/child-development/share-physical-custody-stress/
These sessions are also free of charge for the indigent whereas in America, the indigent won’t even be granted an attorney. In addition, only after several sessions and no agreement, do lawyers and the courts become involved. https://www.juristjouren.se/vardnad-och-underhall_kopia.html
In summary, the European system eliminates the inhumanity, gender inequality, and inefficiency created from the American Child Support system. Both parents share custody and pay less, mothers get paid more, and criminalizing the indigent doesn’t occur.
But it isn’t just Europe that puts Americans and the United States to shame. Developing nations, despite being classified as worse on women’s and human rights, have better systems.
In Jordan and Iraq for example, the parent with a higher income must foot the majority of costs for raising the child. If a spouse remarries, child support obligations for the opposing parent simply end.
Also, there is a 50/50 shared custody arrangement between mother and father divided by early and adolescent years of the child’s development, with an option of the child choosing which parent to remain with. https://www.international-divorce.com/ca-jordan.htm
In Israel, gender equality awareness has come to a discussion unlike in America. Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked recently proposed a bill in the Israel Kenesset wherein Child Support would be based on both parents’ incomes, rather than gender. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israeli-bill-would-revamp-child-support-1.5434301 Kulanu MK Merav Ben Ari proposed a bill to scratch child support entirely and just enforce joint custody. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/237085
Even in Africa, in Botswana and Lethoso, if the mother is financially stable, there’s no need for the government to enforce Child Support payments and there is a maximum cap on the amount of Child Support collected. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1966884?seq=2#metadata_info_tab_contents Unlike in America, where even the U.S. President Donald Trump pays $300,000 a year, former baseball star Alex Rodriguez $115,000 a month, and actor Eddie Murphy $51,000 monthly. https://www.ranker.com/list/expensive-celebrity-child-support-payments/matthewcoleweiss Such money has better use for the public than to spoil any child like this.
In Latin American nations like Chile, the child support system is also fairer. The amount is based on necessities only and prosecutions for arrears are relatively low, according to John Cobin of EscapeAmericaNow. Personal assets of a father are not at risk of being liquated to support a child. Debtors’ prisons are a practically moot concept and imprisonment for severe arrears may be fifteen days as opposed to a year or more in the United States. https://escapeamericanow.info/debtors-prisons-in-usa-and-chile/
America has a lot of catching up to do. It has a problem understanding money isn’t everything and governments sometimes create more ills than good.
Conclusions
It is a doubt that American Child Support will be reformed any time soon. Editorials urging Child Support reform have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Denver Post, The Baltimore Sun, The Boston Globe, The Charleston Post And Courier and in a report by National Public Radio, yet nothing has materialized. https://dailycaller.com/2018/04/09/state-child-support-laws-destroy-families/
The American Child Support System needs to rid itself of misandry embedded within its foundation by erasing the crutch called the Deadbeat Dad myth and upgrade its system to match contemporary American gender reality. It absolutely has to stop criminalizing innocent poor fathers and cease violating their fundamental U.S. constitutional and human rights.
More importantly, it should stop the corruption and fraud which persists in its institutional and procedural behavior of profiting from the misery of human suffering, while augmenting the separation of families, to its own profit.
Bruce Eden, Director of Dads Against Discrimination stated, “The longer the state engages in social engineering of families, it delays the day that the state is out of the killing business of families. Death is a product of state Family Courts and its judges and attorneys. They view it as the cost of doing business in the ever expanding fraud business model that is styled as family court.” https://www.dailyrecord.com/story/opinion/letters/2018/09/05/letter-dysfunctional-family-courts-destroying-lives/37723129/
Finally, America should suck in its pride and catch up and learn from the rest of the world. The American Child Support system has to accept that government intervention in family affairs is not always the answer, it’s sometimes the problem.
Authors Irwin Garfinkel and Annemette Sorenson stated, “The United States fosters parental irresponsibility, is inequitable, exacerbates already poor family relations, and impoverishes single parents and their children. It would be difficult to imagine a more dysfunctional system.” http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.903.7087&rep=rep1&type=pdf
One thing for certain, we can no longer look to America for an example to learn from, in regards to Child Support. On the contrary, civilized nations and humans with hearts beating within their chests should condemn with every breath the American Child support barbarity.
As Oscar Wilde once observed, “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence, without civilization in between.”
I Was a Professor at the Horribly Corrupt American University of Iraq… Until the Neocons Fired Me
Republished from AlterNet: https://www.alternet.org/story/148443/i_was_a_professor_at_the_horribly_corrupt_american_university_of_iraq…_until_the_neocons_fired_me
The hero of this story is the $100 bill — or rather, the wad of $100 bills. My first meeting with those lovely $100 bills came at the end of my interview for a job teaching English at the American University of Iraq Sulaimaniya (AUIS). At the end of the interview, the Chancellor, Joshua Mitchell asked me what my travel expenses had been and pulled out a wad of $100 bills. He peeled off 11 of them — the cost of my ticket — and slapped them down on the table, snarling, “There, that’s how I do business!”
It certainly wasn’t the way most American academics do business. Most Americans are horrified by the sight of large amounts of cash, and American academics, an even more squeamish lot than most, would never have slapped that much money down on a table without asking for a receipt or any other formality. I was impressed; there’s something appealing about raw gangsterism popping up when you expected overcautious pedantry — especially when that raw gangsterism is giving you cash.
Any scruples I might have had about joining the occupation vanished with the last of our cash. My wife Katherine and I had been truly poor in the preceding three years — homeless, begging at food banks, the whole deal. I evenpublished some helpful hints in AlterNet for those experiencing real poverty for the first time.
We went to Iraq to make money, not because we believed the neocon talk about training Iraq’s future leaders in the great ideals of the West.
And once we got to know our colleagues at AUIS, we found that nearly all the faculty was there for the same reason. Oh, they knew the talking points — democracy, Great Books, transforming an authoritarian culture — but they were in Iraq to make money. Well, to make money and to drink. In fact, when the talk got boozy, as it almost always did at faculty gatherings, the nonsense about bringing democracy disappeared and people started talking openly about SUVs and houses in the country.
