It’s finally spring break, so you and your friends decide to pay a visit to warm, sunny Florida. But on the plane, you all decide to get the party started right then and there—and what better way to do that than to order some mile-high cocktails? The flight attendant comes and hands you that cute little shot in a bottle and ice in a plastic cup. But you also thirst for a Diet Coke—a chaser. Add a can of Coke and another plastic cup of ice in front of you. During this long flight your eco-friendly Dartmouth Nalgene idly awaits in your dorm room—couldn’t fit into the back pocket of your mini skirt—so you order several little plastic cups of water to stave off the formation of an arrival-ruining hangover. As the flight attendant comes around to prepare everyone for landing, you hand him all the plastic cups stacked in front of you, four in all. Your friends do the same, as do everyone on the flight, and everyone on every flight in the U.S. every day. All in all, this adds up to a whopping four million plastic cups in airport trash—every single day.

Four million is a big number. Forty million, the number of paper cups we use every day, is even bigger. I’d never seen four million of anything before—that is, until I heard about the photographer Chris Jordan.

Chris Jordan uses his art to help viewers visualize America’s consumer-addicted culture. In an interview with Bill Moyers he explained, “All of my work is meant to evoke a whole bunch of different layers of discord between the attraction and repulsion that we feel toward our consumer habits and our consumer lives. It’s like there’s this tremendous power in our culture that has a dark side to it that has surfaced lately. And that’s kind of what I’m working with.”

With Plastic Cups, 2008, Jordan enables us to visualize one million plastic cups—six hours’ worth in the American airline industry—as part of his Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait project. In this collection, he reconstructs a Charlie Brown comic using pictures of 10,000 collars—the number of unwanted dogs and cats euthanized in the U.S. every day. In Skull With Cigarette, 2007, Jordan uses 200,000 cigarette cartons (the number of people in the U.S. who die from smoking every 6 months) to recreate Van Gogh’s famous painting by the same name. Paper Bags, 2007 depicts the 1.14 million brown paper bags that Americans use every hour. And Ben Franklin, 2007 uses 125,000 one-hundred dollar bills (the amount spent in Iraq every hour of the war) to create an image of our founding father.

The images on this page are from Barbie Dolls, 2008. The full image is that of a woman’s chest. Zoomed in, we see an intricate floral pattern. And looking eve more closely, we see that each ‘flower’ is actually a circle of 24 Barbie dolls. In total, the photo uses 32,000 Barbie dolls, the number of women who undergo elective breast augmentation surgery each month in the United States (for a total of 384,000 women a year). The photo is beautiful; the message is haunting. Chris Jordan explains this intention: “I [use] beauty as a seduction, to draw the viewer in to sit through the piece long enough that the underlying message might seep in.”

And seep in they do, beginning with the moment you read the statistic attached to each of Chris Jordan’s photos. I, for one, will be packing my Nalgene this spring break.

The true potential of music cannot be realized until its beauty has been shared. As a violinist in the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra, I rediscovered this seemingly obvious statement through the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 on Saturday, February 27th, with Philip Back ’10 performing the virtuosic piano solo.

In a sense, hearing the Rachmaninoff piano concerto is a remarkably personal experience. You realize that the soloist has invited you in to share the profound passion and commitment he himself feels for the music. When you first meet Philip, you get a sense that he’s extremely reserved, as though mysterious barriers have been constructed around him. This may compel you to maintain your distance, not wanting to disturb or impose upon the reputedly impenetrable Philip Back.

But when he plays the piano, you hear the rapturous melodies of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2, and you cannot help but become inextricably drawn into the thrill and intensity of the music, his music.

For any musician, one of the most gratifying elements of a performance is the ability to share it with others. While this satisfaction makes any concert worthwhile, it made Saturday’s concert even more so—because that night, our orchestra not only performed musical masterpieces, but we also saw one of our peers, Philip Back, share his own music and passion with a public audience in Spaulding. And as fellow musicians, we could all relate with and respect the commitment it takes to perform the Rachmaninoff concerto.
After the concert, a piano instructor Phil and I both share told me that he once asked Phil: “Out of everything you could have performed, why did you choose the Rachmaninoff?” Philip answered that he’d heard the piece when he was young, and fell in love with the music. With that early fascination, Philip (a philosophy and music major, soon-to-be 2nd lieutenant in the US Army) committed himself to realizing those dreams at Dartmouth. And for anyone listening, to experience the culmination of that dedicated passion inspires an even greater appreciation for the music itself.

