http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/06/30/a-young-jewish-mans-lethal-arab-spring-delusion/
Andrew Pochter, then a recent alumnus of the State Department’s National Security Language for Youth Program, published a report June 8, 2011 for Al Arabiya on his impressions of the Arab Spring uprisings in Morocco. Entitled, “The Acquisition of Reality,” the callow Mr. Pochter lauded Moroccan despot King Muhammad VI’s release of 90 imprisoned jihadists (arbitrarily designated “Islamists” and “Sahrawis,” i.e., the latter being “nationalists” cum jihadists), while lamenting,
This seems to be a good start, though it is important to keep in mind that over 100 political prisoners still remain behind bars.
Just two years later, the well-intentioned, if naïve Pochter’s tragic delusions about the ugly reality of the Orwellian-named Arab spring were shattered, instantaneously, by lethal violence. While photographing demonstrations in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria this past Friday (6/28/13), near an office of the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood, Pochter was stabbed, and suffered a fatal chest wound.
Veteran international journalist Jon Williams tweeted that, as per unnamed “intelligence sources,” Pochter’s assailant questioned the young man whether he were an American, before plunging a knife into the victim’s chest. If Williams’ account is confirmed, this would mark the second time in two months that an American was targeted for stabbing in Egypt. On Thursday, May 12, 2013, Chris Stone, an Associate Professor of Arabic, and Director of the Arabic Program at The City University of New York was stabbed in the neck outside the US embassy’s Cairo headquarters. Stone’s attacker, Kafr El-Sheikh, was motivated by his professed hatred of the US, and Americans. Stone survived the attack, but as Al-Ahram reported, the knife lodged in his neck had to be removed by a surgical operation. Ironically, Stone, who had penned anti-Israel vitriol, and supported demands that the New York Police Department terminate its legitimate (and successful) anti-jihad terror surveillance activities, was recently appointed head of the Center for Arabic Study Abroad by the American University in Cairo, and, as Al-Ahram highlighted, “praised for his pro-Palestine views and his interest in Arab culture.”
The late youth Andrew Pochter was described in an Al-Arabiya tribute by his former Moroccan Arabic teacher as similarly “filled with the Arabic language and with the Arab world.” Prochter attended Kenyon College, where he was a religious studies major, who co-managed the college’s Hillel, and had just completed his sophomore year. Prior to his fateful sojourn in Egypt, Pochter interned for AMIDEAST, an American nonprofit that focuses on the Middle East and North Africa, and studied regional politics. His mother, Elizabeth Pochter, maintained that her son read poems to his girlfriend about the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” and insisted that somehow the endless jihad against The Jewish State, “wasn’t just about some detached war to him, but a struggle that he passionately wanted to resolve.” Elizabeth Pochter added, according to a statement by Kenyon College, that her Jewish son,
