LIBERTY UNIVERSITY STUDIES ABROAD

Liberty University, Bob Jones University, and Oral Roberts University, have signed a joint Studies Abroad/Student Exchange Program agreement with Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba student organization at Punjab University in Lahore, and at several other campuses in Pakistan. "We see this as a way to offer our students an overseas experience immersed in the kind of righteous, moral atmosphere we have labored to create on our own campuses," Liberty University founder Rev. Jerry Falwell wrote shortly before his death. "In a nation where academic planning is in the hands of godless liberals, I want conservative Christian students to learn from our Islamic brethren how to bring immoral professors to heel."

Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba (IJT), the largest and most powerful student organization in Pakistan, enforces complete separation of men and women in dining halls, although there is no university regulation requiring it, and members have physically assaulted fellow students for drinking, flirting or kissing on campus, or even talking to a student of opposite gender in a cafeteria line. The organization recently blocked a proposed curriculum in musicology and performing arts as an insult to Islam. If IJT objects to a teacher's syllabus, massive protests are generated about his moral qualifications.

"I dream of the day when we in America can also use force anytime we witness immoral public behavior" exclaimed Benjamin Henry Harrison III, one of the first Liberty University students to sign up for a year at Punjab. "At my campus it wouldn't even get to that point, but if we can establish an atmosphere where Christian students at large public universities, or at depraved institutions like the Ivy League, can enforce appropriate modesty, we could reclaim America for the god of MY fathers."

Off to another IJT-dominated campus in Pakistan, Calvin Colton Wainright declaimed "I go as an apostle in the war against terror, to demonstrate to our Muslim friends that there are godly men and women in America who are not about sending women to medical school or allowing the weaker sex to hold posts in government."

Jonathan Hubbard Winslow, assigned to organize a welcome for twenty IJT members coming to America for six months of study, hopes to work up a few targets for direct action, bringing together listservs of Christian students at nearby secular campuses, with the inspiration and tactical ingenuity of the newly arriving guest students. He has had to carefully avoid Islamic student organizations, many of them filled with fifth and sixth generation Americans, who by and large are hostile both to evangelical prosyletizing by Christians and distortions of Islam and jihad by organizations like IJT. In America, he says, Christians are more receptive to holy war than native-born Muslims.

Enthusiasm is clearly stronger among American students for the overseas component of the exchange. "This may not seem like a great way to pick up girls," chortled Ichabod Emmons Oxenbridge, "but I understand that there are well developed social customs for a godly man to requisition a wife when he catches sight of a good looking young virgin, and they know how to submit to their husbands. A few friends at Brigham Young University are hoping to get in on this exchange program too, sort of getting back to their roots, and sharing their heritage with a receptive audience."