AUIS bloomed in the Northern Iraqi desert, a very artificial growth sustained hydroponically with US tax dollars. One night, at a very boozy faculty party, some veteran AUIS teachers told us the secret story of how the place was created .They claimed that AUIS was born when John Agresto, a right-wing academic and vassal of the Cheney clan, drove over the Turkish border with $500,000 cash taped to his body. There was something grotesque about this legend, because Agresto is a notably fat man, and once you’d heard the legend of his cash-strapped trip across the border, you couldn’t help imagining him bulging with cash on top of his other bulges, like a wombat infested with botfly larvae.
Bizarre as that story sounds, it’s probably true. Stranger things, involving much bigger stashes of tax money, have happened throughout the US occupation of Iraq — and Agresto certainly had the political connections to score that kind of cash. In the early stages of the US occupation after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Agresto was in charge of “reforming” the Iraqi education system on good Republican principles. To his credit, he wrote a reasonably honest book about the experience called Mugged by Reality. Unfortunately, the mugging didn’t take; Agresto has gone back to his right-wing roots, avoiding that disrespectful thug, Reality, as much as possible.
Agresto has a very typical right-wing biography, steeped in resentment and nourishing long, slow, vengeful designs on the academic profession which had humiliated him. He was a Reagan appointee to the National Endowment for the Humanities in the mid-1980s, joining his patron, Bill Bennett, in the project to de-fund the Left. But when he was nominated as Deputy head, a job that required congressional confirmation, Agresto was bitterly humiliated. He was criticized as a “mediocre political appointment” by the American Studies Association, with a dozen academic organizations joining up to issue a statement deploring his “decidedly partisan reputation.” There were also raised evebrows at the fact that a witness who testified for Agresto at his confirmation hearings had recently been given a large grant at Agresto’s behest. After these bruising revelations,his nomination was dropped.
Humiliation was the theme of all Agresto’s memories of venturing into the wider world, beyond the tiny enclave of neocon academics. Even his ideological allies seemed to hurt him; he once described Lynne Cheney, his boss at the NEH, as “gruff and manly,” then repeated with real hatred in his voice, “Gruff…she was gruff.”
All that bitterness, and all those wads of taxpayer cash, ended up in the creation of AUIS. It was planned, as we new faculty were told, as a three-campus system, with branches in Baghdad and Southern Iraq. But Reality mugged that plan savagely; any attempt to stroll the groves of academe in any part of Iraq other than the Kurdish far north would have been interrupted with a lesson in practical physics from an IED.
Agresto took that money to Sulaimaniya, in the Kurdish zone of Northern Iraq, and set up AUIS, with himself in charge. He apparently chose Kurdistan for the simple reason that Baghdad, the natural place to put an American university in Iraq, was already too dangerous for Americans.
So AUIS was sited in Sulaimaniya, a quiet Kurdish town near the Iranian border with a long reputation of separatism towards the rest of Iraq, especially Arab Iraq. Saddam recognized Sulaimaniya’s tradition of fierce independence, once saying that “the head of the serpent lies in Sulaimaniya,”
“Suli,” as we expats called it, is a quiet, dusty town. When you fly into the Suli airport, the city seems almost invisible, because the favorite building material is concrete, and the beige and tan blocky houses blend perfectly with the dry brown hills. It’s hot in the summer and cold and damp in the winter and there’s very little to do. One of my colleagues described living there as “sensory deprivation.”
I arrived, with a dozen other new hires, in September 2009. We flew in on the same plane and were taken to our hotels on the same bus. Most of us were pretty flinchy at first, wincing at every loud noise.But we soon learned there was nothing to fear from terrorists or even street hawkers. The Pesh Merga, the Kurdish militia who run security, are extremely effective, and the Kurds themselves are a polite, phlegmatic people.We soon realized the only danger in Suli was crossing the street. Everybody who’s anybody in Suli has an SUV — Kia Sportages for the middle class, Toyota Landcruisers for the rich — and very few locals know how to drive. But there is no violence against foreigners, as far as I know. We learned to go back to sleep after hearing bursts of AK fire, the established manner of celebrating a wedding or an election or just the fact that it’s Friday night. The only time I really flinched, once we were settled in, was when a bolt of lightning detonated directly above our hotel in the middle of the night. And even then, though I assumed it was a bomb, I wasn’t worried for our safety; my first thought was, “Agh, they’ll send us home and I won’t get any more of that money.”
In fact, I want to say clearly here how much I like and admire the people of Suli, my students in particular. They were a wonderful change from the timid, bland kids I’ve encountered in my recent North American teaching experiences. Most of the students at AUIS could name relatives tortured or killed by Saddam, or in the vicious Kurdish civil war of the 1990s, and nearly all of them were studying in an alien language they’d had little chance to learn properly. Yet they were smart, funny and without self-pity.
It was my fellow Americans who were the problem. And I was not alone in that opinion. I once asked a colleague at AUIS if she had any trouble getting respect from male Kurdish students. She looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Absolutely not. Are you kidding? The problem around here isn’t the students, it’s the assholes in the Main Building.”
The Main Building dominated the campus. In fact, the campus was divided in two like an ante-bellum plantation: there was the Main Building and the cabins. The cabins were cheap, prefabricated white metal shacks, shimmering in the bright sunlight, laid out like an army camp inside a square of blast walls. All the actual teaching, and all the teachers’ offices, were in the cabins. The Main Building, a big stone Soviet-style edifice, was reserved for the administrators’ vast offices.
That was the real campus. It wasn’t the one we’d seen online. That was the first shock of our arrival: finding out that the huge, luxurious campus on the AUIS website — the one you could fly around on a “virtual tour” that swooped along tiled walkways connecting grand buildings labeled “Presidential Building” and “Student Housing” — didn’t exist.
Oh, there’s a construction site, sitting on a dry hillside just out of town. And for years, AUIS shamelessly showed “virtual video” of that site as it’s supposed to look, if and when it’s ever finished, as if it already were the campus. It may never be finished; already the university hired and finally fired a local construction firm which missed every deadline it was set. A Turkish company has the contract now, adding to the Turks’ domination of all business in Iraqi Kurdistan.