The Rachmaninoff piano concerto ended in a powerful, dizzying climax, immersing the entire orchestra with tangible energy and emotional connection. As I heard the audience explode, surging into a standing ovation, I felt the unexpected and uncharacteristic traces of moisture on my own cheeks, and at that moment, I realized that sharing music is not a one-way street. Because ultimately, the music Philip offered was for the audience, for our orchestra, and for himself. After that concert, no one could doubt that the true potential of music is meant to be shared.

Warning: the details of the sexual violence against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo given in this article are disturbing.

“Yes, it’s difficult to hear about,” said playwright and activist Eve Ensler in an interview with The Women’s Media Center, “but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hear.” The 2009 V-DAY spotlight is not a story of Valentine’s Day love. It addresses the prevalent rape of women by armed groups in an Eastern Congo conflict that has been supposedly “over” since’99.Most people prefer to avoid hearing tales about thousands of women being gang raped, developing fistula, contracting HIV, or having gun barrels and sticks shoved into their vaginas. But these aren’t just tales: they are the true stories of real women. In order to put a stop to practices that have now become commonplace, we must listen and take action.

The’99 Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement officially ended a conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that involved several African nations, a conflict that developed as an outgrowth of the mid-1990s Rwandan genocide. However, foreign troops remain in the Congo today, as do numerous armed groups representing different foreign and domestic interests, as well as ethnic groups. The unending conflict has displaced over two million civilians, caused the deaths of another 2.5 million and the rape of over 200,000 women and girls—taking only the years 1998-2001 under consideration.

Even these horrifying numbers don’t accurately represent the conflict’s true devastation: estimating the true number of women, girls, and boys raped and sexually assaulted is nearly impossible. For fear of being stigmatized or ostracized, victims keep silent about their attacks and refuse to seek medical treatment.

Sexual violence against women and girls has been committed by every armed group in the Eastern Congo, opportunistic bandits, and even a few U.N. troops. Survivors who have sought medical treatment and support tell similar stories: Many were attacked while working in the fields, or kidnapped in looting raids on their villages. Many were subjected to rape more than once, and by multiple men.

Twenty-year-old Generose N., from Kabare told Human Rights Watch her story:
I was on the road from Kalonge to Mudaka. I had money that my fiance gave me to buy a wedding dress. A soldier attacked me on the road. He said things in Kinyarwanda. [Later she said he was Hutu]. He took me away to a place in the forest where there were three other soldiers. They roughed me up. This was August 8 [2001] and they kept me until August 25 and each one of them raped me every day.

This is a far too common story: 3,500 incidents of rape were reported in North and South Kivu (in Eastern Congo) during the first six months of 2008 alone. Fifty percent of the survivors were under the age of five. In the aftermath of the rape, survivors are stigmatized by their community, rejected by their loved ones, and often become pregnant, contract HIV, or develop fistulas. Fistulas are ruptures that appear between the vagina, bladder, and/or rectum, which cause extreme pain and frequently interfere with women’s ability to control her urination and defecation. They can be repaired with a costly surgery—but few women have the ability to travel to a hospital, while underfunded medical centers are already overwhelmed by the treatment of the small percentage of rape victims who do come to them.

Even though rape has unfortunately often been utilized a tool of war, the figures reported in the DRC are of an unprecedented magnitude. Armed groups have used rape to disable community and thereby win and maintain control over territories they claim. After violent rape, many survivors are unable to give birth, and they are often turned away by their fiances and husbands; this, in addition to mass looting and killing, disrupts individual families and whole communities.

I wish I could end this article on a positive note, but I’m afraid that is virtually impossible. Perhaps hope can be found in the increasing numbers of Congolese women now telling their stories to the world in hopes of preventing these acts from reoccurring. More hope might be found in the arrest of Congolese Tutsi rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, accused of war crimes by numerous human rights groups, in Rwanda earlier this year. His arrest could possibly lead to the punishment of more perpetrators of sexual violence.

A real solution to the crisis must involve the leadership and participation of many nations and the U.N. to demobilize armed groups, achieve a peace settlement, punish war crime offenders, and prevent rape. Hopefully, the awareness raised by the international V-Day spotlight will inspire a renewed effort to stop sexual violence in the Eastern Congo and to end the persistent and devastating conflict.

Close your eyes and picture Afghanistan; the one that the media has been obligated to describe to us for the past eight years as we bombed the nation. It’s unbearably hot, of course, like any other Middle Eastern country. Minarets are visible on every horizon. Everyone is Muslim and Arab. What other ethnicity is there in the Islamic world anyways?

