Thursday, October 28, 2004
Cornell conservatives, though few in number, are an extremely vocal lot. Ubiquitous around campus are copies of the Cornell Review, a right-wing publication whose motto is "we do not apologize". Also, a number of conservative columnists have started writing this year for the Cornell Daily Sun, the most widely read student publication on campus.
The fact that the conservatives here are so vocal would be fine, if they did were not openly racist and generally offensive in doing so. Take for example the extremist right-wing columnist Sara Townsley. Tuesdays are my bad days, as that is when Townsley's weekly column appears in the Daily Sun. Between plasma physics and mathematical physics, I sit in the cafeteria in Kennedy hall, eating a light lunch and resisting the urge to immediately regurgitate it, as I read her overtly racist mixture of misleading propaganda and outright lies.
For a long time, I had wondered how writing of such a low factual quality could make it onto the Daily Sun, without an uproar of protest from its reader base. If right-wing extremists are so vocal on campus, I thought, then where are their progressive counterparts?
Recently, while wandering lost in the basement of the student union, I stumbled across a copy of Turn Left, a progressive student publication, which unfortunately is not distributed with the same determination as conservative publications. I was relieved to find that a more progressive voice does exist on campus, and that they too take umbrage at the provocative propaganda being promulgated by Townsley et al.
In particular, I found a gem of an article, written by a Muhammad Yasir Nawaz, in response to the anti-Muslim Townsley article that I linked to above. In the article, I even found this amusing allusion to Michelle Malkin, a Filipino-American writer who defends the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and proposes the same for Arab-Americans today:
"Unable to withstand the sane liberal environment of academia and incapable of doing original research and opening their minds to a factual discovery of history, the conservatives have long adopted the technique of exploiting the ignorance of a vastly uninformed public--their own kin. With a handful of new bootlicking non-whites, a breed of humans that has always been available to the imperialists and has always suited their power manipulation, these conservative radicals want to hijack elections by doing verbal and possible physical violence against Muslims--all the while pretending to remain racially unbiased."
The fact that the conservatives here are so vocal would be fine, if they did were not openly racist and generally offensive in doing so. Take for example the extremist right-wing columnist Sara Townsley. Tuesdays are my bad days, as that is when Townsley's weekly column appears in the Daily Sun. Between plasma physics and mathematical physics, I sit in the cafeteria in Kennedy hall, eating a light lunch and resisting the urge to immediately regurgitate it, as I read her overtly racist mixture of misleading propaganda and outright lies.
For a long time, I had wondered how writing of such a low factual quality could make it onto the Daily Sun, without an uproar of protest from its reader base. If right-wing extremists are so vocal on campus, I thought, then where are their progressive counterparts?
Recently, while wandering lost in the basement of the student union, I stumbled across a copy of Turn Left, a progressive student publication, which unfortunately is not distributed with the same determination as conservative publications. I was relieved to find that a more progressive voice does exist on campus, and that they too take umbrage at the provocative propaganda being promulgated by Townsley et al.
In particular, I found a gem of an article, written by a Muhammad Yasir Nawaz, in response to the anti-Muslim Townsley article that I linked to above. In the article, I even found this amusing allusion to Michelle Malkin, a Filipino-American writer who defends the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and proposes the same for Arab-Americans today:
"Unable to withstand the sane liberal environment of academia and incapable of doing original research and opening their minds to a factual discovery of history, the conservatives have long adopted the technique of exploiting the ignorance of a vastly uninformed public--their own kin. With a handful of new bootlicking non-whites, a breed of humans that has always been available to the imperialists and has always suited their power manipulation, these conservative radicals want to hijack elections by doing verbal and possible physical violence against Muslims--all the while pretending to remain racially unbiased."