When anyone at AUIS dared to suggest that it wasn’t very honest to keep up the “virtual tour” fiction, Mitchell and Agresto had a stock response: “We’re a startup operation!” It reminded me of a stand-up comic’s line: “I try to remain new on the job as long as possible.
One reason we accepted shocks like the nonexistent campus so docilely was that, when our minders met us at the Suli airport, they gave us a nice little packet containing a cellphone and $5000 cash “to help [us] settle in.”
Next day, they took us to the real campus and assigned us to one of the white cabins. We soon discovered that these cabins were damn near fictions themselves. They were so shoddily built that the door handles came off nearly every one of them at some point in my year at AUIS. Mine decided to fall off at the worst possible moment, after a morning of grading essays with the help of way too much coffee, just when my aging bladder decided it had had enough. I walked quickly to the door and — clunk. The door handle had become a souvenir, a key chain.
The shoddiness of the cabins came in handy at that point, because all I had to do was bang on the wall we shared with professors in the other half of the cabin, and one of my colleagues obligingly came over and opened the door from the outside. He knew what that banging on the wall meant; the same thing had happened to him a week earlier. It all made for a kind of cheerful roughing-it camaraderie, but it also underlined the strange sense of falseness, that you were living and teaching in a stage set.
All the claims AUIS made had the same stagey, silly feel, a boastful absurdity typical of the US in Iraq. The claims made for our mission were ridiculous; we were supposed to be transforming Iraq’s culture, teaching its future leaders a new and democratic way of thinking. But the university had only 200-odd students, and was straining to accommodate that number. It was hard to see how a group this size would transform a country of more than 26 million people.
And when I taught my first classes, I learned that those few students were woefully unprepared for university courses in English. We’d been told — another lie, of course — that the university’s ESL program produced fluent speakers and writers of English. That was a joke. Had I graded my students at the same level as in an American university — another one of our official fictions — at least two-thirds of them would have failed. A better man would no doubt have done the principled thing; I wanted those $100 bills and simply handed out a lot of generous C’s and B-‘s.
Total fabrication; that’s what it all seems like now. We were supposed to be bridging the great ethnic divides of Iraq, but in that first semester, I taught a Composition course that consisted of what I thought of as a “Wall of Kurds” and a “Wall of Arabs.” The class was almost entirely male, and had the feel of a gang fight in hibernation. On one side of the room was the Wall of Kurds, a half dozen tough-looking, rural Kurdish students who spoke very little English; and on the other, a half-dozen much more urbane but much wimpier Arab students from Baghdad who wore a permanent flinch. The Arabs spoke and wrote much better English, the beneficiaries of Saddam’s preferential treatment of Baghdad, and the Kurds resented every sentence their erstwhile tormentors got right.
Both groups regarded me as an ephemeral inconvenience — a real surprise for me, because Agresto had assured me in the job interview that we were the biggest thing in these kids’ lives, the transformative yeast in the Iraqi loaf. At AUIS, he had told me (and every other new teacher), we’d see the total dedication to learning that we had longed for, and missed, in American students.
It never appeared. What I saw was several hundred lively, intelligent adolescents who were tremendously excited about living away from home, talking to members of the opposite sex, and trying on new identities. Classic adolescent stuff. There were times, in good weather, when the panorama of fevered social cliques occupying their few square meters of turf on the steps of the Main Building made the place look like a teen movie or a live-action Archie comic — all those family-ridden kids, burdened with having to be somebody’s son or daughter, brother or cousin, all their lives, suddenly allowed to be characters out of Heathers or Clueless.
There was an even bigger problem with fulfilling our messianic mission: the faculty. We were not an impressive bunch. There were good teachers at AUIS — I won’t name them, because praise from me might get them fired–but they survived by lying low; being bright and a good teacher made you suspect in a place where center stage was firmly occupied by a clique of loud, provincial rightwing nuts. In this sense, AUIS was an excellent microcosm of the American polity that had produced it: the best lacked all conviction, while the worst (with apologies to Yeats) raked in the cash and talked nonsense.
Successful Profs: Red-State Brown-Nosers with No Qualifikashuns
There was a clear, simple formula for success at AUIS: be a Southern white male Republican with a talent for flattery, an undistinguished academic record, and very little experience in university-level teaching.
Some of the faculty were so dismally unqualified and shameless that even our students, mostly reverent toward foreign authority-figures, saw through them.
The man Agresto hired to teach American History makes a perfect Exhibit A in any list of what’s wrong with AUIS. The first sign that he was not exactly committed to intellectual integrity was his choice of textbook for the course: an abominable book called America: The Last Best Hope, by William Bennett. Yes, THE William Bennett, Reagan’s Secretary of Education, the buffoon who sermonized on virtue until his gambling losses added up so high that they drowned out his pomposities, the man who once scolded a child in public for wearing a Bart Simpson t-shirt.
Bennett’s title sums up the thesis of his textbook clearly: America is literally, simply, the last and best hope for the human species. Tough luck, China — or Burma, or Ecuador, or any other nation on the planet — because we R it, the alpha and omega. It’s a classic reactionary thesis: “I can’t imagine any nation ever being as great as America; therefore no nation ever will be.” Argument by lack of imagination — a favorite among opponents of evolution, biological or historical.
My students used to leave this book on their desks between classes, so I had a chance to flip through it. I expected it to be awful, but it was even worse than I could have guessed. Bennett gives sleazy imperial apologists a bad name. If you want to see this thing done well, try Hitchens or Paul Johnston, the British neo-imperialist historian from the Thatcher era. Bennett, who can’t write worth a damn and has never done original research in his life, is the worst of that very bad lot.
One student, the son of prominent Kurdish freedom-fighters and a genuine believer in things like intellectual freedom, saw through Bennett and had the courage to complain about the book. The teacher replied, “Well, this is a conservative university and it’s my job to give you the conservative perspective.” A simpler, more honest answer would have been: “Look, kid, I got this job by sucking up to John Agresto, who happens to be a close friend of William Bennett, so my hugely-inflated salary depends on feeding you this crap.” I still remember the disgusted shrug the student gave after telling me the story. He was learning about Western standards of intellectual integrity, all right — but not the way he was supposed to be.