The men casually wear guns strapped to their backs, using them occasionally to demonstrate their support for the Taliban. Women are nowhere to be seen—they only sit around at home, bored and uneducated in their black burqas. And children? Do they even exist in this glee-barren land?

Though it may not be its primary purpose, Afghan Starr certainly debunks the Afghan media myth in this American-Idol-style documentary. Filmed in late fall and winter, snow blankets the streets of Kabul. The attention is on the majority—60 percent—of Afghan population under twenty-one years of age. These youth, outfitted in trendy G Star Raw puffers and embellished jeans, spend their time shooting pool, clowning each other, chilling and listening to music.

Afghan Star stresses that music and singing remain popular in Afghan culture, as they always have been. Assuming that the Taliban and Mujahadeen crushed Afghanistan’s love for music is akin to believing that religion died in the Soviet Union or that Americans don’t do drugs. Appreciation for music and talented singers is what makes the pop idol television show Afghan Star so successful. The process is analogous to American Idol: 2000 people audition around the country, the judges cringe when most open their mouths, and a handful get the golden ticket to Afghanistan’s Hollywood, Kabul.

The documentary follows the story of four young Afghans in particular as they all vie for the $1,000 prize. The two male contestants are Rafi, a 19-year-old from Mazar e Sharif, and Hameed, a 19-year-old from Kunduz. The film focuses differently on the lives of the two female contestants: Lima, a 25-year-old from Khandahar, and Setara, a 21-year-old from Herat.

The sensationalized advertisement for Afghan Star reads: “In Afghanistan, you risk your life to sing…”

Then you watch the movie, and realize that it is really only Setara, who dances and allows her headscarf to slip from her head, that is threatened.

Men interviewed in the street felt she should be killed for this behavior, and even her fellow contestants on Afghan Star thought she had crossed the line. Of course this is upsetting, and no one’s life should be threatened for dancing (or anything, for that matter). But was this really the point of Afghan Star? Was the fact that Afghans cannot dance in public what we should take away?

A Sundance Channel interview with host of Afghan Star Daoud Seddiqi and Director Havana Marking exemplifies this mistaken point. The interviewer asked what Seddiqi’s goal was with the show. He replied, “You know, at first we need peace. I want to bring peace to my country with my show, with my work, with my everything. I hope my people, after that, don’t think about war and weapons; after that, they choose a good life, and music…” The interviewer cut in, asking, “And maybe a little dancing. Just a little bit?”

What a juxtaposition of priorities. The Afghan singer wants peace for his country, while the American interviewer wants to see Afghans dance in public. Is this what we derive from a presupposed stereotype of Afghanistan? Does that lessen our guilt and justify the U.S. invasion? Does Setara need the U.S. military to save her because she cannot dance on public television?

Perhaps it is this obsession with saving the women of Afghanistan that caused Lima and Setara to become the focus for most viewers and reviewers. Afghan Star gives us a chance to move beyond criticizing the gender dynamics of Afghanistan, enabling us to de-exotify the country and better understand their culture.

Take a moment to consider these facts, and try to comprehend the gravity of the problem of sexual assault in America:

1 in 6 American women have survived a rape or an attempted rape in their lifetime
1 in 33 American men have survived a rape or an attempted rape in their lifetime
Every two minutes, someone in the U.S is sexually assaulted
60 percent of sexual assaults, including rape, are not reported to the police
If a rape is reported, there is only a 50.8 percent chance of arrest
Factoring in unreported rapes, only 6 percent of rapists ever spend any time in jail

For the 40 percent of rape survivors who choose to report the crime against them, a long, frustrating, and often unsuccessful process follows. The victims first endure a 4 to 6 hour procedure, including a full-body examination, photographs of all visible physical injuries and body cavities, and swabs of every part of the body where ultraviolet light reveals DNA evidence. All these samples are placed in large white envelopes, and these “rape kits” are handed over to the police.

The ostensible next step would be to test these rape kits for DNA and other evidence that could lead to the arrest and conviction of a rapist. But in most large cities across the United States these rape kits rarely make it out of storage facilities and remain untested. San Antonio has 5,191 untested rape kits in storage; Houston has 3,846; Albuquerque has 1,116; and Detroit has somewhere between 5,800 and 10,000. A Human Rights Watch report from March spawned this count of stored rape kits across the country after highlighting Los Angeles’ failure to test an astonishing 12,699 rape kits.

