Contributors
All articles
-
Only Charcoal to Defend: The U.S. government is responsible for the crises in the Middle East
President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night outlined his plan for “degrading and ultimately destroying” the Islamic State. The plan involved a vastly expanded military operation and a campaign of precision bombing that will continue for years. A host of American politicians and pundits have joined the president in voicing their desires to see the Islamic State destroyed.
“We will follow them to the gates of hell,” warned Vice President Joe Biden in a speech Wednesday night. Or, as Judge Jeanine of Fox News put it, “Keep bombing them. Bomb them again and again.”
The Islamic State shocked the world over the last two months by conquering wide swaths of Iraq and Syria and establishing an Islamic caliphate. More sensational yet are the numerous videos of mass executions conducted by the group, and its predilection for public crucifixion or decapitation as punishment for crimes ranging from drug possession to being part of the “wrong” religious denomination. The Islamic State is surely vicious and brutal.In this way, it mirrors its makers.
If the Islamic State is the cancer of the Middle East, the United States is the world’s unscrupulous dumper of carcinogens. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban, it gave the Taliban a raison d’etre. When the U.S. went into Iraq to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s regime, it gave al-Qaeda room to grow.
When the United States and a “coalition of the willing” invaded Iraq in 2003 under blatantly false pretenses, it killed over 100,000 Iraqis, destroyed the country’s infrastructure, exacerbated sectarian divisions and left the nation destitute, with a U.S.-armed puppet government in Baghdad.
The memory of sexual and psychological torture at the hands of American soldiers is fresh in the minds of many Iraqis, including members of the Islamic State who staged a prison break from Abu Ghraib last year.
Several months ago, the Islamic State stormed northern Iraqi cities and, in the process of overrunning the Iraqi soldiers stationed there, gained control over an enormous cache of American weapons and supplies. Of course, the group already had many arms, some of which it received from the C.I.A to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Moammar al-Qaddafi in Libya.
Preventing the Islamic State from gaining further traction is a reasonable goal, but any serious venture to combat the sort of militancy and extremism displayed by the Islamic State would require the West to stop trying to colonize and subjugate the Middle East (through war, neo-liberal capitalism and the Israeli colony), and to stop supporting and providing weapons to autocratic leaders in the region.
Saudi Arabia likes to behead people just as much as the Islamic State, so why is one our close ally and the other a mortal enemy?
Bombing people has simply proved ineffective in the U.S.’s tragicomic Global War on Terror. If anything, it has bred anti-American anger and sympathy for groups like al-Qaeda. Any attacks on the White House would simply be a case of the chickens coming home to roost.
“If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven,” Obama warned on Wednesday. But if American leaders really wanted to protect Americans, they would put controls on energy companies in order to stop a crisis of massive climate change, would they not? Why do they not spend less money on war and more on education and health? Or at least jail one of the bankers responsible for the current recession?
U.S. involvement in Iraq and Syria is not really about protecting Americans. We hear the same fearful language that was thrown around in the lead up to the Iraq War and the disastrous Global War on Terror, but the threat of the Islamic State is only conceptual here.
The threat of corporate gangsters and a militarized police state, on the other hand, is very real, especially when governments, such as those of the U.S. and the U.K. use the threat of groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to justify surveillance, censoring and a host of other authoritarian measures against their own citizens.
We should have learned, but the same military-industrial businessmen who raped Iraq and wasted nearly a trillion dollars to line their pockets are trying to do it all over again.
Rather than hiding behind the screens from which they direct drones and spread lies, the people who really want this war—the president, his cabinet, those in Congress, and all their cronies in the weapons and oil industries—should stay true to their word, journey to Iraq and Syria, and personally accompany the Islamic State to the gates of hell. Stay there for all I care.
-
Only Charcoal to Defend: Toeing the line between criticism, hypocrisy
Why is it that we Opinion columnists find it necessary to share our thoughts with you every so often? I don’t remember anyone asking me to do it, except for my editor of course, who has to remind me every two weeks.
In the process of writing columns, I’ve given advice, suggested changes at Bowdoin and, in my first article, accused the members of the Judicial Board of breaching the honor and social codes.Was this presumptuous? To think that my opinions were worth the paper that they were printed on, or to think that writing about them would even do anything? I don’t know.
We columnists have a tendency to criticize things. To my knowledge, almost every one of my past articles has included a critique of something or other.
-
Only Charcoal to Defend: From Guy Fawkes to Black Friday: Reconciling November’s holidays
November is the month when we descend into winter. Each holiday takes us a little deeper. The sun shone when the month was young, and Halloween parties peppered the campus. I got giddy when I saw a couple Guy Fawkes masks—a symbol of the internet hacktivist group Anonymous, of Occupy Wall Street, and of other anti-government and anti-establishment movements around the world. “We are legion!” yelled one masked Halloweener at one point, echoing the mantra of Anonymous.
I managed to remember the Fifth of November when it came. It received very little news coverage, but Twitter was full of pictures of protestors with Guy Fawkes masks in front of Buckingham Palace, the White House, and other symbols of power around the world. In 1605, Londoners lit bonfires all over the city to celebrate the foiling of Guy Fawkes’ gunpowder plot to blow up the House of Lords. To more and more people now, November 5 is a revolutionary day waiting for Fawkes’ reckoning.
But before I can romanticize a gunpowder plot, with November comes a day that is beautiful for many reasons, and would not tolerate more destruction. Kurt Vonnegut described how on November 11, 1918, “millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another” and the First World War ended. The day was named Armistice Day, and never again were we supposed to have another war like the one that cease fire ended. The day is now known as Veterans Day—and we have had many wars since. Had Vonnegut and I been friends, we would have celebrated our birthdays together on this day, and maybe we would have talked about how we were never supposed to have such wars again.
