I understand fear. We live in a frightening time, if you watch the news. Fear is an understandable reaction when confronted with the terrifying acts of violence occurring all across America. My problem is the depth with which this fear has permeated our thinking, gripping us with such paranoia that we’re turning against one another. Fear is destroying our sense of community.
Example: a Grinnell student makes a posting on Plans that can be considered a threat of violence. Those who know the student (and many who don’t) realize the threat is not serious, but perhaps some in the Plans community are not convinced.
Some become afraid. Administrators, deeming themselves responsible for student safety, become afraid as well. They become so fearful that they solicit outside authority to take action. As a result a member of our community—perhaps deranged but most likely peculiarly outspoken—is sacrificed to judgment by outside authority.
Most if not all of the Grinnell College community, even if they agree with the actions taken by the administration, would consider such a situation unfortunate. One of our fellow students was jailed on the pretense that he intended to commit an act of violence, when in fact he had no intention. A joke was considered a threat, and as a result the joker was treated as a terrorist.
Without condoning or condemning administrative actions, I think we can all agree that this is a sad state of affairs. This student is not a terrorist. Then how could he end up in state custody facing felony charges? How could such an absurd misunderstanding take place? How did it get this far? I contend that we arrived at such a state as a result of an omnipresent sense of fear.
Why are we so afraid of one another? Granted, recent history has shown that violence can reach us anywhere. But are such acts of violence really so random? We, as constituents of our community, are directly responsible for the safety of our own environment. Violence is a symptom of social disharmony.
As a community, we reap what we sow. If such a threat of violence is taken seriously, it means we have no faith in the stability of our community. Is Grinnell College so hostile an environment that we might start shooting each other as the result of a Plans posting? Do we really think one of our own is capable of that? Is our community that sick?
What I’m trying to say is that Grinnell College is not America, in many ways. As a nation, America is in disharmony with the global community. Therefore America faces violence through terrorism.
Specific communities in America have faced violent eruptions in the past due to structural violence within the community. But I believe Grinnell is different. We have a community relatively free from friction, internal and external. While Uncle Sam has reason to fear the chickens coming home to roost, we as Grinnellians ought not to have such a fear.
We ought to know one another well enough that jocular intimations of violence are not given credence, and we ought to trust one another enough to mediate our problems within the community.
Ideally, we would handle our affairs as Grinnellians, secure in our mutual trust of and good-will towards each other, not as generic Americans, fearful of the next attack.
Furthermore, this idea can be extracted to the principles of self-governance. Self-governance exists based on the belief that a healthy community—be it a floor, a college, or a state—can mediate itself best independently, without appealing to outside authority. Decisions made by outside arbitrators or based on the sentiments of a larger, more abstract group are invariably worse than those made by an intimate, autonomous, self-determining community.
Yes, I advocate identifying as Grinnellians before Americans. I say this because we as a campus community can relate as individuals, whereas our connection as Americans is highly superficial. Consequently American rules of behavior fit us far worse than our own. Self-governance means being your own country.
This sounds radical, but we do it all the time. We all break the law: we cut the tags off our mattresses, we jaywalk, we go to Texas and sodomize each other—often times we don’t give credence to American law because we feel it doesn’t or shouldn’t to us. This is a good thing.
If a floor can resolve the issue of pot smoke, why involve the police? How involved is the state of Iowa in campus life? What right do they have to govern our behavior?
This is not to say I advocate secession from the Union; there are times when outside regulatory forces are necessary. But my hope is that we can set fear aside and try to handle our problems internally first—that we can self-govern. I hope we will not be persuaded by the culture of fear propagated by the mass media, but that will we be familiar enough with our community that we can recognize tongue-in-cheek references to violence.
I hope we will not be dogmatic followers of state and national law, but that we will regulate our own conduct as a community. I hope we will not treat each other as subjects of state authority, but as human beings. I hope we reject fear and embrace compassion.
—Ben Hanes ‘05
Some students have attempted to frame “the true nature” or “reality” of the Intifada movements as “hate” or “violence.” This is false, and we would like to use this letter to clear up this misconception. The word ‘Intifada’ is Arabic for ‘to shake off.’ Within the context of an illegal military occupation that has now lasted 38 years, this word signifies the movement of Palestinians to ‘shake off’ these bonds of occupation. That said, the Intifada movements include a variety of non-violent and unarmed protests and should not be reduced to illegitimate violence such as suicide bombing.
The first Intifada began in 1987 after an Israeli army transporter ran into and killed four Palestinians at an occupation checkpoint. It consisted of symbolic protests where Palestinians, many of whom were children, threw rocks at Israeli tanks that were illegally occupying the West Bank and Gaza. Never during this first Intifada were the protestors armed. Many other non-violent means were also used during this Intifada.