Luckily for the students in American History, they spent most of their time watching war movies rather than reading Bennett’s Sunday School tales. Since I taught in the same cabin as our American History instructor, separated from his class by a flimsy metal wall, I got to listen to a whole semester’s worth of bad WW II films. Three long months of trying to teach my students to use the simple present, rather than the present progressive, in their essays, shouting to be heard over the corny dialogue coming through the wall: “I’m hit, Sarge! Uh…go on without me!” usually followed by explosions that rocked the thin metal wall, as Sarge and friends took their revenge for the Gipper.
His one criterion was “bad language.” He wouldn’t show any movie with swearing in it (thus eliminating every decent war movie ever made). That scruple served him in place of any squeamishness about giving his teaching to the likes of William Bennett and John Wayne.
And for this, he was paid about $15,000 per month. The only reason I know he made that much is that he was a terrible braggart. We’d just been paid our first month’s salary, in cash, and as he walked with me among the cabins, he crowed, “Here I am walkin’ along with $15,000 cash in my pocket!”
He didn’t rate that sort of money because of his qualifications. As in, he didn’t got none. Not even a Ph.D. (though he claimed later to have picked one up from an online degree mill). He had no recent teaching experience, and no academic publications. Even by the lax standards of AUIS, the disparity between his rank and his qualifications became the object of speculation.
It was only through his habit of boasting that we found out the truth. As the winter break approached, he started strutting around telling everyone how he was going home to lobby Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, his home state, to send AUIS a big grant. He liked to boast while grooming himself in the stinking men’s room of the Cabins, which always stank like a chicken coop in hot weather. Standing at the urinal, he boasted to anyone trying to empty their bladders in his vicinity that his wife was one of the richest women in the state and a close friend of the Senator. He’d have no trouble getting an audience with Chambliss.
So that $15,000/mo. salary was only nominally for teaching; the man was actually a lobbyist with connections to the sleaziest and most lucrative crannies of the Southern rightwing elite. When I heard him boasting about his connections to Chambliss, I looked up the good senator and got another involuntary lesson in the utter falseness of the ideals holding up AUIS and its constituency. Saxby Chambliss was elected to the Senate in 2002 thanks to campaign ads showing the incumbent, Max Cleland, next to photos of Osama bin Laden. Even John McCain called the ads “reprehensible.” But that’s not the worst of it: Max Cleland, whose patriotism Chambliss impugned, lost three limbs to a grenade while fighting in Viet Nam. Saxby Chambliss never served, supposedly because he had a bad knee from playing high school football. The knee, of course, miraculously recovered once ol’ Saxby was past draft age.
But there was no time to get angry at the history professor, because by the time the news that he was an unqualified lobbyist came out, we were already trying to deal with a psychotic sexual episode, another classic of rightwing pathology.
This boil-over was especially shameful, because it involved an American male professor abusing and intimidating a woman, a violation of our sacred mission to teach the Kurds to value free, independent women.
The American who boiled over was a strange little fello– a hollow-eyed fanatic, one of those tenth-generation Calvinists who can’t help meddling in everyone else’s business. And what he hated most, naturally, was … free, independent women.
The woman he decided to obsess about was a foot taller than he was. He didn’t like that. And he didn’t like the fact that she was teaching in Iraq while her husband was back home in the US. Worse still, this woman was in the habit of having lunch with a man — a tall preppie who was not her husband. This proved unendurable to our mad midget. He started his campaign by glaring at her for weeks — you know that classic rightwing expression, a mixture of frustrated lust and cowardly rage? And then he decided God wanted him to take action. First he went to have a little pastoral intervention with the tall, dim Preppie guy this woman lunched with. He told the Preppie that, by having a falafel with a married woman, he was threatening the sanctity of marriage and leading the woman into sin.
The preppie had little to say in return. He himself was a classic subspecies of North American Phalangist eugenics: tall, athletic, but not exactly the sharpest oar on the rowing team. I once had to listen to him at a party, drunkenly boasting that he was going to open up a McDonald’s in Sulaimaniya, going on and on about how his father had raised $16 million recently and would have no trouble coming up with the $900,000 he’d need to start a Mickey D’s in Kurdistan.
After screaming at the male preppie, the little Calvinist hunted down the American woman, the real culprit, and harangued her about her sins. She didn’t take it very well, even dared to object to being sermonized. That was when the little fellow lost it completely. He ended up screaming at her, “You’re nothing but a whore, you fucking whore!”
The woman complained to Agresto, who called the little man into his office for a mild scolding. It was interesting that Agresto considered this explosion such a minor infraction. In a real American university the mad midget would have been fired, or placed on psychiatric leave, but after all, he had acted in the defense of traditional values, so his outburst was classed as a misdemeanor, a matter of excessive zeal. He’s still teaching at AUIS, very popular with the administration, loathed by students.
I soon learned that the rules were different at AUIS. My first slap in the face came in Jordan, hours after we newcomers had flown in to begin the academic year. At an outdoor buffet at the hotel there, AUIS’s Personnel Director, Lara Dizeyee, told us, “If you’re Jewish– keep it to yourself.” I waited for the sky to fall; you don’t talk that way. I thought it was illegal to say things like that. But no one said a thing. The people who ran AUIS anticipated and enjoyed this cowardice; they clearly enjoyed frightening the faculty. Every time something happened, Joshua Mitchell, our “acting chancellor,” would announce a meeting, and we’d file in — middle-aged men and women with fancy academic titles, all hunched over and shuffling like eighth-graders. Mitchell would take a seat front and center, never looking at us; then, after a gravitas-gathering pause, address us in a petulant whine.
After a few of these meetings, we realized that Mitchell’s speeches always had the same thesis: something had gone wrong again and, as always, it was the faculty’s fault.
The first crisis was the most dramatic: one of the ESL teachers was raped by two local men who’d offered her a ride. We only learned about this through the grapevine; no word came from the main building for several days, at which time Mitchell called a meeting to discuss “the incident” — he would only refer to it that way. The meeting was our introduction to the Mitchell crisis mode: a long, pompous oration designed to buffer the unwelcome news. When he finished, we knew no more about “the incident” than we had before — but we knew that whatever horrible thing had happened, it was our fault.