Why aren’t these rape kits being tested? In the HRW report, no police chief or city official offered an excuse that justified leaving thousands and thousands of rape kits unattended. “We can only do so much with the resources we have,” said Greg Matheson, the Criminalistics Lab director for the City of Los Angeles police. That excuse is hardly sufficient when the 2004 Debbie Smith Act provides federal funds for state and local law enforcement entities to test DNA evidence—with rape kits specifically in mind.

A Los Angeles police officer offered another excuse to Human Rights Watch staff and this “justification” is just as fallacious as the previous one. The officer assumed some rape survivors just lie about what happened. Less than 2 percent of reported rape cases are false accusations, yet this unnamed officer exemplifies the erroneous belief that this percentage is much higher: “I am also not going to submit a kit when I don’t think the case is founded, where something about the victim’s story just doesn’t add up. As you know, some people report a rape to get back at their boyfriend, or to hide from their parents that they were having sex with their boyfriend, or all sorts of reasons. So, you don’t just test every rape kit that comes to you.”

The California State Assembly recently tried to address this problem with Assembly Bill 1017, which would require all local law enforcement agencies in the state to report to the Department of Justice the total number of rape kits in their possession that have not been tested or analyzed. This would at least give the state an idea of the scale of this problem. The bill easily flowed through both houses of the state legislature but stopped at Governor Schwarzenegger’s desk.

While the Governor made sure to say that he “strongly support[s] efforts to ensure that rape kits are analyzed and processed in a timely manner in order to identify and prosecute sex offenders,” he vetoed the bill because he claimed it required too much time, money, and effort on the part of police departments and the Department of Justice.

The U.S Senate has recently recognized that police departments like Los Angeles’ cannot be trusted to prioritize rape kit testing, and neither can state governments. As a result, Senators Al Franken (D-MN), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) have proposed the Justice for Survivors of Sexual Assault Act of 2009. The act, which has been referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, would require the federal government to collect all untested rape kits and prioritize their testing in federal DNA funding programs, including those highlighted by the 2004 Debbie Smith Act.

Every major city in the United States will need the approval of this law to set fire to their feet on this issue—all, except New York City. The NYPD discovered their rape kit backlog problem way back in 1999 (and it was a BIG problem, with 16,000 untested kits) and vowed to have every one tested by 2003, as well as to immediately send every new rape kit to the crime lab for testing. Since 2003, the rape arrest rate in NYC has risen from 40 percent to 70 percent with the help of every rape kit being tested within 30-60 days of its collection. These figures prove that the backlog problem can be solved, and show that Los Angeles, along with every other city, county and state with a backlog of rape kits, needs to stop making excuses and make rape kit testing a priority.

The School of the Americas (SOA) is a combat training school for Latin American soldiers that was initially established in Panama in 1946. Since 1984, when it relocated after the Panamanian President demanded “the biggest base for destabilization in Latin America” leave, it has been based at Fort Benning, Georgia. The school, frequently called the “School of Assassins,” was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001—its former name was tarnished by released torture manuals and graduates guilty of human rights abuses. Since its inception, the SOA/WHINSEC has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers—many of whom have now been linked to massacres, torture, rape, and military coups. SOA/WHINSEC-trained members of the Honduran army are responsible for the recent coup of democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya’s government.

The School of the Americas Watch is an organization founded in 1990 by Father Roy Bourgeois, a priest who was enraged after spending four years in dictator-run Bolivia in the 1970s and hearing of the rape and murder of four Catholic Sisters by members of the Salvadorian National Guard. SOA Watch describes itself as “a nonviolent grassroots movement that works to stand in solidarity with the people of Latin America and the Caribbean, to close the SOA/WHINSEC, and to change oppressive U.S. foreign policy that the SOA represents.” Eric Lecompte, National Director for School of the America’s Watch, came to speak at M.E.Ch.A.’s Día De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) program. After his speech detailing the history of the SOA and the atrocities of its graduates, the DFP had a chance to ask him a few questions:

How did you first hear about School of the Americas?
I first learned about the School of the Americas [when] I was a high school student on the south side of Chicago. There were people from Illinois in the mid 1990s that were going down to be a part of this demonstration that was taking place at the gates of Fort Benning. So, I started to hear about it in the media in Illinois, and as a result I began to do more research. Shortly after I had an opportunity to take a trip down to Latin America and learn from people first hand about what the school was doing there.

What would you say the most common defense of the SOA is that you’ve heard?
What I’ve heard essentially is to fight communism, fight drugs, fight terrorism, and to promote democracy. Those are the things I’ve heard from those that are proponents [and] supporters of the school.

