I went to a fairly obscure college in rural North Dakota.\u00a0\u00a0But you can’t always judge\u00a0a book by its cover.<\/p>\n
My obscure little college had hellacious recruiting chops in foreign places, like Europe, the Middle East and Chicago.\u00a0 At one point, the little school of (then) 600-odd students had fifty Iranians (the hostage crisis turned into an enrollment crisis, as they all pretty much left when the crisis started).\u00a0 My freshman year, we had Germans, a\u00a0Kuwaiti, thirty-odd scholarship athletes from Chicago –\u00a0you get the picture.<\/p>\n
The small campus\u00a0had three dorms (four if you count the one that was just for married students).\u00a0 In one, four Jordanians shared a suite.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In another dorm, a couple of Palestinian kids shared a room.<\/p>\n
And over in the dorm I lived in\u00a0my last three years of school, there were seven or eight Lebanese – Christians, in this case.\u00a0 (Rumor had it that a number of Israeli kids were on the brink of attending, but there was no way to make the cafeteria kitchen kosher).<\/p>\n
So you had in microcosm the entire Middle East problem;\u00a0Arab Christians (who were allied with and supported by the Jewish Israelis), Jordanians (who had fought the Israelis and <\/em>expelled the Palestinians ten short years earlier), and Palestinians.<\/p>\n Somehow they managed to get along with each other, even sitting in classes together without killing each other (or the poor Kuwaiti kid, a nice guy who got a stipend from the Kuwaiti government that put him in the top 5% of incomes in the city of Jamestown).\u00a0 I’m willing to chalk that up to equal parts “oh, crap, if we get in trouble here we’re 4,000\u00a0 miles from home” and, I’d like to think,\u00a0“this is not why we’re here”.<\/p>\n