That vague blame wasn’t good enough for the Dean of Student Affairs, Denise Natali. She stood up and began shrieking at us that “the incident” was all our fault — specifically the fault of the American women on the faculty. In this case, it was…sleeveless blouses! That was what had caused the rape! Natali, always excitable, couldn’t seem to stop repeating her accusation: “I see women walking around here in sleeveless t-shirts! Tank tops! What do you expect?”
Everyone looked around furtively, checking out their neighbors’ attire. But there were no tank tops, sleeveless t-shirts, or other beachwear in evidence. In fact, our female students dressed much more provocatively than women faculty. The rule in Suli seemed to be that as long as the skin is covered, anything goes, including skintight black leotards.
Natali, not finding any wardrobe crimes, just repeated her accusation more loudly: we had brought it on ourselves!
I felt the same mental confusion as when the HR director told us to keep any Jewishness to ourselves. Had Natali actually said that it was the rape victim’s own fault, and that any other woman who dressed immodestly deserved to get the same treatment? I remember hesitating to believe what I was hearing. I grew up in Berkeley, where you assume the world would end if anyone said such things out loud. But she was saying them, repeating them in the same crazy shriek, and everybody was taking her very seriously, or pretending to.
We didn’t get a saner version of “The Incident” until our Kurdish security director came for a follow-up talk a few weeks later. He showed up in what he took to be the American manner: informal, relaxed, the complete opposite of Mitchell and Natali. And when asked to explain the rape, he said simply, “Look, Kurdish young men do not handle their drink very well. I would say, if you want to be safe, just don’t go where young Kurdish men are drinking.”
As usual, the Kurds had contradicted our neocon leaders’ view of them; and once again, the Kurds seemed to make much better Americans than the actual specimens we brought over to run the place.
The Big Death Threat
This became painfully clear when our shriek-prone Dean of Student Affairs Denise Natali got the death threat.
The trouble began with a typically heavy-handed, authoritarian policy directive from the Main Building: teachers were to take attendance every single day. If a student missed two classes, we were to inform Denise; any student missing four classes was out of the course. Period. No excuses accepted, not even major surgery.
By the time we got this order, we were used to the AUIS way of doing things. The new policy was a perfect fit for AUIS; it concentrated power in the hands of the bigwigs in the Main Building, kept the faculty off-balance, and scared the students.
By mid-semester, Natali had expelled several students for missing class. Our courses cost a lot of money by local standards, so anyone but the arrogant fools who ruled AUIS would have expected trouble. But like their masters in the Iraq occupation, the bosses at AUIS never imagined that they might be liable to normal human reactions. And when the reaction came, they proved as feeble and weepy when taking abuse as they were callous and boastful when dishing it out.
Someone didn’t like getting scolded and expelled; so, one weekend, someone taped a death threat to Natali’s office door.
As usual, it took several days for the Chancellor, Mitchell, to respond. And as you’d expect, the response, when it finally came, involved another grand meeting, a ponderous oration, and a bizarre memo.
That memo became notorious. It was so offensive and downright ridiculous that it proved too much, even for the cowed, venal faculty. Its thesis, of course, was that the death threat was all our fault. We teachers had forced Natali to play bad cop, and now she was paying for our cowardice. This was a lie, of course; the whole point of the harsh attendance policy was to reinforce the Main Building’s power over what went on in the cabins. But Mitchell had clearly written in heat; he and Natali were very close, and since it could not be the administration’s fault, he decided it must be the faculty’s, as you’ll see in this excerpt:
“The letter Denise received [containing the death threat] suggests that its author was a student who is disgruntled by a decision that Denise implemented. I say “implemented” rather than “made” because every teacher and administrator on the academic side of the house is bound by AUI-S policies-and expected to act within their proper purview to enforce those policies. It is no secret that too often during the course of the last year faculty members and administrators have played the “good cop,” which has forced Denise into a position of making the tough call that should have occurred elsewhere.
This cannot ever happen again. I need your promise that it will not…
Under no circumstances may you any longer pass a tough decision off to Denise, or to her successor, should Denise leave shortly.
I don’t know how I can make this any clearer, except to say that it is a condition of your ongoing employment that you do abide by this understanding…”
That was the real point: the concluding paragraph warning that dissent will lead to dismissal. It was classic neocon rhetoric, starting off with high-minded blather about togetherness (“in concert”) and ending up with a reminder that they could fire any of us, any time they felt like it. We knew that; Agresto and Mitchell had already fired most of the Business Department in the most vindictive possible manner. One of them had complained bitterly to me that when he wrote to Agresto asking whether he’d be wanted back or should pursue other opportunities, Agresto sent him a one-sentence email: “I’d look into those other opportunities.” Another Business prof was fired, rumor had it, because she was involved in a lawsuit against the Federal laboratory where Agresto’s wife worked. What could you do, sue them? In Iraq? They had all the power.
So we let Mitchell browbeat us in this ridiculous memo; there was nothing we could do.
It was the students who really responded to Mitchell effectively. And they did it by saying nothing at all. According to everything that Agresto and Mitchell told us, those students, indoctrinated in civic duty by the likes of Bill Bennett (who began his career in public service by informing on his Harvard roommates for smoking pot), our students should have fallen over themselves to turn in the anti-freedom thug who posted that threat.
Mitchell, naturally, sent the students a memo to encourage them to inform — an unintentionally comic mixture of bluster and threats with patronizing instruction in the norms of “civility”:
“Students,
This past Thursday, April 22, a faculty member received a written Death Threat [sic] taped to her AUI-S office door…
Any student who has knowledge about this Threat is expected to come to my office before 4 PM on Monday afternoon. If you do not come forward,and I later discover that you had any knowledge of this, you will be immediately and permanently expelled from AUI-S. If you do come to my office with the name or names of the person or persons responsible, you will be pardoned and allowed to stay at AUI-S…
Until further notice, every single student and guest coming on campus will be padded down, and whatever bags you carry will be fully inspected.
