UPDATED: Exchange student speaks out about classroom incident at Niceville High (LETTER)
When international exchange student Jawdat “J.D.” Kasab wrote “Death to America” on a board inside a Niceville High School classroom, he had no inkling of the havoc the phrase would cause.
It wasn’t a threat. It wasn’t a promise. It was just a joke, he said.
Jawdat, a Muslim, was sent back to his home in Israel on Friday evening after officials in the exchange program he was enrolled in told him he had been dismissed over the incident, which occurred about a month earlier.
“I’m sorry that I did that,” Jawdat said during a phone call Monday from Israel. “I don’t want them to think I’m some kind of terrorist because the people who know me, they know I’m not. I’d like for them to give me another chance to come back and show them that I’m not.”
Read Friday's story about the incident »
Read Jawdat's e-mail about the incident »
Jawdat arrived in Niceville four months ago as part of the Youth Exchange and Study Program (YES) through AYUSA Global Youth Exchange. The incident that got him sent home occurred in early November inside an art classroom at the high school.
“We were in class, we had nothing to do; we were joking around and we wanted to do something funny,” Jawdat said. “I didn’t think something would happen.”
He said he told the group he was going to write the phrase, which they often jokingly said to each other, up on the board in Arabic.
“I am the one who translated it, not anyone else,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to hide anything.”
Jawdat’s friends laughed and he erased the phrase moments after it was written, he said.
Later the story of him writing the phrase was recounted by another student and brought to the attention of school officials. School officials asked Jawdat what happened; he told them and was suspended for two days, he said.
He thought that would be the end of it, but it wasn’t. On Nov. 30, AYUSA sent Jawdat the letter informing him he had to leave the country.
“The YES program is one of several grant programs that AYUSA administers on behalf the U.S. Department of State, all of which are subject to strict protocols and procedures,” AYUSA Executive Director Sherry Car-penter said Monday via e-mail. “Following protocol and procedure, the student was dismissed due to an inflammatory statement he wrote on the board at his high school in Florida.
“Because the student is a minor, we can’t comment on specific details of the dismissal, except to say that the decision to send the student home is final and AYUSA does not have the authority to reinstate the student.”
The program’s involvement with him ended as soon as he was reunited with his parents, she said.
In an e-mail composed after he arrived back home, Jawdat wrote that as he made friends at the high school, he discovered a good way to bridge the gap between them was to joke about the serious issues in the Middle East.
“It was our cultural way to denounce the violence by making jokes about it,” Jawdat wrote. “Those jokes made us feel that we fight the terrorism and the violence.”
He said the experience opened his eyes to cultural differences, though, and he stopped joking about things like terrorism after that incident.
“Americans have a different sense of humor and that kind of thing frightens them,” he said.
If he had it to do again, he said, he wouldn’t make jokes about issues that Americans, especially those in the Niceville community, take so seriously.
“I’ve learned that I have to think twice and when I’m visiting a country I should respect their community,” Jawdat said.
Jawdat said he is still strug-gling to understand everything that happened and what it means for his future.
Attempts to contact AYUSA to sort out the issue haven’t been fruitful, Jawdat said.
“My program failed to com-municate with me and they never called me back,” he said, “which made me sad.”
He and his father, Khaled Kasab Mahameed, went to the U.S. Embassy in Israel on Monday, and were given an appointment to speak with someone next week.
The two spent the rest of the afternoon educating Palestinians about the persecution of Jews during World War II. The often controversial work is part of their family’s mission to create peace in their country through educating Muslims and Arabs about Jews.
It’s a lesson, Mahameed said, officials at AYUSA would do well to remember.
“If you want to control the subject of terrorism, what does that mean? You have to talk about it,” Mahameed said.
Mahameed said he will sue AYUSA if it doesn’t reconsider its decision about his son. Both Jawdat and his father want him to finish out the school year at Niceville High.
“AYUSA is failing,” Mahameed said. “They didn’t do their duty … to teach students about what freedom means … . This is not education; this is not American culture.”
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