Opinion

Walker Bristol | Notes from the Underclass

NQR is back

Tufts right now: an open letter to the 18.7 percent

Strategies, tactics and occasional dilemmas

 On Thursday afternoon several students from Tufts Divest went into a prospective students' info session and asked the admissions officer several questions about Tufts' investments in the fossil fuels industry.  Parents and students in the info session reacted negatively to the interruption, frustrated that their already limited time was being cut short.  A few parents from the audience expressed their discontent aggressively, verbally attacking the students from Tufts Divest. The action was recorded and subsequently leaked through Facebook provoking a brief, albeit controversial reaction among Tufts students.  Many members of the student body expressed disapproval of the action, believing the activists did not represent Tufts accurately and instead left prospective students with an undeservedly negative image of the university.  

Craig Frucht | Axes to Grind

A 16?year?old girl goes out partying in Steubenville, Ohio, where photographs document her becoming intoxicated to the point that she can't walk, stand or talk. While she is in that state, two boys use their fingers to penetrate her, and one of them tries to force her to perform oral sex - only she isn't conscious enough to comply.

Resolution step forward in fixing flawed advising

It's time to talk

I am currently abroad, and a friend of mine on campus hinted that I might find the commentary and conversations on the Tufts Confessions Facebook page both horrifying and grossly fascinating. He was right. I realized that a fair amount of Tufts students clearly do not understand - either because they refuse to be educated or because they have not been educated - rape culture and/or sexual assault. They do not understand anything about victim blaming, they do not understand anything about the dehumanization of rapists and victims alike and they do not understand the words "trigger warning," "consent" and "trauma," among others, that shape our society's and our campus' approach to other human beings.

Jonathan Green | Drug Justice

From Woodstock to New York City's stint as a focal point for the cannabis?fueled antiwar activism of the New Left, the aroma of burned reefer has long oft?floated in the breeze of the Empire State. Last week, though, legislators in Albany again failed to pass a meaningful cannabis decriminalization measure in their new budget, thereby continuing to indefinitely sustain the criminality of cannabis and its racially charged law enforcement.

Transparent planning of Africana studies threatened by complacency

Given that the a program in Critical Studies in disparities and Diasporas (C2D) was created for the most part as a direct result of concerted effort on the part of a passionate group of undergraduate students and their allies, it constitutes a threat to all that these students have achieved that the administrators and faculty have not made a clear effort to involve them in its implementation. Whether student representatives to the working group on the umbrella program are realistic in their demands, or whether their opinions are popular, should by no means dictate whether they are listened to. Even the students are now unclear on their role on the working group they themselves helped to create or whether the working group even still exists.Students all but made this program happen, and to exclude these students from the processes by which it will be defined is directly contradictory to the historical spirit of the push for an Africana studies major and representation of the study of diversity in the Tufts curriculum. Since the 1970s, this has been a student-led movement. Last year, it was students that occupied Ballou Hall and, for better or for worse, forced a decision out of the relevant administrators. That Dean of Arts and Sciences Berger-Sweeney will now not even comment on the process of moving or not moving forward with the program shows a certain level of contempt for the students who have become emotionally and academically invested in seeing their project through.Even if the Dean has valid motives for passing responsibility for the pro gram and the working group down to those with on-the-ground knowledge, these faculty members and administrators must recognize what it means that they have since December not made it clear to their student counterparts what their relationship will be, let alone met with them or possibly even met at all. A working group should not take this much work these students jobs are not finished, and they have done their part to make it clear that they will see their project through through if given the chance. The university has a chance here, in creating a brand-new program without the bindings of precedent or institutional memory, to truly take into account the desires of the people who had a hand in creating it while it designs the curriculum and thinks about hiring key faculty.The series of miscommunications and a general lack of clarity spell a threat that this opportunity may be lost, especially the more vocal student proponents get fed up or graduate off the Hill to move on to more fruitful activism.