This is an American University. We grant you liberties that you do not have at other universities here in Iraq. In return, we expect much. Most notably, we expect decency and civility in all that you do. One or more of your classmates has now violated those terms. As a consequence, all of you will be affected for the rest of the school year and beyond. Do not forget that with liberty comes responsibility.
[The memo continues with a warning about what Dr. Agresto, then away from AUIS, will do when he gets back — a variant of the old “wait till your father gets home!” theme.]
Earnestly,
Joshua Mitchell
Acting Chancellor
The American University of Iraq – Sulaimani”
Mitchell expected this bombardment of gravitas to shock and awe our apprentice-Westerner students into rushing to his office, begging forgiveness and spelling out the culprit’s name in neon.
It didn’t happen. I’m betting that every student at AUIS knew who’d posted the death threat. But not one said a word. When they could be persuaded to discuss the matter at all, they shrugged contemptuously, clearly regarding this as a silly fuss, a lot of Gringo nonsense. And they were notably lacking in sympathy for Natali.
Mitchell and Agresto reacted to this great disappointment like Bush and Cheney to the insurrection: first they simply lied, saying that “we” were making great progress on the case.
After several weeks, when it was clear no one was going to come forward, Mitchell and Agresto simply dropped the subject. In the end, they settled for offering Natali very concrete reassurance: they constructed a huge blast wall just outside her office. The wall was a source of great amusement to our students; this was Iraq, and they were not impressed by walls — especially when one of the collective punishment/humiliations imposed on them for not informing was to have to go around to the back door.
Natali returned to her job after a few weeks. The job was her life; she had nowhere else to go; and the real risk was probably very small. If the death threat really had come from a student, it was unlikely to be carried out; our students were more serious than Americans of the same age, but Suli was not a very violent city; it was as if the Kurds had had enough of violence, and wanted a peaceful life for once. Natali faced a simple calculation: make a lot of money by facing a very minor threat, of go back to America — the most frightening place on earth for someone without money or a job.
I was facing the same decision, because it was now Spring 2010, and though everyone I knew had already been rehired by Agresto, I hadn’t heard a thing from him, and that was a bad sign. He liked to keep people on the hook.
I couldn’t understand what I’d done wrong. I was the most abjectly loyal, earnest employee Agresto and Mitchell could want. I wore a suit and tie every single day. I even wore the silly nametag that everyone else dropped after a few weeks. And I tried to be a cheerful American, even though I’m not very good at it, consoling myself with the fact that this bunch wasn’t very good at it either.
At last, I made an appointment with Agresto and told him directly I’d like a contract for two more years. His response floored me: “I don’t know anything about you,” he said coyly, adding, “You never have lunch with me.”
The reason I never had lunch with him was that I was sick as a dog, constantly nauseous, going through four or five awful spasms of vomiting every day. They started at 5:00 a.m. (the people who lived downstairs from us said they used my dawn vomiting session as an alarm clock) and continued through the teaching day. My students got used to my sudden departures followed by off-stage retching noises, but I was trying to hide them from the administration.
I had no idea what was wrong, and no way to find out. There was no doctor on campus, though we’d been promised there would be. There was nobody. Worse yet, there were no competent doctors in the entire city. When I asked a Kurdish friend for a good doctor, she said, “The Kurds don’t go to doctors. They wait until they are dying and then go to hospital.” And I’d seen the Suli hospital, which reminded me a lot of Matthew Brady’s photos of the Union Army’s medical facilities; I wasn’t going back there.
But I was literally more afraid of poverty than of death. So I swallowed the bile (again literally) and made a point of sitting at Agresto’s table in the cafeteria, smiling and being submissively sociable. Agresto liked my new attitude, and deigned to visit one of my classes. That sealed the deal, and I soon got the two-year contract I craved — and I got it the same way I’d gotten the job in the first place: by playing on John Agresto’s huge, wounded ego.
I’d prepared for that first interview by reading Agresto’s book, Mugged by Reality, on the plane. And it’s a pretty good book, I’ll admit. But the way he ate up my flattering account of it was a bit of a shock. And I felt the same shock, seeing how quickly he responded to a little lunchtime sucking-up. The man was more easily played than a kazoo.
With my new contract signed and sealed, I started to warm to Agresto and Mitchell. Maybe I’d been unfair to these guys, I thought. They must be more broadminded than I’d thought. They must have googled me before hiring me, and if you google me you soon find out that I’m a comic writer, and not of the harmless-joshing variety. Conservatives are wary of comedy in general, infatuated as they are with High Seriousness; and my comedy is rather harsh by any standards.
“It was damned nice of them to hire, and then re-hire me,” I thought, “They’re actually very tolerant people!”
Of course, I was wrong. They were as tolerant as Cotton Mather. They were exactly what they always seemed to be: pompous petty tyrants.
What I hadn’t realized was that they were also incredibly stupid and lazy, so stupid and so lazy that they hadn’t even Googled my name when hiring or re-hiring me. When I realized that, I couldn’t help thinking of an anecdote from the life of Michael Collins. While Collins was in hiding, running a guerrilla war against the British, his niece got hired as Private Secretary to a high official in the British administration. When Collins heard, he said, “How the Hell did these people ever get an Empire?”
But my case, if it has any bearing on the bigger picture, answers a different question: “How did these Americans manage to throw away an empire so quickly?” And the answers are simple: laziness. Stupidity. Turning potential allies into enemies. The usual.
Because, as it turned out, they’d never even bothered to Google me — or, for that matter, read the CV I sent them when applying for the job. They had no idea I’d written anything that might bother them; and when they found out, they reacted in exactly the way you’d expect.
My Departure
The last few weeks of the Spring 2010 semester were a wonderful time. Not only did I have a new contract but Katherine had found me a good doctor, a Moldovan practicing in Erbil, the biggest city in Iraqi Kurdistan. He was grim and cold in the Russian manner, but he knew what he was doing. After a day of tests (you haven’t lived until you’ve vomited Barium while on a turning X-Ray platform), he figured out that I was suffering from megaloblastic anemia. One injection of B-12 and I stopped vomiting. By the time the semester ended, I felt ready to walk to Istanbul.
