First, Yale admits former deputy foreign secretary of the bin Laden-harboring Taliban, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a student.

Now Harvard has opened its arms to former Iranian President Mohammed “We Love Hizbullah” Khatami.

What’s next? Princeton to host a Dinner-and-a-Movie Night with Saddam Hussein?

And let’s not forget about the 75 professors across the U.S. who think 9/11 was an inside job.

Welcome to American Academia…

Look no further than stories like this, where the County Director of schools is telling a soldier that teaching should take priority over fighting for your country.

Like so many soldiers who have helped fight the war on terror, Capt. John Parker put his life on the line every day while he was deployed in Afghanistan.

“I signed up to serve my country,” Parker tells NewsChannel 5 investigative reporter Jennifer Kraus.

And serve he did, which is why he was so shocked at how he was treated when he came back home to Wilson County.

“It just made me feel that the people I was fighting for were the exact people that were taking my job from me,” he adds.

You see, Parker is not just a soldier.

He’s also a teacher who taught criminal justice to high school students and helped coach the school wrestling team. before he was sent to the Middle East with the Army Reserves.
…
Parker should have had no problem going back to work thanks to a special federal law that protects soldiers like Parker.

It guarantees that, when they come home from their deployment, they’ll get their old jobs back for at least a year.

But just one month after Parker went back to work, the Wilson County School system told him his teaching contract was not being renewed and he was out of a job.
…
Wilson County Director of Schools Dr. Jim Duncan, the man who sent the letter informing Parker that he was being let go, insists that “he was not fired.”

Duncan maintains that the teacher-turned-soldier was told not to return to school the next year because there just weren’t enough students signed up for Parker’s class.

But Duncan also admits that he had problems with Parker being sent to Afghanistan not once, but twice.

“It was like we got these classes going and you’re supposed to be the teacher,” Duncan tells Kraus.

“So, you’re saying his teaching position should have been his priority?” Kraus asks.

“Firmly. Yes.”

And while heroes like this are fighting to regain their teaching positions, teachers who joyously promote theories about 9/11 being an “inside job” are quickly welcomed into the educational system.

Need any further proof of the problems with the American education system?

Not only is Jay Bennish an unhinged, America-hating liberal, but he’s a liar as well. Perhaps I’m just repeating myself. On March 7, 2006, trying to defend his idiotic anti-American rant on a Today Show lovefest, told Matt Lauer:

“My job as a social studies teacher is to argue alternative perspectives and viewpoints so that students are aware of those point of views. They do not necessarily reflect my own views. They are simply thrown out there to encourage critical thought.”

They don’t reflect his views? According to his lawyer, Bennish’s only regret is that, “He wished he’d picked a different dictator.” It’s obvious what his views are, and they were on full display in that classroom.

Despite claims by Bennish that he had presented a balance of information, his lawyer admitted he was lying:

From now on, however, “when he puts out something controversial, he’ll put the other side out right then and there,'’ Lane said.

But seriously, if you’re heard the tape or read the transcript, you can tell this was not a case of presenting a balanced lesson… he wanted to make sure the students believed the way he does. He wanted to convince them that his warped view of the world is the only view of the world. It’s blatantly obvious in just this one particular response to Sean Allen’s question:

“If you were Palestinians, who are the real terrorists? The Israelis, who fire missiles that they purchased from the United States government into Palestinian neighborhoods and refugees and maybe kill a terrorist, but also kill innocent women and children. And when you shoot a missile into Pakistan to quote-unquote kill a known terrorist, and we just killed 75 people that have nothing to do with al Qaeda, as far as they’re concerned, we’re the terrorists. We’ve attacked them on their soil with the intention of killing their innocent people.”

So what balance did he provide earlier in class, or later in class, or at any moment in the history of the world to offset his claim that we intend to kill innocent people?

Lauer: “The family here, the student’s family, didn’t go to the school board with this tape.”

Bennish: “They never contacted me.

Lauer:”They shopped it around to conservative media outlets and finally released it to one and created an uproar. On the tape you can hear Sean Allen [the student in question] asking you questions that seem to be egging you on a little bit. Do you feel you were set up?”

After the student’s father complained to school officials, he took the recording to KOA radio talk show host Mike Rosen, who put it on the Internet and played parts of it on his radio program.

Sean Allen recorded about 20 minutes of Bennish’s class during a February 1 discussion about Bush’s State of the Union speech and gave the recording to his father, who complained to the principal, Amole said.