When you directly bring up SOA graduate’s involvement in massacres, what do these proponents have to say?
Honestly some of the responses are “that’s a few bad apples.” That’s some of the response. When I’ve talked very candidly with people from the Pentagon or the State Department, even in the last few weeks, they’ll say things like “well, you know those people they’ve killed are liberation theologians.” So, it’s a mindset difference —that either that these atrocities are taking place happen at the hands of a few bad apples or that somehow those who’ve been the victims had it coming to them.

How do you find out who graduates from SOA?
Well up until 1995 (sic) [2005] we would issue a Freedom of Information Act request every year and we would get a list of all the names. Sometimes even the school just handed over the names to us. But starting in 1995 (sic) [2005] they would black out all the names so we wouldn’t be able to receive them. For the past four years we don’t have a clear record of the graduates.

Does the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation claim to no longer use the torture manuals?
Yeah, I mean essentially that is a part of what they say: that they are no longer using those manuals and that the school doesn’t exist for that purpose anymore. But what they are very clear about is that the school still does teach counter-insurgency warfare, which is what we’re concerned with—it’s warfare taking place among a civilian population. [This] leads to the question in these countries that have such incredible needs for humanitarian aid, such need for constitutional reform, democratic reform, judicial reform, why is so much money being vested in their militaries? We’re not going to read tomorrow morning in The Globe that Guatemala and Mexico have gone to war with each other, so why do they have these huge militaries? The reality of it is that these militaries [are] to be used internally not externally.

You said in your speech that six countries had withdrawn their troops from training at the School of the Americas, or WHINSEC. Which were those?
Costa Rica, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Argentina have all totally pulled out. Chile, number 7, has done a 2/3 troop withdrawal.

And which countries still have parts of their military in training at the SOA?
Well, not all the rest [of the Latin American countries], but most of them.

Does your organization try to convince Congressmen and women to vote against the funding of WHINSEC?
We do. We have a bill in Congress right now [H.R. 2567] that has 84 members of Congress as cosponsors, including Jim McGovern, that’s 85. We also advocate for cuts in the funding of the school. We’re [also] trying to work with the [Obama] Administration to get an executive order to close the school.

In the past, who are the Congressmen and women that have opposed shutting down or defunding the SOA? Have they been mainly Democrats, Republicans, or a mixture?
We’ve had a mix. The reality of it is its mostly been Democrats [supporting the closure of the SOA], but on funding counts we’ve always been able to count on about 30 Republicans to be voting with us. The leaders of our current bill in Congress are Jim McGovern from Massachusetts—he’s really the champion—but also John Lewis from Georgia is a big supporter. We also have a few Republicans [supporting the current bill]; we have four or five Republicans signed on including Ron Paul, who are calling [for] the school’s closure.

Check out SOA Watch’s website­—soaw.org—to find out more about the bill in Congress to suspend operations at SOA. Also learn how to participate in their annual protest at the gates of Fort Benning, coming up on November 20th.

Has Michael Moore lost his touch? Or does his new Capitalism documentary deserve more awards than Taylor Swift’s Love Story? Moore’s latest is much more like Beyoncé—good, but not good enough to win (over hearts and minds of diehard capitalists, that is).

Would staunch believers in the wonders of capitalism even go to see this Michael Moore flick? And if they did, would they be swayed at all? As a socialist, I loved Capitalism: A Love Story; I already think capitalism is evil. There are a few parts, however, I believe would resonate with any viewer.

As in all his other documentaries, Moore showcases the human side of this seemingly academic subject. Staying away from too much financial mumbo-jumbo, he follows the stories of several families evicted from their houses — homes they built themselves and grew up in. If you have no sympathy for people evicted from their homes, the story of children unjustly sent to juvy will probably wrench your heart a little more.

Both of these human-interest stories were meant to demonstrate the ill effects of greed, which Moore argues is fostered by capitalism. The greed of today’s capitalism is antithetical to Christian teachings, which most patriots and capitalists claim to follow. As several priests point out in the film, Jesus was a champion of the poor. If hearing from the clergy wasn’t enough, Jesus is then satirically portrayed as an advocate for greed, free market economics, and more tax cuts.
Other than these high points and a few other memorable moments, Capitalism: A Love Story follows the typical Moore format, but less successfully than his previous films. Moore tries once again to talk to the CEO of General Motors. He and his crew didn’t even make it up the steps to the entrance. The security guards on Wall Street also knew well enough to keep him far from the elevators and AIG execs. Perhaps that is what was missing from this movie— no interactions with CEOs as in Roger and Me, no interviews with Charlton Heston like in Bowling for Columbine.

