Ah, the depths of compassion that are sometimes shown by academics for their down-and-out colleagues!
Susan O’Malley, a former head of the University Faculty Senate of the City University of New York and current English professor at Kingsborough Community College, is just such a stand-up lady. Last fall she went to this governing body to plead for a job for Mohammed Yousry, the convicted co-conspirator of Maoist lawyer Lynn Stewart, for whom he worked and who supports armed revolution.
In 2005 Yousry was convicted of supporting terrorism, specifically, for translating a letter for, and reading letters to, blind Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. These letters concerned communication between Rahman and his jihadist supporters, relating to his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
As recorded in the minutes of that UFS meeting, the influential O’Malley put out the following feelers:
Do you think CUNY could hire Mohammed Yousry? What do you think? I have his phone number. I could find out if he wants to be hired and if anyone would like to try to hire him. I’m just throwing it out; I don’t know. I know that it’s on appeal but it’s becoming increasingly clear that he really did just about nothing.
To which one of her more level-headed colleagues responded:
I don’t think I have an answer to that question. Others may. As you may or may not know he’s been sentenced to 20 months and that is under appeal at the present time.
CUNY Professor Emeritus Sharad Karkhanis, who intrepidly reports, in The Patriot Returns (here and here), the machinations of leftist academics in the system, comments:
It’s almost unbelievable…Queen O’Malley was…obsessed…Yes, yes, Mohammed was on her mind and she was not going to rest until she got this convicted terrorist a job. We do not know how many people she buttonholed, or telephoned, or e-mailed for him. But we sure do know that she used her position as a former Chair of the UFS to be recognized at the plenary and sneak in this “Job Wanted for the terrorist” ad. She even made sure to notify the delegates that she had his telephone number and could contact him.
Karkhanis presses on:
1) Has Queen O’Malley ever made a “Job Wanted” announcement like this for a non-convicted, non-violent, peace loving American educator for a job in CUNY? There are hundreds of qualified people looking for teaching jobs. Why does she prefer convicted terrorists who are bent on harming our people and our nation…?
2) During her six year tenure as the Chair of the UFS, did she ever give UFS delegates an opportunity to make announcements of this nature? If not, why not?
3) Being on the PSC’s Executive Committee [the Professional Staff Congress is CUNY’s educational workers’ union], she knew that Yousry, fired from his adjunct position at York in April 2002, was provided with all legal and contractual protection…up to arbitration…, which cost thousand of dollars, money which came from dues paying members…
Many of us know peace loving, law abiding, never-even-convicted-for-littering citizens who need work. How many law-abiding adjunct faculty have to worry about getting their two courses in order to hold onto medical benefits!? She does not worry about the “ordinary” adjunct — but she is worried about convicted terrorists! She will take these precious courses away and give them to terrorists and terrorist sympathizers!
We at the Patriot take the liberty of asking you, our readers, a question:
How many of you know, or have friends who know, a convicted terrorist and [have] his or her home telephone number?
We sure don’t and believe that you don’t either. But, watch out — Queen O’Malley does!
Brooklyn College (CUNY) Professor Mitchell Langbert, who brought the O’Malley’s job-plea to my attention, adds another exclamation to this intriguing testimony to the bottomless pit of leftist zealotry: “…rather than going for a Ph.D., students interested in academic jobs might just as well commit terrorist acts and be handed jobs by sympathetic left-wing academics!”
That O’Malley would publicly, without reticence or shame, beat the bushes for a felon convicted of abetting the most hateful enemies of this nation — enemies who would not hesitate to eliminate useful idiots like her in the name of establishing worldwide Islamist tyranny — illustrates once again the perverse and destructive bent of campus radicals.
When David Horowitz’s book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America was published, hostile reviewers ridiculed the idea that a professor might be “dangerous.” But Horowitz demonstrated that all too many of the nation’s professoriate negatively affect America’s war on terror.
Would that O’Malley were one of a kind — a small, sad aberration. But such is not the case. Her championing of Youssef, with no significant opposition from her colleagues, exemplifies a deep and suicidal pattern within academe.