Harvard’s Arabic 101 Final Exam Misinterpreted as Attack Plan by Kansas Congressman
Kansas Representative Thad Pennington III caused a diplomatic stir this week after he misread Harvard’s Arabic 101 final exam as a blueprint for domestic terrorism, calling it “clear jihad instructions printed by a leftist elite madrassa.”
The exam—comprised of beginner phrases like “The boy walks to school” and “I study science at the university”—was discovered by Pennington on his nephew’s kitchen table and quickly flagged to Homeland Security.
“I saw words like ‘kitab’ and ‘madrasa’—that’s practically Al-Qaeda Sudoku,” Pennington declared on Newsmax.
Arabic professor Dr. Noura Hamadi countered:
“It’s a test on how to properly conjugate verbs and not embarrass yourself in Cairo. He’d know that if he passed fifth grade.”
The Congressman called for an investigation into “language-based sleeper cells” and demanded that all foreign-language classes include at least one Toby Keith song.
Fox News aired an emergency segment titled: “Grammar Jihad: Are Our Children Being Trained in Terror Tense?”
After extensive review, the only threatening part of the exam was an optional essay prompt about Arabic calligraphy, which Pennington confused with a battle diagram.
In a bipartisan rebuttal, Senator Bernie Sanders stated:
“You know what’s radical? The price of textbooks. Calm down.”
The Congressman now insists he’s not anti-Arabic—he just prefers “languages that look more English-y.”