(CNN) -- An American student fatally stabbed in Egypt was so fascinated with the region, he read poems about it to his girlfriend, his mother said.
Andrew Pochter of Chevy Chase, Maryland, was stabbed Friday in the port city of Alexandria. He was in the country teaching English to elementary school children.
"As we understand it, he was witnessing the protest as a bystander and was stabbed by a protester," his family said in a statement. "He went to Egypt because he cared profoundly about the Middle East, and he planned to live and work there in the pursuit of peace and understanding."
Update: Pochter's Arab adventure was initially underwritten by the U.S. State Department:Egyptian state media reported that he was stabbed in the chest while filming the protests...
Andrew D. Pochter, the young American teacher who was killed during protests in the Egyptian city of Alexandria on Friday night was a man whose mind was “filled with Arabic language and with the Arab world,” a teacher who taught him in Morocco told Al Arabiya English.
He was also a young man who “loved common folks, socializing and simple life” despite coming from an upper middle class family in the United States, said Hachimi Taoufik, a teacher who taught Arabic to Pochter in al-Jadida, Morocco.
“I believe he was the only student among his group who was the most social; he loved to go buy sardine sandwiches in Mellah, that cost 5 dirhams (60 cents), he loved to come home and cook with my wife and kids, he even liked to go grocery shopping to cook some of the meals he wanted to share with us,” Taoufik said.
Pochter, 21, studied in Morocco between June 2010 and June 2011 as part of the U.S. National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y) funded by the Department of State to study in Morocco, said Bouchra Kachoub, then resident director of NSLI-Y.From the NSLI-I website:
NSLI-Y programs offer intensive language immersion in a variety of locations around the world. Scholarships are available for students to learn the following languages:
- Arabic
- Chinese (Mandarin)
- Hindi
- Korean
- Persian (Tajik)
- Russian
- Turkish
Programs may take place in the following locations:
- China
- Egypt
- India
- Jordan
- Korea
- Morocco
- Oman
- Russia
- Taiwan
- Tajikistan
- Turkey
- Other locations
around the world
Um, maybe they should rethink sending young Pochters to fend for themselves in some of those dangerous locales. (And a young Jew going to Morsi's Egypt during a summer of Jew-hate--really bad idea.)
Update: You can all but bet that Andrew Pochter won't be turned into the Rachel Corrie of the Arab Spring. So don't expect any theatrical productions featuring entries from the young idealist's diary, or Billy Bragg setting Andrew's life to music as he did for Rachel, "martyr" to the Jew-oppressed Palestinians and their "just" and "urgent" cause. And, oh yeah, no one is going to call Andrew the Anne Frank of Egypt, even though Andrew, a casualty of irrational Jew-hate, has more in common with Anne, another casualty of Jew-hate, than Anne has with Rachel, a casualty of her own Zionhass/Americahass, engendered by her own extreme leftism.
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