arochialism festers easily at Dartmouth. We are a community filled with ignorance about the world that surrounds us. There is no valid excuse. I have heard people make the argument that Hanover is isolated, and that therefore Dartmouth students are disconnected from the larger world. This argument is not applicable in the world today.

There may have been a time when the College’s physical isolation was perhaps a significant source of our intellectual isolation, but this no longer can be true. A wired and wireless network blankets the entire campus—every major newspaper in the world is a few clicks away. CNN, and MSNBC are pumped via cable into our dorm rooms and lounges.

The hardcopy of a New York Times can be delivered right to your front door. Today’s isolation from world affairs at Dartmouth is not forced by physical location, but by a genuine laziness of the part of many of us to work to address our ignorance.

I did not matriculate with an expectation that every Dartmouth student would be politically inclined, but I did expect the vast majority of students to be reasonably situated in the discourse of world events.

Instead, what I have encountered is a lack of international awareness that is far more pervasive than I could have ever imagined at an Ivy League institution.

For example, I know a student, a government major no less, who was perplexed when I told her that I was Muslim but not Arab. She was convinced that Pakistan was an Arab country (Pakistan is in fact a part of South Asia that was partitioned from India a little more than fifty years ago).

Even more shocking, I can recall a student asking me a few months back “Who is this Yassir Arafat guy you’re talking about?”

There are so many examples. It saddens me that I have heard a number of times—being Canadian this is of course particularly irritating for me—that Quebec is the capital of Canada (Ottawa is actually the capital). Earlier this term, I received another stark reminder of student ignorance.

My professor announced that Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu was to visit campus in two weeks. The class quickly filled with murmurs of “who’s that?” The professor then realized that this man who should need no introduction needed an introduction before his class of Dartmouth undergraduates.

Although these brief snippets reveal only the tip of the iceberg, they are signposts of a problem that has much deeper implications for the College.

At a highly selective liberal arts college such as Dartmouth, whether a student graduates with a degree in biochemistry or philosophy, there is an expectation that he or she will be liberally educated.

Even historically, the expectation has always existed that liberally educated graduates should possess a heightened awareness of the issues confronting America and the international community.

I have had a number of encounters with alumni who fondly recollect their experiences in the “Great Issues” course, introduced by President John Sloan Dickey and required of all seniors. The course was guided by the principle that well-educated American citizens, in any field of endeavor, must be versed in the significant domestic and international issues animating the social and political life of America and the world at the time. Sadly, the “Great Issues” course, for most of us, is a long-forgotten quirk of Dartmouth lore.

I would not be surprised if fewer than one or two percent of current undergraduates read the international section of the New York Times in full everyday, online or in hardcopy. At Dartmouth we have the privilege of having academic, political and social luminaries visit our campus to share their insights with the student community.

In lecture after lecture, with the exception of visits by former heads of state, the gray heads of local residents continue to outnumber students in 105 Dartmouth, Filene auditorium, and Rockefeller 3.

During Al-Nur’s, the Muslim society on campus, first Islamic Awareness Week this spring, almost every lecture was given to an audience largely empty of undergraduates.

Fewer than a dozen undergraduates could be spotted at each lecture of last quarter’s very topical Montgomery Endowment series “Intelligence: The Need to Know.”

I sometimes wonder if the lectures hosted by the College would fare better if they were held directly at the Kendal Retirement Community. After all, this would save Kendal residents, who form the majority of almost every lecture audience, the trek to campus. Wasn’t 9/11 supposed to change of all of this?

In a democracy we are all participants in the civic arena. “Political” knowledge cannot be viewed as the rarefied purview of specialists. What happens in the rest of the world affects all of our lives.

All graduates of an institution like Dartmouth, regardless of the profession they choose to pursue, must be knowledgeable enough to fully participate in the civic arena and influence US government policies.

These policies frame America’s interactions with the rest of the world. We cannot afford to be idle bystanders. Though this ethos is not wholly realized even among the United States’ most highly “educated” echelons, democracy is premised on such an assumption of civic participation.

Duty to country is often invoked in the post-9/11 context. It should be a somber reminder to both Dartmouth College students and everyone else that there is patriotic significance to picking up a newspaper or attending a lecture on issues of international importance.

The dehumanization of the Palestinian is nigh complete in the American popular consciousness. Extra-judicial assassinations, collective punishment, inordinate force, economic strangulation, are much more justifiable, after all, against a fundamentally violent and intransigent people. Breaking from this logic, one of the principal orthodoxies of the American political establishment and news media, is a risky endeavor. One hazards collecting an assortment of odious labels ranging from “terrorist-sympathizer” to “anti-Semite.” The simple truth is, however, that one need not embrace terrorist violence or despise Israelis to arrive at a fuller and more compassionate understanding of the Palestinian perspective.

