Category: Featured

By Eric Soble

Opinions Editor

It is popular in parts of the media concerned with commentating and editorializing to claim that a debate produces “more heat than light,” or to assert that the mainstream dialogue is “fruitless.” The planned building of an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero is a case in point.

The only reason this issue is a news story is because of the disinformation circulated by the likes of Fox News and the New York Post. The cultural center will not open on September 11th, as Republican Glenn Beck claimed in August on “Fox & Friends,” nor will the center be located “at” Ground Zero as Andrea Peyser bleated in her May column. In fact, the mosque will be built on the former site of a Burlington Coat Factory, two blocks away.

None of these commentators ever mention that there is already a mosque named “Masjid Manhattan” only four blocks from Ground Zero. Nor do they reveal that the Pentagon, another site of the 9/11 attacks, offers Muslim prayer services led by an imam every Friday.

Arguments made by those who oppose the building of the center are not only misguided but utterly laughable. Newt Gingrich has expressed that Muslims should not be able to build a mosque near Ground Zero until Saudi Arabia allows the building of churches. Because our nation should be going toe-to-toe with a government that treats women as subhuman and routinely uses amputation as a punishment for robbery.

Other politicians have labeled the project as offensive to both American principles and the families of 9/11 victims, as if this designation should automatically strip the Cordoba leaders of their legal right to build. This propensity to throw a tantrum over materials or actions deemed offensive is not so far removed from the petulant and illiberal reactions to the Mohammad cartoons. It seems freedom of expression has its enemies on both sides of the clash of civilizations.

Once we get into the business of saying, “You can practice your religion, but just not there,” or “you can practice your religion, so long as it doesn’t offend anyone,” we have crossed our Constitutional boundaries. Could one imagine preventing a Christian group from building churches in the south because of the lynching carried out by the Protestant Ku Klux Klan? Such an idea would automatically be dismissed as ludicrous.

I do not personally enjoy any church or mosque or consulate of Scientology being built anywhere, namely because I believe them to be against reason and critical thinking. I do not personally agree with statements made by the main architect of this project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, concerning the legitimacy of the theocratic Iranian regime. But these sentiments cannot be used in a discourse of civil liberties. Regardless of my own biases, Muslims have the right to worship and build wherever they wish.

Those who understand the U.S. Constitution and frame this debate in terms of religious freedom must also understand that tolerance is a two-way street. If Muslims in the United States begin calling for Sharia law courts and censorship of the arts, I hope my compatriots will stand in opposition to this double standard. I hope we do not equate being religiously tolerant with sacrificing secularism; these two principles are more interdependent than we think.

An extraordinary opportunity lies before us. This summer, the University bookstore will move downtown to a new location on Market Street. The move will open up 12,000 square feet for which the student body must act decisively to claim its sovereign right.

Among the University’s few structural weaknesses is its lack of a communal space of an academic nature where students can gather in small groups or form clubs to work collaboratively on new enterprises. This lack of gathering space fragments campus life unnecessarily, contributing detrimentally to gender interactions, which are left to dorm encounters and segregated social groupings in our sororities and fraternities. In a vacuum, the first floor of Bertrand Library substitutes as the most social place on campus-albeit mostly trivial chats en passant between book retrieval and morning coffee.

The design of our dining system, with its dispersion of students to their respective watering holes, severely limits cross-gender and interdisciplinary -collaboration-unless you include weekend social activities! Most respected universities offer dynamic, student-designed spaces for improvisation, to advance collegiate and intellectual interaction. Refitting the bookstore’s void would immediately become one of the University’s greatest assets. The University should rise to the challenge and create an environmentally-designed student club to nourish student ventures and to attract the brightest and most talented scholars of tomorrow.

The Elaine Langone Center renovations need to become the first priority of both the administration and the student body this spring. During the presidential search and transitional period, a university-led renovation of the space would signal a much-needed commitment to cultivate greater student cohesion on campus. While the attention of the trustees is focused-understandably-on long-term infrastructure projects, investment to improve this existing asset would see handsome returns. Let us focus the budget on utility-maximization, thereby leaving the University with a space that it has long desired.

I have a vision of returning to my alma mater, in the near future, to find a social laboratory of bright students sharing business plans, writing plays together, plotting off-campus service and performing music. I picture future Bucknellians plopped on some chairs,     delving through Plato or Aristotle with their legs quietly folded on coffee tables. Others collaborate over puzzling economic problems. Walking deeper into the new student lounge, I notice first-years settling a dispute over their ping-pong talents, while sorority sisters try their hand at a game of shuffle board.

Deeper still, I discover a billiards table sitting idly in wait for patrons, and a small stage where aspiring poets and musicians supply the evening fare. In the back left corner, I see the BSG office-moved from its old, isolated locale on the ELC third floor-newly relocated with efficient placement, to properly operate as student headquarters. Yet, my exploration still finds this new territory’s greatest treasure: in the far back-where once I picked up new reads at the inception of every semester-I now see a row of five group-study rooms! Each one bears resemblance to Bertrand’s hotly-contested study rooms that faithfully provided me the environment from which I attacked my collegiate work. How lucky these students are to have a center to stimulate curiosities, foster imaginations, tackle course work and even challenge friendly adversaries!

Whether your vision aligns with mine, there must be no doubt: student apathy towards this opportunity will lead to a result far from favor. One cannot start a movement with ears deafened by iPods, so wake up! Voice your opinion!
-Davis Alexander Rosborough ’10

On Jan. 22, 2009, President Barack Obama carried out his promise to end torture and human rights abuse by issuing an executive order to shut down Guantanamo Bay and the military tribunals overseeing affairs.  The implications of this order are far-reaching and will change the United States’ legal ideology.

It also represents a departure from the beliefs of the Bush administration’s “by all means” philosophy that limited civil liberties and freedoms in the name of the pervasive “war on terror.” Obama showed insight in ordering the closure of the Cuban military base for multiple reasons.

This change seems to be almost completely physical in nature. The closure of Guantanamo Bay did not end the harsh interrogation methods used by the CIA, or the long-term detention of about 47 subjects in military commissions. Obama refuses to investigate or prosecute those that committed human rights abuses on Bush’s watch.

I understand that the key to politics is compromise. Most say that in order to be meaningful, progress must be coupled with debate and the legislative process. But there are certain absolutes that all legislators should confirm-that the United States does not torture, that we should protect the rights of our own citizens and that we should set an example of freedom and liberty for the rest of the world.

Obama needs a stronger stance on human rights. Such a strong voice would enhance our claims as a free, liberal society by actually endorsing those claims. While “practice what you preach” may seem like common sense, the United States has justified for years the invasion of Iraq under the pretense that we were “liberating” its people from a dictatorial regime.

On the other hand, we were jailing dissidents within our own country, tapping phones with the Patriot Act and setting up kangaroo courts with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This is not only against constitutional law, but also against the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. A reversal of these policies will give us more leverage in international politics and put America above the things we fight against-torture, injustice and tyranny.

The country Obama has envisioned and begun to lead, is in line with the civil liberties that are so essential to our development and progression as a nation. But his voice on human rights must be followed with actions towards those goals.