Okay, so the goins on yesterday may not have been as bad as expected. Sure Belmont comes out looking like a bully, but as Bill Hobbs reports, it wasn’t by students who only thought they knew what they were talking about. In fact, one student is a Sudanese refugee who lived down the hall from me last year. The student, Amr Ali, stood up and confronted the ambassador, and Hobbs notes one of Amr’s comments:
I want you to look at me. This is the future. The people that you have oppressed, the people that your government has kicked out of the country will go back and make a better Sudan. We will make the country greater than it has ever been since you have raped it since 1989.
*Photo credited to News@Belmont
The Tennessean also picked it up. (The full Tennesseean article is here.) Not suprisingly to most bloggers, Hobbs did a much more thorough job covering the story, but the newspaper did mention one more thing, however, in naming the professor who led the walkout. Professor Daniel Schafer, my history professor last semester, spoke before Kabeir got up.
Given that situation, Schafer said, students would be better served to leave the room and take part in a letter-writing campaign in the next room. ”He is not here to listen to our concerns, but to pretend to listen to our concerns,” Schafer said.
With that, about 70 students got up and left.
I have to admit, perhaps I should have gone. It would have been interesting to see. And it certainly would have been interesting to see my buddy Amr lambast the Sudanese representative. Let’s just hope the little disclaimer in all the news outlets, such as this snippet from WVLT in Knoxville, is taken into consideration before judging Belmont too harshly:
Belmont officials who organized the event with deputy chief of mission Abdelbagi Kabeir say they warned him the audience would be strongly opposed to his government.
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