Imagine a people. Do not label them Arab, Muslim or Palestinian. Shed your preconceptions for a paragraph or two. These people have existed with their present national self-identity since the 7th century, continuously inhabiting their land for more than a millennium. The year is ’17, colonialism remains dominant around the globe, and the British proudly bear the white man’s burden. Benevolently, the British determine that the present inhabitants of the land have less of a need for their land than a certain European people who make a religious claim to the land. Their claims are ostensibly justified by accounts in their religious texts that over two thousand years ago their forebears possessed the territory. The deliberate encroachment, bolstered by British military support, formalizes the newcomers’ ambitions beyond small communal settlements to a full-fledged state. The indigenous people gain no state, but instead are marginalized and progressively dispossessed. In the end they reside in 20% of the land which they cultivated for 13 centuries, and govern over none of it. They are quite literally a stateless people, rendered so by a colonialism no less insidious and dehumanizing than that which ravaged Africa or South America.

The colonialism of Palestine was unique in that it was the only colonial possession of the twentieth century to not revert to indigenous self-rule. Every other League of Nation mandate eventually, as intended, attained independent statehood. Indeed, Palestine is the only territory of twentieth century colonialism to have been established as a state for immigrant settlers, for even South Africa reverted to rule by its native people. The experience of colonialism has produced more than a half-century of political, economic, social and cultural devastation for the Palestinian people.

The loss of lives is significant, but we hear little of the loss of livelihood. Palestinians live a life of pervasive indigence that has been compounded by the latest violence. Palestinian incomes have plummeted to a twentieth of Israeli ones. Four-fifths of those living in Gaza have fallen below the poverty line, and more than half subsist on UN handouts. One Israeli economist quoted anonymously in the Economist proclaims, “Frankly, we are strangling them.” Access roads, exclusive to Israeli settlers, crisscross the West Bank which is itself divided into 60 pieces. Israeli checkpoints staffed with soldiers restrict entry and exit from every Palestinian village and city. The trip in between the largest towns of Hebron and Ramallah takes an hour on such roads, but Palestinians—when permitted to travel—must take back roads dotted with blockades making the journey either impossible or an arduous four hours. Mobility within the Palestinian territories is all but nonexistent for Palestinians while Israeli settlers can move around freely. Draconian rules imposed on Palestinians govern every aspect of daily life. The 35,000 residents of Bethlehem, who are Christian and Muslim Palestinians, are kept under strict curfew and allowed to leave their homes for only a few hours a day. Such curfews govern the daily life in countless other villages and towns.

Collective punishment is an explicit policy of the state of Israel, and in the past year has gained impetus under the Sharon government. As part of the policy, olive groves and other agricultural fields are systematically destroyed—more than 78% have been bulldozed in the last year. Another component of the policy is the bulldozing of Palestinian homes. Since September more the 240 Palestinian homes have been destroyed by Israel for ‘security reasons,’ often it is without warning and only the oncoming drone of a bulldozer that sends men, women, and children fleeing. Such actions are in flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention which explicitly prohibits occupying powers from such reprisals, stating that “Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited. Pillage is prohibited. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.” It must be understood that the oppression of the Palestinian people is far beyond the bullets fired into stone-throwing crowds. The litany of oppression can fill volumes, and the meager facts presented above provide a mere glimpse into the ‘banality of oppression’ that has become the everyday reality of the Palestinian.

The descriptions in the paragraphs above are not a violent cry for the destruction of the state of Israel. Israel is a political reality today, and an established society. However, recognition of the state’s continued existence does not mean that the history of its creation or its ongoing policies have to be altered or sanitized. Next time you hear of the Arab-Israeli conflict, take a moment and pause before you dismiss the Palestinians as insatiable rabble-rousers. Recall how indignant you felt about South African apartheid. Now try and explain to yourself why you don’t feel just as indignant about Palestinian oppression.

he Student Assembly has become irrelevant to almost every student on campus. This is a reality the current and past leadership of the SA refuse to acknowledge. Michael Sevi and I acknowledge this reality, and aim to embark on a process of significant and proactive change. Michael and I are not beholden to the status quo of the SA. We are willing to question any and every aspect of the SA that we see as an obstacle to effective and representative student government.