Katherine and I flew back to the US, trying to adjust to seeing the same landscapes we’d trudged as poor folk with the very different perspective of “the man who is rich and right,” as Stevens puts it. It was disorienting, but in a very pleasant way. From time to time we’d just laugh with the joy of being solvent.
And then, in mid-July 2010, some spoilsport had to go and send John Agresto an article I’d written against the Iraq War back in 2005. It was clearly a shock to Agresto, and he reacted very quickly. One blissful sunny afternoon in Seattle, I got this message:
Dear John Dolan, We have a problem, which has just now come to our attention. Please see this: //exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7809&IBLOCK_ID=35. This link is attributed to you. Absent your correction, we presume it is you. The obscenity and racism included in this link, and others not unlike it, are vile. They are, moreover, anathema to everything this university represents. If this piece, and especially the image it contains, were ever made public in Iraq, your life, our lives, and the life of the university would be in danger.
Given this situation we have no choice but to: (1) ask that you resign; or (2) pay you for the remainder of your current contract and cancel your new contract.
As a courtesy to you and Katherine we will box up and ship your goods to an address in the US or Canada that you provide us.
John Agresto
Provost
I had to read the letter a few times to believe it. The article he linked to was published four years before I’d been hired. It had been sitting in plain view online since 2005. It was all listed on the CV I’d sent with my application. I’d even given a talk to the AUIS journalism students about working for the eXile, where this article had been published. If Agresto or any of the big shots had come to the talk, they would have seen me hand out examples of the satirical articles I wrote back then.
Then there was that warning, or threat, in Agresto’s letter, suggesting that I’d be killed if I returned to Sulaimaniya. The article, a bitter satire comparing the Bush diehards to “the Infected” from Danny Boyle’s zombie film 28 Weeks Later, was hardly likely to offend the Kurds; its targets were all white Americans. The only people who would want to kill me for that article were…well, John Agresto and his neocon comrades. So I took that part of the letter as a pretty direct threat that I’d be killed if I came back.
The rest was such gibberish that I couldn’t help wondering if Agresto had written it as a taunt, a “Nah-nah-nah” moment to savor, a chance to grind at least one of the detractors of his patron Cheney into the dust.
It was too ridiculous to be taken seriously. “Racism”? The only “racism” the article showed was in a paragraph in which I said disgustedly that African-Americans, as the only demographic to oppose the Iraq War, were the last sane group in the country, and that white Americans were “truly a nation of suckers.” According to the rules involving “racism” as I understand them, a white American like me is entitled to talk badly about white Americans without being called “racist.”
But the real shocker was hearing John Agresto talk about firing me for thought crimes. You see, John Agresto has only one claim to fame as an academic (not counting his role as bagman for The Agencies in Kurdistan). He became quasi-famous in rightwing circles during the 1990s as … take a guess. Seriously, what would be the most ironic predicate you could put on that sentence? That’s right: he became famous as a crusader against the tyranny of political correctness in American universities. If you enjoy truly awe-inspiring displays of hypocrisy, I invite you to read Agresto’s article, “To Reform the Politically Correct University, Reform the Liberal Arts.” In this brave treatise, Agresto argues that the key to returning freedom of thought to the university lies in bringing ideological diversity to the liberal arts — you know, English and so on.
Now he had taken refuge in the oldest, dirtiest trick in the PC censor’s book, accusing me of “racism” and “obscenity.” It was a little difficult to believe that Agresto really took concerns like racism very seriously, because he has a decades-old record of refusing to apply affirmative action guidelines in any job he takes. (He certainly managed to select a pure lily-white staff at AUIS.) In fact, Agresto’s article on reforming the Liberal Arts to eliminate PC is full of comments like this:
“[W]hen we in and out of the academy complain that our students are being indoctrinated rather than educated, our main examples all seem to come from areas like … English departments or, God help us, in the various sub-departmental “studies” — Women’s, Gay, Chicano, and so on.”
Maybe Agresto enjoyed using the jargon of those “God help us” fields he despises to accuse me of “racism” toward white Americans, or maybe he’s just too stupid to see the contradiction between his scorn for the leftist critique and his eager use of it to quash a heretic. As always when dealing with the American Right, it’s difficult to say where stupidity gives way to malice, if indeed the distinction can be made at all.
And there’s no way I can milk this disaster for much in the way of pity-points. I went for the quick buck with those sleazy academic bagmen; they found out I was a double-agent; they canned me. It’s no martyr’s tale. But it still leaves a bitter taste, if only because those sleaze-sters are still getting all those bundles of $100 bills, and I’m not.z
I’m not sure what it all means. But I know one thing: the next time some rightwinger starts mouthing off to me about “Liberal PC” or “leftwing censorship,” I’m going to spit in his face.
American International School of Kurdistan Erbil: Nothing Personal, Just Integrity and Wasta
via American International School of Kurdistan Erbil: Nothing Personal, Just Integrity and Wasta
Mr. Barzo Faysal Shakir of the Ministry of Education has asserted there are many schools in Kurdistan that are American. It’s not a personal issue with the principal or the American system. It’s an issue pertaining to years of numerous outrageous complaints against the “problematic” school and with its lack of accreditation and curriculum authenticity. “This year, there are 23 schools in the Kurdistan Region, of which 19 are international and backed by scientific institutions…We have been for years informing the school to submit scientific accreditation obtained from a known institution. The school has not yet submitted this to us,” he said. It is important to add that if AIS-K rectifies this, the average time for ascertaining or renewing accreditation for a school, is from one to two years.
American International School of Kurdistan Erbil: Nothing Personal, Just Integrity and Wasta
Republished from KNN: https://www.knnc.net/EN/Details.aspx?jimare=685
The American International School of Kurdistan (AIS-K) in Erbil, Northern Iraq sticks out to the bustling public that traverses Gulan and Bakhtiari streets. Recently, Rudaw published an article declaring the school closed by the Ministry of Education, though the publication unexplainably was retracted days later. (Original article- http://www.rudaw.net/english/lifestyle/28082018 and screenshot of cached version- https://ibb.co/cQAgX9) Rudaw journalists Chris Johannes and Ayoub Nouri would not provide a reason when contacted.