Generally, Moore’s documentaries work because they deal with issues people are riled up about: school shootings, the War in Iraq, or healthcare. The real question to ask in predicting the movie’s success is: are people angry about capitalism? Sure, there has been a recent backlash with protests against AIG bonuses and the bailouts. But, is that anger directed toward capitalism? The answer most likely is no, which is why Michael Moore’s newest documentary probably won’t hold well against conservatives. Still, it is worth seeing, even if it doesn’t quite hold up to Moore’s other fabulous flicks.

Dawn Leamon and Jamie Leigh Jones were two ordinary American women who only wanted an honest job for honest pay; they had no way of knowing that they were about to make the worst decision of their lives. Leamon and Jones, two contractors operating in Iraq, were both victims of rape while working overseas. In Jones’ case, she was gang-raped and abandoned in a shipping container by her perpetrators for 24 hours without food or water. But their coworkers were never charged with these heinous crimes, shielded not only by various government entities but also their employers.

With support from the U.S. Treasury and protection from a shield of patriotism, defense contractors have obtained a superman-like gall best demonstrated by their conditions for employment. Several contractors, like Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), require their employees to sign off on submitting to binding private arbitration in disputes with the contractors instead of bringing complaints to public courts. Here is an example, taken from a sample contract, of what such a clause in a KBR contract would look like:

5.6. It is the mutual intention of the parties to have any dispute concerning this Agreement resolved out of court …The parties agree that the resolution of any such dispute through such Plan shall be final and binding.

These “disputes” include allegations of sexual assault—something women like Leamon and Jones probably could not have anticipated. Unfortunately for them, it is also something the Department of Defense did not question. Cases of defense contractors, like Leamon and Jones, being raped by fellow employees in Iraq went unprosecuted by the Justice Department. This inactivity wasn’t challenged until a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in April 2008. At this hearing the Department of Defense claimed they couldn’t prosecute these cases because of the contracts employees had signed (even though their clauses only prevented civil suits). The Committee’s opinion? The DOJ and DOD were essentially wrong, and that someone should do something about these contracts.

A year later, new Senator Al Franken took this cue to propose his first piece of legislation — an amendment to H.R. 3326, the Department of Defense budget for 2010. The amendment curtails defense contractors’ use of arbitration in sexual assault and other disputes:

Sec. 8104. (a) None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any existing or new Federal contract if the contractor or a subcontractor at any tier requires that an employee or independent contractor, as a condition of employment, sign a contract that mandates that the employee or independent contractor performing work under the contract or subcontract resolve through arbitration any claim under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or any tort related to or arising out of sexual assault or harassment, including assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false imprisonment, or negligent hiring, supervision, or retention.

The roll call vote on this amendment occurred with little debate on October 6. Franken made his case well enough to sway (if there indeed was any doubt in their minds in the first place) 68 senators to approve. Senator Jefferson Sessions of Alabama, along with 29 other Republican Senators, voiced his disapproval for the amendment. Sen. Sessions offered an explanation for his “nay” vote, arguing:

The amendment would impose the will of Congress on private individuals and companies in a retroactive fashion, invalidating employment contracts without due process of law. It is a political amendment, really at bottom, representing sort of a political attack directed at Halliburton, which is politically a matter of sensitivity… Senator Franken offered this amendment because he apparently does not like the fact there are arbitration agreements in employment contracts.

Sen. Sessions goes on to offer a long explanation of a Supreme Court case on arbitration agreements, quoting Justice Kennedy, and then surmises a very judge-like opinion:

We do not have any allegations that the contracts Senator Franken is trying to invalidate were imposed on employees or that fraud or coercion was involved in creating them. To invalidate these contracts would violate not only the due process rights of employers but the employees as well. Employees could, indeed, benefit from arbitration rather than having to go to Federal court.

