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Obama Inc. Shifting Funds from Cultural Exchange w/Europe to Africa
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 18, 2014 @ 9:25 am In The Point | 17 Comments
Interesting, but not terribly surprising. Obama is nothing if not consistently anti-Western.
If the Obama administration’s proposed education and cultural exchange budget for next year passes Congress unchanged, fewer students and scholars could study abroad via the venerable Fulbright Program due to an unprecedented $30 million, or 13 percent, cut to the program.
Neher is one of 53 Nobel Prize winners among the 355,000 alumni strong global Fulbright community which also includes 29 heads of states or government, 80 Pulitzer Prize winners, numerous top academics and business leaders and spans across more than 150 countries.
Obama isn’t big on saving money. If he cuts a program, it’s usually because he opposes it on political grounds and is moving the money somewhere else.
So why slash what the State Department itself calls its “flagship international academic exchange program” while the overall budget for educational and cultural exchange goes up by 1.6 percent?
Because we’re done with Europe.
It reveals a regional shift away from Europe in favor of Asia and Africa.
That’s because at the same time the Fulbright Program is earmarked for a hefty cut, two new programs focusing on Africa and Asia, the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) and the Young South-East Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) are scheduled for launch. Their proposed budget matches almost dollar for dollar the $30 million slashed from Fulbright. In addition, a new Fulbright University Vietnam is slated to support “academic freedom and autonomy in developing new curricula”.
But aside from Vietnam, the truly interesting question would be how many of those programs would end up focusing on Muslims. Because everything is CVE, aka all about Islam.
“There has been a big shift away from our Western European programs,” says Stephen Reilly, executive director of the US Fulbright Association, the largest of Fulbright’s national alumni organizations, which has not been consulted on the plans.
To stave off the planned cuts, Fulbright supporters have launched an online petition “Save Fulbright” which has so far garnered more than 25,000 signatures. According to the petition, “if these cuts were applied to the part of the Fulbright Program for US students and US scholars, over 40 percent of the awards would be jeopardized.”
Not a problem for Obama. It’s Europe so he has no use for it.
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