Our promises aren’t rhetoric: The Sevi-Rahim 7-Point Plan for Building A True Student Government (blitz Aly Rahim or Michael Sevi for your copy) comprehensively outlines a real process for reinventing student government at Dartmouth. Many candidates, both past and present, have alluded vaguely to change. Michael and I, however, are the first in many years to run a platform dedicated to the overhaul of student assembly. We see our campaign as much more than just two candidates running for office. We see it as the beginning of a full-fledged movement and process of restoring representative student government to the Dartmouth community. Michael and I, as most Dartmouth students, are disillusioned and disappointed with the state of student government at Dartmouth. We hope you will give us your vote of confidence and join us in a grassroots effort to once again make student government relevant to students.

Our argument against our fellow candidates is this: they are not willing to undertake the massive reform for student government as outlined in our 7 Point Plan. Michael and I are willing to acknowledge with our fellow students the irrelevance of the SA in their everyday lives. Sometimes ineffective institutions need to be disassembled and reinvented. It’s time to reinvent student government at Dartmouth.

hen the opponents of the incitement of hatred and the proponents of unchecked free speech abut in the public sphere, sparks inevitably fly. Those who see free speech as indivisible have over the years transformed the right into the highest altar of worship in the land of democracy. Unadulterated free speech advocates are vociferous and mainstream in American society; to go against them is to slaughter the unassailable sacred cow. The fact remains that a number of other free societies have determined that even the right of expression, undoubtedly a vital right, is subject to the reasonable limitations of a free and democratic society.

Have these societies snowballed towards repressive fascist regimes outlawing the rights of press and speech? Unless you are inclined to refer to America’s benign northern neighbor as such, the answer is an emphatic no. Public incitement of hatred is a criminal code offense in Canada. A Canadian Supreme Court benchmark on the issue validated the legislation enacting the offense. The court ruled that “substantial harm” demonstrably flows from hate propaganda, as evinced by the “collective historical knowledge of the potentially catastrophic effects of the promotion of hatred.” The court found there to be an obvious “rational connection” between the ban on hate propaganda and “fostering harmonious social relations in a community dedicated to equality and multiculturalism.”

What does such a proscription on the public incitement of hatred achieve? It effectively declares the society’s outright opprobrium for the content of messages of hate. Such laws establish that attempts to disseminate hatred are wholly contradictory with the values of a society embracing equality and recognizing the worth and dignity of every person. Pluralist societies stressing equality and liberty for every individual, regardless of race or creed, are indeed able to objectively reject hatred on the grounds that it is incompatible with the society’s fundamental values. Complicity with hateful speech indicates that individuals within a particular identifiable group do not have the same inherent dignity, equality, and rights as other citizens, that they are lesser human beings. These laws objectively declare that such attempts at disenfranchisement do not accord with the society’s principles.

So what of the slippery slope? First of all, the standards by which these laws are applied are and must be stringent in terms of scope and evidentiary requirements. It’s not possible to delve into the legal intricacies of these in this short opinion piece. Secondly, the contention that the rights of bigots must be protected in order to safeguard the rights of good and tolerant citizens is a bald-faced lie. Laws against hate dissemination sanction individuals encroaching on the rights of others, and going against the principles underpinning the society they live within. Beyond hatred, laws that reasonably limit speech, such as those concerning libel and slander, exist in almost every liberal democracy.

The reasonable limitation of banning hate speech is premised in large part on the same principles as slander or libel laws. Individuals deserve protection from undue vilification in the public sphere; by transference, aggregates of individuals in an identifiable group deserve this same protection. If I publish an article in the United States that falsely claims that Mr. X is a dirty disease-carrying public menace, existing libel laws would harshly sanction me. If I was to write an article falsely declaring that all members of Mr. X’s identifiable group (racial, religious etc.) are dirty disease-carrying public menaces, I would be left alone. In both instances I have falsely claimed that Mr. X is a dirty virus-carrying public menace.

That the law that would sanction me in the first instance is generally perceived as benign. The specter of sanctioning me for the second action, which effectively is doing the same thing to Mr. X, is decried as an attack on everything that is fundamentally American. In my mind the distinction is intellectually faulty—I denigrate Mr. X no less flagrantly in the second instance, therefore I should be held similarly culpable.

Inciting hatred contributes nothing to the aspirations of citizens in a liberal and free democracy. It does not bring society closer to a greater truth, it does not promote greater individual development, nor does it protect or foster the flourishing democracy that welcomes all to participate. Instead, hate propagates lies and falsehoods (which as history attests have the danger of being accepted as truths), and aims at delegitimizing the participation of key groups of society in the public sphere. Banning the incitement of hatred presents a minimal impairment of the freedom of expression in the modern liberal democratic state which concurrently pledges to foster and defend the free and equal participation of all it citizens.