I am pretty sure that Dawn Leamon, Jamie Leigh Jones and the hundreds of other women who haven’t received justice for the lewd acts they survived while working in Iraq aren’t “benefit[ing] from arbitration.” They want to be able to sue their employers for not handling their “disputes” properly. It is true that they signed the very contracts that now have them in such a bind, but not only do very few people actually read the contracts, no one could predict all the situations the term “disputes” could possibly apply to, including in this case rape and sexual assault.
Some blogs demonize Senator Sessions and the 29 Senators who also voted against the amendment, saying the lawmakers “in essence voted ‘YES’ to rape.” I can curse Republican Senators as much as the next liberal, but clearly they do not support rape. They simply chose a horrible way to exhibit their disapproval of Senator Franken by opposing a necessary change to unjust employment contracts. Their choice reveals a disturbing trend in Congress of opposition to the rival party trumping all.

o, it’s 1:06 a.m. on May 7th. The Dartmouth Daily Updates blitz is deleted from my inbox almost as quickly as it pops up. Why so dismissive? Well, if the messages were important, I should have already received a million other blitzes about them. The next day, a friend mentions something that sends me rummaging through my trash for this particular DDU, buried among announcements about the swine flu and President Wright’s farewell party:

_________________________________________

From: “Harry C. Kinne” <Harry.C.Kinne@Dartmouth.edu>

To: Undergraduates in Residence, Tuck Students, Thayer Students, DMS Students, Arts and Sciences Graduate Students

Subject: Safety and Security Alert

Safety and Security Alert

I write to alert the student community that a woman has reported that she attended a party on campus where she was served a mixed drink. That is her last recollection until she woke up the next morning in a common area of another residential building on campus. The women reported that she had bruising and scratches on her body but has no memory of how they occurred or how she got to that location.

More info: http://d2u.dartmouth.edu/archive?id=2145

_________________________________________

Umm…what?! I immediately copy and paste the link into my browser. The webpage describes the dangers of date rape drugs—drugs suspected to have been used in this case of sexual assault.

I thought everyone would be talking about this. I expected an endless array of blitzes, official announcements, student organization responses, and forums addressing student concerns. I expected the issue of sexual assault on campus to flare up once again. Instead, on May 7th, my inbox remained clear and calm—that is, until notice of an AD party popped up. What little discussion this blitz eventually prompted made mysteriously little mention of date rape drugs. That fateful DDU that I at least dug out of the trash remains unread and largely unacknowledged weeks later.

Dartmouth Safety and Security has a duty to inform campus of incidences like these. As part of the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, S&S is required to publish and distribute an annual security report, which is available through the Dartmouth website. (Refer to http://www.dartmouth.edu/~security/information/clery-act/ for last year’s report.) However, something strange is afoot; the number of sexual assault cases reported by S&S does not match the actual number of cases seen on campus, or even the number of “reported” cases. We can thank a face-saving clerical loophole for this: S&S is only required to report cases that occur on or around campus, yet survivors of sexual assault often do not mention their location. Without locations, therefore, Safety and Security does not report incidents as having occurred on campus. In 2007, Safety and Security reported’ forced sexual offenses; however, Dartmouth’s Center for Women and Gender recorded approximately 60 cases that year (as reported by the Sexual Assault Peer Advisors [SAPAs] and/or counselors). The numbers—19 versus 60—simply do not match. Which looks better on paper? Which weighs less on our campus conscience?

The Clery Act also requires colleges to make “timely reports to the campus community on crimes considered to be a threat to other students and employees…” The beloved Dartmouth Daily Updates technically notified students of the possible roofie incident. But even S&S realized that this wasn’t a proper notification. “After feedback from students we found a way to use the system that goes out looking like a regular Security Blitz Alert and goes immediately. Lesson learned. Future notices will go out looking like an alert and not a DDU.” Safety and Security may have tried to report this crime to the campus, but all sexual assault cases, not just those involving date rape drugs, are crimes. Shouldn’t we be notified of ALL sexual assault cases? Perhaps if 60 blitzes reporting these crimes were sent out each year, the terrifying frequency of sexual assault at Dartmouth would be better understood.

Initially I was outraged that the Dartmouth community was not properly informed of the use of roofies. My anger remains, but it’s now anger that all sexual assault cases are not reported to the campus (assuming, of course, the anonymity of survivors). Sexual assault is a problem on campus and we can’t fix it without addressing it. If this seems intuitive, or even unnecessary, consider one student’s response to a mass blitz sent out about sexual assault on campus. He responded “I am not outraged by sexual assault on campus because, at least in my experience, I do not see it occurring. I respect your right to have a forum, but I am not interested.”