iSIS better extremely late than never

The Integrated Student Information System (iSIS), will replace the thirty- year-old Student Information System (SIS) program currently in use by the end of the year. After decades of dealing with SISs less-than-intuitive and clunky workings, the creators of iSIS are optimistic about the possibilities of what should ostensibly be a vast improvement on SIS the new sites designers seem confident that iSIS will continue to work out glitches and to grow as the campus determines what works and what doesnt. The idea that iSIS could evolve to meet specific concerns and stresses of a rapidly changing world of tech holds promisethe track record of its older sister, SIS, does not, however, inspire the same fuzzy feelings.

Walt LawsMacDonald | Show Me The Money!

Walker Bristol, my fellow oped columnist hes the crazy lefty that will be on this page tomorrow and apparent Twitter archnemesis, called me out on a line from last weeks column that I honestly hadnt given much thought to. CEOs put on trial. Wait what Wall Street execs exactly have been put on trial except Bear Stearns?

OPED | An oped battle: we all want to be heard

As the author of the antiStudents for Justice in Palestine (SJP) oped that appeared in the Daily last week, I first want to apologize for judging SJP as an outsider in an effort to engage with them. I had never been to a SJP event (even though I tried, but was discouraged), so I was unfair to judge them so critically without knowing much about them. I have come to learn that most SJP members are very welleducated on the issue and that they have thoughtout reasons for their actions.

Regardless of reason, TCF rejection another blow to justifiable departure policy

Tufts Christian Fellowships (TCF) decision yesterday to forgo seeking re-recognition brings some degree of closure to the ongoing debate over the groups right to require a specific belief system of its leaders. TCF or however it will be known now after losing the rights to use Tufts name has made an explicit choice to align themselves with its parent organization, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and avail itself of the requirements of the TCU Constitution in accepting de-recognition. In doing so, TCF has also issued, at least implicitly, yet another blow to the already suspect credibility of the Committee on Student Lifes (CSL) polarizing decision in December to allow religious groups to exempt themselves from universitys nondiscrimination policy.

Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

Jonathan Green | Drug Justice

From Capitol Hill to online blogs of all political persuasions, it seems that the whole country has caught drone fever. Those flying robots, often armed with cameras and sometimes with missiles and munitions, are increasingly swarming American skies, launched by certain local police and sheriffs departments.

Raising awareness across the spectrum of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

I would like to respond to Robert Perskys op-ed piece published in the Daily on March 6.

A call to action from J Street U

I spent this past week in a state of existence that I like to call "enjoyable discomfort." I attended several events hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as a part of their Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) programming. I thought, I struggled and I questioned. I heard plenty of things I disagreed with, but I also heard one point that I strongly believe to be true.