The BBC points out that the first Intifada “included demonstrations, strikes, boycotting Israeli goods and the civil administration in the occupied territories, and the creation of independent schools and alternative social and political institutions” (Tarik Kafala, “Intifada: Then and Now,”BBC News Online, Friday, 8 December 2000). The BBC concludes that, “The uprising is credited with restoring pride to Palestinians downtrodden by 20 years of Israeli occupation and forcing Israel to the negotiating table.”
The second Intifada began after Ariel Sharon led 1000 armed Israeli soldiers to the Al-Haram Ash-Sharif, the third holiest site in Islam (which most Israelis call “the Temple Mount”), in order to send a message of dominance to the Palestinian people. Shortly after, Police Minister Ben-Ami publicly approved of the Israeli army’s shooting of Palestinian demonstrators who protested this act. Demonstrations became widespread, and in reaction to non-violent Palestinian demonstrators being shot, the violence which, for some, has come to signify the second Intifada began.
Although most of the media’s attention has been on the violence of the second Intifada, it too has had more non-violent actions than violent ones. The second Intifada has included non-violent resistance to the occupation in the forms of playing music at roadblocks and checkpoints, setting up joint peaceful camps where Palestinians and foreigners participate, dressing up protest tents for short periods of time, using whistles, attempting to remove some of the earth piles that block roads, and standing in solidarity with owners of land and homes demolished by Israeli bulldozers.
There have been non-violent mass demonstrations, in particular around the assassinations of Palestinian spiritual leaders. The second Intifada has included peaceful demonstrations by foreign students such as Rachel Corrie, who was killed while attempting to prevent an Israel bulldozer from illegally demolishing a Palestinian’s home, and Joe Carr, who spoke about his experiences this semester on campus.
The assertion that the word Intifada has a popular meaning of violence and hate can only exist in a void of historical fact. We hope that with this new information about the non-violent majority of the Intifada’s actions will clear up the misconception that the two Intifadas are movements of hate or violence.
—The Palestinian Solidarity Group
In last week’s letters to the editor of the S&B, the newly-formed Palestinian Solidarity Group defended their use of the Arabic word “intifada” as their group’s campus username. They claimed, as most do, that “intifada” is Arabic for “uprising,” in this case, the uprising of the Palestinians against Israelis who are illegally occupying and destroying their homeland. They further claimed that this term is predominantly non-violent. A brief overview of Islamic/Arabic political language, identity politics, and international law, however, offers an alternative conclusion.
As Dr. Bernard Lewis explains in his book, The Political Language of Islam, Muslims define their political struggles not in the Western terminology of up versus down, but in terms of nearer versus further away—that is, nearer or further away from Allah’s path. The last passage of the Koran informs us that one is nearer to Allah’s path the more one resists the temptations to negotiate offered by non-Muslims.
Hence, when the Palestinian Intifada of 2000 erupted, it was not an “uprising” against Israel, who had just offered the Palestinians nearly all of the land that Israel captured during the 1967 War, but an essentially Islamic resurgence to protect Palestinian communal solidarity in the face of what most Muslims perceived as unprecedented Israeli/Western pressure to lure them into submission through negotiations.
Evidence of this came when Palestinian suicide bombers entered Israel predominantly via Palestinian towns from which Israel had recently withdrawn rather than from those in which the Israeli army was most active.
Also, as far as international law is concerned, the two most important UN resolutions concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict do not accord with the claims of Grinnell’s Palestinian Soldiarity Group. The 1947 UN partition of Palestine was accepted by Zionists and most of the West, but the Arab countries rejected it, and they instead were so eager to declare war against the Zionists that they attacked even before their armies were prepared to do so.
In their haste, the Arab leaders, notably Iraq’s Nuri Said, encouraged the Arabs in Palestine to temporarily evacuate their homes until they were no longer under Zionist “threat.” Sixty-eight percent of the 1948 Palestinian refugees followed Nuri Said’s advice, and the others were expelled by Zionist forces who would have lacked the pretext to act had the Arabs not first attacked them (whether Zionist leaders David ben-Gurion and Ariel Sharon would have wanted to attack anyway is a moot point).
The other UN resolution crucial to this conflict is #242, which, contrary to popular belief—including even the beliefs of high-ranking UN offiials, does not call on Israel to evacuate the territories of Gaza, the Golan Heights or the West Bank (or the Sinai Peninsula).
Rather, 242 calls on Israel and the Arab states to negotiate boundaries that have still not yet been finalized, largely as a result of Arab intransigence in recognizing Israel’s right to exist.
