The controversy over the dedication in the ASSU Anti-Calendar (Student handbook raises ire among Jewish groups–July 31) should raise serious questions about student political activism, which appears to have deteriorated from advocating justice and human rights to proclaiming meaningless slogans. The story of the dedication in the Anti-Calendar provides a startling illustration of this transformation.
It began when the staff of the Anti-Calendar decided to dedicate the ‘01/’02 issue to the memory of “the Innocents, Afghanistan and Palestine, murdered.” Whichever way one interprets this both geographically and grammatically vague statement, it is clearly a political one: it accuses America and Israel of intentionally killing civilians, for killing unintentionally does not qualify as a “murder,” and combatants are not exactly innocent. Why phrase the dedication in such a controversial way? Must an innocent be murdered to deserve mention in the Anti-Calendar? After a glance at the back cover of the booklet and the discovery that George Bush Sr. is a “criminal,” it is hard to avoid suspecting that the purpose of the dedication is to promote left-wing, anti-American, and anti-Israeli views.
Promoting the staff’s political agenda on the pages of a student-funded publication with unproven accusations is not exactly ethical. The dedication implies that if Bush and Ariel Sharon did not conspire to kill these innocents, their deaths are reduced in importance. This is very wrong—shouldn’t we mourn everyone who died before his time?
Enter the campus Jewish groups. It is uncertain whether they thought carefully about the meaning of the word “murder.” It is certain that they wrongly assumed that “Palestine” refers to the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. The “state” of Palestine has not yet been founded, but the term has been used since Roman times to refer to the entire area—both Israel and the occupied territories. From this assumption, they deduced that the staff of the Anti-Calendar is dedicated only to the Palestinians who died, not to the Israelis. An average student would be reluctant to protest a dedication to innocents that were murdered. But some Jewish activists responded with ridiculous allegations about a “horrible attempt to marginalize Jewish students,” as indicated in The Varsity article.
A Jewish activist said that the dedication “will raise a lot of eyebrows.” It is uncertain that this actually occurred. Raising eyebrows, after all, requires some sort of an analysis, and activists rarely bother to analyze anything. Evidently, neither the editors of the Anti-Calendar, nor the Jewish activists have given thought to the meaning of the dedication. They wrote, reacted, and spoke instinctively, without considering what they were saying. The dedication, then, has not fulfilled its purpose: nobody, not even the one who composed it, stopped for a minute and thought about those who died for nothing.