Hungry for freedom

Arafat Jaradat, a thirty-year-old Palestinian resident hailing from the West Bank village of Saeer, died in an Israeli detention facility on Saturday, Feb. 23. Though Israeli officials initially posited that his death was caused by cardiac arrest, an autopsy completed in Israel revealed that the Palestinian father and husband had recently incurred approximately eight broken bones in his arms, ribs, legs, neck, and spine. Taking into account the fact that no evidence of heart problems turned up during the autopsy, Palestinian experts and officials have deduced that Jaradat died as a result of injuries inflicted by torture during his five-day detainment.The logical question to ask following this conclusion is: What sort of grave security threat did Jaradat pose to merit torture so intense that he lost his life to his injuries? The answer is shocking: Jaradat was accused of throwing rocks and an unconfirmed Molotov cocktail at an Israeli civilian in November.Jaradats death coincides with a growing movement among Palestinian civil society in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners who choose hunger strikes as a means to resist the abhorrent conditions that prisoners are subjected to in Israeli detention facilities. A number of human rights organizations, including BTselem, Human Rights Watch and the UN, have highlighted the physical and psychological torture that exists alongside repulsive hygienic conditions in Israeli prisons. As of right now, around 3,000 Palestinians are participating in hunger strikes across the West Bank. One Palestinian man, Samer Isaawi, has held out his hunger strike for over 200 days, and physicians worry that he may die at any moment.Isaawi is being held under administrative detention, a policy whereby an accused person can be legally put in prison for up to six months with no charges. There is no limit to the number of times that this 6-month sentence can be renewed.This means that a Palestinian can legally spend the entirety of his or her life in jail without knowing what charges put him or her there, and thus is completely incapable of mounting any kind of coherent legal defense. One hundred and seventy-eight Palestinians are reported to be currently serving time under administrative detention, and Human Rights Watch called the practice abusive. Sarah Whitson, the Middle East director of Human Rights Watch, recently stated simply that It is outrageous that Israel has locked these men up for months without either charging them with crimes or allowing them to see the evidence it says it has against them. The detainees evidently feel they have to put their lives in jeopardy through hunger strikes so that Israel will end these unlawful practices. Life in these facilities is so detestable and unjust that literally thousands of prisoners are willing to risk their lives in protest.This summer, through my work with a human rights organization on the ground in the West Bank, I translated the testimony of a Palestinian man (well call him Thair) into English so that human rights groups could advocate for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to open an investigation into his complaint. Thair was tortured and sexually assaulted by a group of IDF soldiers during his 24-hour detainment. I had previously skimmed through a few of the United Nations reports on the deployment of methods such as sleep deprivation, binding in painful positions, choking, rape threats, and intense beatings in Israeli prisons, but that knowledge did nothing to prepare me for the emotional week I spent with Thairs testimony. I stared at a 12-page account of each terrible act that he was subjected to over the course of his ordeal, trying in vain to accurately translate the nightmare he underwent onto the written page. I read about how he was dragged barefoot through the streets of his native city, kicked in the stomach repeatedly, chained to a chair and beaten with a stick until it broke on his back, peed on, insulted and denied food, water, or a bathroom for approximately 20 hours. Soldiers attempted to insert foreign objects into Thairs anus and convinced him that his elderly father had died following his arrest, at which he nearly lost hope and confessed to a crime he did not commit.Thairs alleged crime? Throwing stones. And despite pressure from eight international human rights groups to find justice for this tortured man and situate his story in the larger context of detainee abuse in Israel, the IDF closed the case quickly and quietly.These repugnant realities are not isolated incidents. The people described above are not a small minority who have somehow fallen through the cracks of the Israeli military legal system that governs the West Bank. They represent the institutionalized human rights violations committed on a daily basis by the Israeli regime in the West Bank, a regime that displays little regard for the dignity of Palestinian life.In light of these unacceptable circumstances, Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine will fast all day Thursday, March 7 as a symbolic act of solidarity with Palestinian hunger-strikers who put their lives at risk to resist the injustices of their incarceration. As Tufts students, we are all concerned global citizens. This is a human rights issue at its core and, despite the convoluted debate in which this conflict is enveloped, the Palestinian struggle for freedom is no different than any other social justice movement. It is time to stop pretending that the Israeli-security paradigm is the only lens through which we must judge this conflict, and by extrapolation, that some individuals deserve more rights than others. When we compartmentalize a so-called security threat as somehow less than human, we begin the process of othering an entire people. This type of logic leads to a dangerous and continuous curtailing of rights in the name of security, a trend George Orwell artfully cautioned us against almost 60 years ago. Palestinians are humans; thus analyzing this conflict through a framework based on human rights is the only way to guarantee equality and a just peace for everyone residing between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. If you have more questions about the Tufts chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and our activism on campus and beyond, visit our website at tuftssjp.com.--Caitlyn Doucette is a senior majoring in international relations and Arabic. She can be reached at Caitlyn.Doucette@tufts.edu.

Radicals: revolution without solution

Letter to the Editor