US university president poses with ‘suicide bomber’
The president of one of the leading universities in the United States last week posed for photographs with a student dressed as a suicide bomber, The Jerusalem Post has learned. In copies of photos obtained by the Post, University of Pennsylvania president Dr. Amy Gutmann is seen standing with engineering student Saad Saadi at the annual Halloween costume party held at the president’s home.
I understand that Halloween is a holiday designed to turn our normal understanding of and relationship to evil and suffering on its head. Even so, there are some things so evil, so thoroughly beyond the pale, and so thoroughly reprehensible that they should under no cirsumstances be made light of. Radical Islamofascist suicide bombers are, in my book at least, right at the top of that list. You just don’t make light of the suffering and death of thousands of innocent civilians, people whose only crime was in being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And you certainly don’t glamorize those zealots who turn themselves into human bombs in their sick, twisted pursuit of their “religion”. If a suicide bomber can be described as a devout Muslim, then I’m Pee Wee Herman.
What makes this even worse is that Dr. Amy Gutmann, the President of the University of Pennsylvania, seems unable to make this distinction, even going so far as to be photographed with a costumed “suicide bomber”, Saad Saadi, at a Halloween party at her home. And that’s not even the worst of it. Gutmann is Jewish; you’d think that, especially as the President of an Ivy League university, she’d have a higher degree of common sense and sensitivity. You could also be forgiven for thinking that Saadi could have recognized that there is NOTHING funny in his portrayal of a suicide bomber.
Who’d have ever thought that the best example of positive Jewish-Arab relations would be in coming together to earn a DUMB@$$ AWARD?
Saadi is seen with a keffiyeh around his head, a toy Kalashnikov rifle in hand and six plastic sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest. Gutmann beams alongside him, dressed as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, a character from L. Frank Baum’s novel The Wizard of Oz.
Gutmann, who is herself Jewish, was inaugurated as university president in 2004….
In other photos taken at Gutmann’s party that evening, Saadi can be seen carrying out a series of mock hostage executions, evoking images reminiscent of the series of abductions and murders of Westerners in Iraq in 2004.
Hey, now…THERE’S something to celebrate, eh? So who came to the party dressed as Nicholas Berg?
In one instance, Saadi stands over a fellow student crouched on the ground, and points a gun at her head while reciting verses from the Koran.
In another image, Saadi poses with an unidentified child as he points Saadi’s toy gun at the camera.
The day after the party, Saadi was quoted in the Daily Pennsylvanian, the campus newspaper, as saying that he attended Gutmann’s affair dressed as a “freedom martyr.”
Uh, no…you attended the party as a DUMB@$$, an insensitive, immature buffoon with more chutzpah than common sense. You decided that it would be “cute” and “original” to attend a Halloween party dressed as a heartless, cold-blooded murderer. Doing that and seeing nothing wrong with it- THAT is the very definition of DUMB@$$. That Dr. Gutmann not only enabled, but participated in Saadi’s offensive insensitivity is even more disturbing…especially given her heritage.
I’m not big on political correctness, but there are times when you really should think about how what it is that you’re doing is going to appear to others. Sure, you want to have fun on Halloween; that’s what the holiday is all about. Nonetheless, there are times when respecting the feelings and sensibilities of others is a good thing. Not that these two DUMB@$$E$ could recognize that….
