Writes Edwin A. Locke from the Ayn Rand Institute:
President Bush recently announced that he would supply $157 million to help Indonesia’s school system. The Indonesians will apparently accept the donation but have made it very clear that they would have total control over how the money would be spent and that they would not teach American values.
Given that Indonesia is a hotbed of Muslim terrorism, it is obvious that this money will be spent, in part or in whole, to teach hatred of America and everything she stands for: reason, freedom, individual rights, capitalism, technology, and progress.
In short, this money will be used to subsidize the teaching of ideas aimed at bringing about our own destruction. Karl Marx said that capitalists would sell communists the rope with which the Marxists would hang them. But what President Bush is doing is much worse. Rope is simply a material object, but Bush’s subsidy will help spread the ideas that encourage others to kill us–with rope or any other weapon at their disposal.
Giving this subsidy to Indonesia is simply suicidal; it would be like giving educational subsidies to the Nazis or Communists. It would be the most shameful act of President Bush’s career. Let us hope that more rational members of the administration will change the President’s mind.