The article highlighted that the schools curriculum is unacceptable and its diplomas are no longer approved by the Ministry of Education. The principal, Aveen Hawrami, stated the issue is “personal.” However, its not. Whether the Ministry of Education hates the school or not is insignificant, the facts below will remain the same regardless.
An article on the AIS-K in the Kurdish Globe dated March 2012, cites inappropriate facilities, lack of student textbooks, no adherence to American educational standards, and over-charging students who erroneously believe the US Consulate Erbil is affiliated with it. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/School+struggles+to+meet+American+standards.-a0283490397
Six years after the Kurdish Globe publication, today the AIS-K still persists in maintaining dilapidated and dirty facilities. Students complain of no soccer field and that the library is a household closet. One AIS-K student reported, “The school has old screws sticking out of desks….classrooms are connected to abandoned bedrooms and bathrooms. You can tell the school was a motel.”
There are still no student textbooks for courses and the school has no ESL (English as a Second Language) diagnostics test prior admission, nor is there an ESL department. Students with weak English just fail without any help, one anonymous student reported. A teacher at UKH (University of Kurdistan Hawler) remarked in disbelief, “If American students at American high schools need textbooks, how can we expect students whose native language is not English, to do without textbooks?”
Fraudulent Claims
The principal persistently claims, tacitly in public and explicitly in private to students and parents, the US Consulate Erbil is ‘affiliated with the AIS-K. Rudaw even quoted Aveen Hawrami stating “the US Consulate Erbil is part of the negotiations” to prevent the closure of the school by the Ministry. This is a lie. The AIS-K is ‘not affiliated with the US Consulate Erbil, despite the principal’s claims or her many invitations to Consulate staff to visit the school. An e-mail from Thomas Sherear, Director of the State Departments Overseas Schools, on March 14, has finally resolved this mystery.
There are also other false claims by the school such as teaching American standards. On its website under the section “Curriculums,” the AIS-K claims, “AIS-Kurdistan follows a strict guideline by using the ‘latest American Curriculum that is supported and supervised directly by Birmingham Public School in Michigan.” Its another lie. An e-mail on March 29 by Anne at Birmingham Public School stressed, “We do not support or supervise them in any way.” Finally, the school is also not accredited by any organization, like Advanced-Ed accredits the British International School of Kurdistan, which explains another reason the Ministry and universities abroad have problems with it.
It is also important to highlight that the AIS-Ks website claims it “only employs qualified teachers from the USA.” Students state this is another lie. The majority of its teachers are not US passport holders. Lastly, Ms. Hawrami stated that “we (AIS-K) also have branches in the US, Canada, and some other countries in the Middle East.” This is yet again, another lie. (The AIS-K website here) http://ais-k.org/
Current Problems
In addition to fraudulent claims by the school and the Ministry of Educations concern over integrity, there are reports of serious issues which should concern the average parent. One of the largest transparent conundrums endemic at the AIS-K, is a lack of professionalism. The school last year in September publicly lambasted the Ministry of Education on its Facebook page,
“AIS has decided to take legal action…We challenge the ministry of education of KRG to prove all documentation against us when we have all documentation proving their own corruptions against AIS due to being belonged to the United States Government System…”
The school has erased this post, but many AIS-K students and Ministry employees recollect it. (Screenshot of Facebook post) https://ibb.co/f7Ggw7
Mr. Barzo Faysal Shakir of the Ministry of Education has asserted there are many schools in Kurdistan that are American. It’s not a personal issue with the principal or the American system. It’s an issue pertaining to years of numerous outrageous complaints against the “problematic” school and with its lack of accreditation and curriculum authenticity. “This year, there are 23 schools in the Kurdistan Region, of which 19 are international and backed by scientific institutions…We have been for years informing the school to submit scientific accreditation obtained from a known institution. The school has not yet submitted this to us,” he said. It is important to add that if AIS-K rectifies this, the average time for ascertaining or renewing accreditation for a school, is from one to two years.
Other problems with the school entail the school unfairly manipulating test points for students who attend Consulate lectures, like YouTube videos, and travel to the frontline of war zones with weapons. Other parents complain of waiting an excessive amount of time outside the AIS-Ks front gate. One mother was threatened with the expulsion of her two children unless she wrote an apology letter for screaming for entry at the locked gate, after her son feinted in the school’s bathroom. Students and teachers and parents have also reported incidents of humiliating abuse by the principal. One teacher reported being wrongfully terminated for submitting a complaint to the Ministry of Education that he was coerced to falsify grades. He stated the Asaysh were sent after him when he filed a civil suit against the school. Other common complaints are the principals gossamer favoritism toward students of wealthy and affluent parents, security being assaulted by students without punishment, guns being brought upon the school’s campus, uncontrolled bullying at the school, and certain students passing the semesters despite failing courses. An anonymous student of the Barzani tribe stated, “”Aveen needs money from me to pass…Aveen said if you did not show your parents your marks, I can change them.”
Despite the Ministry of Education demanding the closure of the school on June 26 to maintain the integrity of Kurdistan’s education system and Rule of Law, Ms. Hawrami persists in allocating guilt toward “personal issues” instead of addressing the real ones above. Parents, teachers and students claim the school remains open today because of wasta (wasta is a term meaning corrupt connections to political figures). In consequence, the school will continue to earn an income remaining open, while potential future AIS-K graduates will face a blemished and possibly irreparable future. Graduates of AIS-K currently face difficulties with acceptance at universities abroad and within Kurdistan. One student, Sherkho Kamal, stated, “Last year, my sister graduated from this school. But no university gave her a place to study.” Worse though, the youth are possibly being taught by the school that wasta is acceptable in Kurdistan.
KRG closes American International School in Erbil
via KRG closes American International School in Erbil
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — The Education Ministry of the Kurdistan Regional Government has decided to close down the American International School in Erbil, citing the lack of necessary scientific qualities and certification.
The ministry has also said it will not recognize the degrees of students who have graduated from the school. The head of the school has said the problem is personal and the ministry has dismissed the all the initiatives made by the school to address the scientific problems identified by the ministry.
American International School of Kurdistan Erbil
A Collective Consciousness and TJP Production 