Related:

• Tobacco: “Don’t the Peruvians and the Iranians and the Chinese have the right to invade America and drop chemical weapons over North Carolina to destroy the tobacco plants that are killing millions and millions of people in their countries every year and causing them billions of dollars in healthcare costs?”
• Capitalism: “Do you see how when looking at [the teacher’s definition of capitalism], where in this definition does it say anything about capitalism is an economic system that will provide everybody in the world with the basic needs that they need? … Do you see how this economic system is at odds with humanity, at odds with caring and compassion, at odds with human rights?“
• Iraq: “Why are we invading Iraq? How do we know that the invasion of Iraq for WMD, and even if weapons had been found, how would you have known, how could you prove that that was not a real reason for us to go there?”
• America: “Who is probably the single, most violent nation on planet earth? The United States of America.”
• Bush’s State of the Union Speech: “Sounds a lot like the things that Adolf Hitler use to say.”

Listen to the whole thing, if you can stomach it. I’d like to thank the kid that made this recording. The teacher was put on administrative leave pending a school district investigation into whether this was an isolated event or a pattern of behavior. Now that his socialist rantings are out there for all to hear, let’s see if his views are supported by the majority of Americans… as opposed to his targeted audience of impressionable high school students.

Feel free to email the teacher, Jay Bennish and let him know what you think.

Update: Another student, interviewed by Denver’s 9News says Bennish’s rhetoric is nothing new at the school (hat tip: Slapstick Politics).

“This is like a usual thing at our school. Three quarters of the teachers are anti-Bush… very much so.”

Update 2: According to one of the parents, on the first day of class, the teacher said Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” was going to be a part of the curriculum.

Update 3: The teacher, Jay Bennish, has now hired the same ACLU attorney David Lane… who also represents self-avowed anti-US Professor Ward Churchill (hat tip: Jay).

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, a teacher-sponsored war crimes trial of President Bush is being held:

President Bush is being tried for “crimes against civilian populations” and “inhumane treatment of prisoners” at Parsippany High School, with students arguing both sides before a five-teacher “international court of justice.”

I object to the very premise of this exercise. With historical figures like Hitler, Milosevic, Hussein and others to choose from, these teachers are insinuating, by merely conducting this exercise, that President Bush is an international war criminal. It’s shameful. What ever happened to love for country? What ever happened to patriotism? What ever happened to reasoned and civil debate? These leftists can’t win in the court of public opinion, so they have to take their anti-American exercises to high school kids? That, in and of itself, says so much.

And what kind of impact do teachers like this have? This very same high school, in Republican-dominated Morris County, held a mock election last November and the Socialist candidate, Tino Rozzo, won the student poll. The Socialist’s platform:

includes a $12-per-hour minimum wage and a “socialized healthcare system under workers and community control” …

Ben Zhou, 17, standing in for Rozzo, also grabbed attention with plans to permit students to fire their teachers and impose heavy taxes on the “filthy rich.”

and…

“I believe we need to get rid of these capitalist ways,” said Steven Honickel, 14…

Several students posed questions to candidates near the end, including Spencer Antonucci. Asked whom he would vote for if he could, Antonucci, 17, said he was “kind of thinking socialist.”

Joseph Kyle, the social studies teacher behind the trial exercise tells why he became a teach in the first place:

“I became a teacher because of all the bad teachers I had”

Perhaps he’s simply trying to motivate his own students to become teachers.

John Fund at The Wall Street Journal has this to say about former Taliban spokesman, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, becoming a student at Yale:

Never has an article made me blink with astonishment as much as when I read in yesterday’s New York Times magazine that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former ambassador-at-large for the Taliban, is now studying at Yale on a U.S. student visa. This is taking the obsession that U.S. universities have with promoting diversity a bit too far….

I don’t believe Mr. Rahmatullah had direct knowledge of the 9/11 plot, and I don’t think he has ever killed anyone. I can appreciate that he is trying to rebuild his life. But he willingly and cheerfully served an evil regime in a manner that would have made Goebbels proud. That he was 22 at the time is little of an excuse. There are many poor, bright students–American and foreign alike–who would jump at the opportunity to attend Yale. Why should Mr. Rahmatullah go to the line ahead of all of them? That’s a question Yale alumni should ask when their alma mater comes looking for contributions.

First, who approved this guy’s student visa? Why are we worrying about business transactions involving port management, or even border security, if those who serve as enemies of the U.S. can simply trot on into our country on a student visa under the guise of “diversity”? Anyone remember that last time we gave student visas to our enemies?Secondly, I would be more than mildly ticked off if my application to Yale was denied because my spot had been awarded to a former member of the group that harbored Osama bin Laden.

‘In some ways,’ Mr. Rahmatullah told the New York Times. ‘I’m the luckiest person in the world. I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale.’”

Glenn thinks, “the food will be inferior to Guantanamo’s.”

On Halloween, a teacher at Lake Ann Elementary, yes ELEMENTARY, school wore a “costume” consisting of a mask depicting President George W. Bush and a shirt that allegedly read “I am evil.” And these same ignorant liberals keep complaining about the lack of education kids are getting. Maybe if you’d stop making asinine political statements to ELEMENTARY school children, you’d find some time to teach them how to read, write and do math.