The Arab leaders, and most Arabs (97 percent), still refuse to recognize Israel because of their aforementioned belief that negotiation is a ploy—in this case, a ploy to divide and conquer them into the fake “paper state-lets” that Western imperialists carved out after World War I to protect oil and Zionist interests. They see Islamic unity as the only solution to these problems, and accepting international (un-Islamic) law as a context for negotiations would be the ultimate blasphemy. In turn, the attempt to create a Western-style Palestinian State will only anger Muslims further, because--in addition to implying Israel’s right to exist on sacred Muslim land--it would divide the land of Palestine, a territory they see as crucial for Islamic survival, from the rest of the Islamic world.
Evidence for this perception came several months ago when Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh analysed poll data from the Palestinian territories indicating that Palestinians overwhelmingly favored “democracy like the Israelis have (i.e. to be a stepping stone for either Western or Islamic conquest of the other)” over “democracy like France and Britain have (i.e. to be a boring, secular state without any revolutionary fervor).” Or, in the recent words of an influential Muslim himself, Iran’s Ayatollah Nouri-Hamedani: “World Arrogance [i.e., the U.S. and the Western powers] is creating a trinity of evil: heresy, divisiveness, and Zionism, in order to weaken the [Iranian] people’s spirit and to create division and disagreement with respect to our regime...The spreading of prostitution and evil things, the creation of a mentality of inferiority, and the propagation of crazy ideas such as secularism, liberalism, and humanism are [all] part of our enemies’ plans to sow disunity in [our] society...”
—Alex Muller ‘07
In regards to Ms. Yarbough’s guest column of last week, I have this to say: My wife Meredith and I were the couple mentioned. Our costume idea was conceived long ago, and worn in the spirit of what I assume to be Mary B. James, an act of play in a controlled setting. The dance is a place were we of the Grinnell community can enact cultural stereotypes in the name of fun. The normal costumes are images of masculine and feminine that would be very offensive in another context, a communal understanding precludes this.
My question is, does the offensiveness of our costumes lie purely in geopolitical currency, or is there another issue at work? Is a certain performance more egregious because it deals with ethnicity as opposed to gender? Or is this so merely because the latter is the norm at Mary B, while the former is not? Miss Yarbrough’s words, spoken and written, have done me a service insofar as they have caused me to question the significance of my actions, even though I do not think I understand her very well in this. I hope our costumes were not disturbing merely due to being outside the ordinary (for Mary B, the ordinary being gender play), for the alternative seems to be a subsumption of gender investigations under those of race and ethnicity. This is I think inaccurate and precisely backwards.
A final word: I think the late dialogue concerning self-governance and the many discrete situations (including this one) therein are betraying a weakness on the part of the campus and most clearly those who make it up. It is easy to post on Plans, easy to write a letter such as this one, and very easy to form a campus group. It requires more courage and integrity to talk with someone one on one in correspondence or in person, the sort of courage that could make it socially unacceptable to be destructive and in general an ass. As difficult and contentious as it might be to articulate this, I think it is an easy thing to understand. Those who are asses or pretend to be should be made to feel that their actions are unwelcome. The alternative is the administration doing what many have pointed out they have been doing of late: treating Grinnell students like children. Because if you can’t talk to people and solve your problems, that is what you are.
Cheers,
—Dave Chenault ‘03
This is a short response to David Archer’s article “Quit Glorifying Communism,” which appeared in the last S&B issue.
I wear communist symbols. Therefore, according to Archer, I am one of those “superficial and callous members of our community.” My first question to David is whether he even asked us the reasons why we wear those symbols, before he quickly jumped to the accusation that we are “glorifying communism.” More importantly, two issues here are at stake: first, whether some people on this campus can choose to wear communist symbols; second, whether some people in this college, if they are Communists/Marxists, may feel free to express their dissenting beliefs.
Perhaps I should start by explaining why I wear Mao’s red star and his visage. I do not deny that I wear those symbols partly for fashion, but my reasons are far more personal than that. I wear them because I simply want to remember a historic era in which my grandparents and parents lived through, and the many joys and pains they experienced. Wearing those symbols is a way through which I can relate to part of my heritage and an integral part of China’s history. In sum, I am not a communist, and wearing such symbols is certainly no political statement. Therefore, I am neither glorifying communism nor embracing it.
Yet what most concerns me about the article is this: that Archer advocates a doctrine that inherently contradicts the principle of a liberal, multi-cultural and open-minded Grinnell Community. Views such as Archer’s not only infringe upon students’ basic rights to display their own individual sense of fashion by wearing communist symbols, but also encroach on individual beliefs in communist political ideology.
In the column, Archer expressed dismay at the College’s failure in “not adequately confront[ing]” communist symbols; however, it is precisely this tolerance that allowed me to wear those symbols without encountering any incidents of reproach.
And finally, from my perspective, the very essence of this community is to allow a healthy exchange of perspectives and display of different ideas. I value this freedom most on campus. That is also what I like most about this country.
—Maggie Ji ‘05
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