-
Only Charcoal to Defend: Expensive journal subscriptions must pave way towards open access information
In order to do some research for this article, I went to JSTOR and searched, ‘‘the high cost of scholarly journals.” On the side of the page was written, “Your access to JSTOR provided by Bowdoin College.”
“Awesome,” I thought to myself. And that is about all that I thought about when I saw it, because, as with all privilege, it meant that I didn’t have to think about what that disclaimer meant.
It meant that if Bowdoin College did not pay for my access, I would have to find some other way to read journals featuring top-tier academic and scientific research.
-
Only Charcoal to Defend: White American hasbara and a new look at the NAS report
Hasbara is a Hebrew word that means “explanation;” it is also a euphemism for Israeli propaganda. It frames the actions and history of Israel from the Zionist perspective—fixating on technological achievements and terrorism while excusing or ignoring human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing.
So I was not surprised to learn that the National Academy of Scholars (NAS) supports Israel, and frequently features stories and blog-posts that vilify Palestinian activists, effectively playing on fears of terrorism under the guise of academid scholarship.
It is a shame that after so much research—359 pages of information and analysis—the NAS report came to such a hollow conclusion: that Bowdoin has a misplaced interest in diversity and global thought, and that the College is somehow “antithetical to the American experiment.”
-
Only Charcoal to Defend: Make the global local: community engagement makes a difference
My mind is still readjusting to Bowdoin. Soon the thoughts and concerns of summer will no longer feel so relevant, and before I am aware of it, I will be consumed with school life. I will have to solidify a major and satisfy requirements.
Events happening in faraway places will lose their immediacy when the leaves begin to change and when the lampposts glint like golden stars while I walk across campus late at night. But, if I lift my eyes from the microscope of one week to the next, what I see distracts me.
The world feels like it is changing dramatically. Civil wars, coup d’états, and social unrest permeate the Middle East; from the Occupy Movement to demonstrations against genetically modified food, people around the world are making their anger and dissatisfaction with current conditions apparent.
-
Only Charcoal to Defend: Bowdoin Middle East studies dismal
In April 2007, the Orient’s editorial board called upon Bowdoin to “find and hire professors who will be able to give students the instruction in Middle Eastern culture and language that they both want and need.” At the time, only one Bowdoin professor, Shelley Deane, specialized in the Middle East.
The following year, a group of students dissatisfied with the lack of Arabic instruction organized informal Arabic classes taught by fellow student Jamil Wyne ’08.
In 2008, the College responded to the growing demand for Middle Eastern studies classes by hiring Russell Hopley as a lecturer in Arabic and Robert Morrison as a religion professor. According to Professor of Religion Jorunn Buckley, hiring Morrison finally satisfied the religion department’s request for specialists in Islam and Judaism that stretched back two decades.But despite the progress, Bowdoin continues to suffer from a deficiency of classes focusing on the Middle East.
-
Only Charcoal to Defend: Time to trade in your iPod for a boombox
iPod advertisements would be more accurate if they depicted a solitary figure walking around, hands in pockets and head down.
Throughout the day I see a multitude of students ambling across campus with earphones dangling out of their ears. Like them, music accompanies me to class in the morning. I can control the soundtrack of the moment, and feel rejuvenated by the rhythm and verse. Music is genuinely what keeps me going on particularly difficult days. But this bliss comes at a loss.
Listening to an iPod with headphones disconnects us from our external reality by replacing natural auditory inputs with electronic mesmerizing musical ones. We enter our own world—and it sounds great—but we do it by exiting another one. Wearing headphones around campus discourages other people from talking to you and discourages you from facing them.
-
Only Charcoal to Defend: Palestinian human rights debate not an issue of anti-Semitism
Several months ago I argued that Bowdoin should stop selling Sabra hummus in the C-Store. Sabra has become a target of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement because its mother company, the Strauss Group, materially and financially supports the Israeli military. In the same article, I claimed that that labeling hummus an Israeli food is an example of cultural appropriation.
Michael Levine ’14 and Judah Isseroff ’13 both wrote columns in response. Isseroff claimed that a new form of anti-Semitism is manifest in liberals who shield prejudice in the guise of compassionate motives, such as those who “flock to the plight of the Palestinians as a cause whose burden they wish to share in.”
Levine asked, “Why is it that when other groups borrow cultural elements it is rightly termed ‘diffusion,’ but when Jews do so it becomes ‘theft’?”
-
Only Charcoal to Defend: Students should reflect on the values of institutional education
My desire to work usually follows the same pattern every semester. At the beginning I am attentive, I turn all my work in on time and am wary about falling behind with assignments. This slowly gives way to an understanding of just how much work I really need to do to get by. In the last few weeks of the semester I undergo a period of self-imposed psychosis: I spend hours lying prostrate on the floor rereading the same lines until finally—foolishly feeling analogous to Meursault from Camus’ The Stranger—I feel utterly indifferent to the obligations my college work demands of me.
-
Only Charcoal to Defend: Superficial ‘change’: It might have to get worse before it gets better
A year of intense campaigning with more than five billion dollars spent, a million attack advertisements, and about 500,000 speeches culminated in Obama’s victory Tuesday night. Media attention leading up to election day focused almost exclusively on which wealthy male with orthodox beliefs and an inoffensive personality would rule the United States for the next four years.