To whomever wrote that blitz: consider some statistics (see below) that prove you completely wrong. Not only does sexual assault occurs regularly here, every single case should be cause for outrage.

ive United States Congressmen stepped behind yellow police tape at the Sudanese embassy in Washington D.C. and waited for police to give them their three warnings while a small crowd chanted “Peace now!” before the politicians were led away in plastic hand-cuffs. The demonstrators were bringing attention to President Omar al-Bashir’s expulsion of 16 aid organizations from Sudan $mdash; a move the U.N. fears will endanger the lives of 1 million people. While this is a serious problem, it is compounded by another big issue facing Sudanese refugees: warehousing.

Refugee warehousing is the practice of restricting refugees’ freedom of mobility and right to provide for themselves, subsequently forcing them to depend on foreign aid. This is essentially what refugee camps, which currently house 7 million (out of 12 million) of the world’s refugees, are. Usually camps provide aid and shelter for refugees temporarily; however for long periods of time, camps often accomplish the very opposite of what they set out to achieve and are apt to become centers that encourage disempowerment and make refugees feel they no longer have control over their lives. A refugee in Uganda recalled feeling “just like a child now. I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where to go.” In addition to fostering this feeling of utter helplessness, the camps’ ultimate goals are sometimes never reached — they are usually situated too close to borders to provide real protection and have often become havens for disease. In’94, some 50,000 Rwandan refugees died of cholera and dehydration in an overcrowded camp in Zaire. A U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees officer even confessed that “there is no doubt that refugees are better off living outside camps.”

So why do these camps even exist ? Simply put, they are an easy pseudo-solution for some of the problems associated with refugees. Countries cannot send refugees back to the very countries they fled, and waiting for voluntary repatriation can take a while when people are escaping decade long conflicts. Host countries often see refugees as burdens due to the cost of integrating them. However, keeping million of still-suffering refugees reliant upon aid is even more expensive in the long run. It’s frankly surprising that this is not a topic of protest. Even more disturbing is the fact that this issue hasn’t attracted global condemnation. According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), “Refugees languishing year after year in inhospitable, dangerous, desolate no-man’s lands near remote and often contested borders are no one’s favorite assignment or story. As a result, warehoused refugees tend to fall off the radar screen of international attention and into the Orwellian memory hole.”

The USCRI is right: refugee camp stories are rare, and once they are covered, they are seldom brought up again. They were a news item about three years ago and despite the media’s indifference, refugees are still languishing in under-resourced, overcrowded camps. The genocide in Sudan garners sporadic attention, though usually only when Congress members are arrested for the cause. Aid organizations need to be let back into Sudan but they also need to be monetarily supported in countries where they are allowed to operate. The Congressmen engaged in civil disobedience to end the genocide— let us hope they continue taking action and get support in Congress to end refugee warehousing.

id you know that evangelical Christians are more likely to buy lottery tickets and less likely to recycle? And that Jehovah’s Witnesses seldom have computers? And the only safe sex is between husband and wife? How do I know these things? I found them on the Internet. Got a problem with that? You shouldn’t. The film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War against the West was shown in part on CNN and Fox, won prizes at three film festivals and was distributed with 70 U.S. newspapers. And believe it or not, one of its sources was the Internet… In fact, the movie even displayed a subtitle saying, “Source: Internet.”

My daily paper, the Los Angeles Times, did not include a free copy of Obsession. I got my copy at the Dartmouth Review sponsored lecture: “Understanding Radical Islam.” More about the Obsession “documentary” (if you can call it that) later—first let us discuss the finer points of Paul Marshall’s Dartmouth lecture.

Dr. Paul Marshall is a senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, a neo-conservative think-tank devoted to such worthy causes as attacking organic farming and advocating the bombing of Iran. Dr. Marshall has written over 20 books, which would appear to be quite the academic achievement, at least until you actually look over them. Unfortunately, with titles like Radical Islam’s Rules: the Worldwide Spread of Extreme Sharia Law (2005), The Rise of Hindu Extremism (2003), Islam at the Crossroads (2002), it becomes immediately obvious that these are the kind of under-researched and over-the-top fear-mongering books that the right-wing pumps out on a weekly basis for Fox News aficionados. Now, to be honest, I have not read a single one of his twenty books. As far as I know, they may be well written and insightful, but if his lecture was an accurate preview, they are likely nothing more than a misguided attempt to package an unbelievably biased conservative-warped history into respectable academic opinion by parading a bunch of fancy degrees and accreditations in front of it.

At his lecture, Dr. Marshall spun a half-hour history of the entire Middle East using a neatly formulated, if not highly simplistic and suspect, worldview of Muslims: “When we were good and faithful Muslims, we succeeded. When we stopped being good and faithful Muslims, we failed.” He claimed that the Islamic world had about “1,000 years of stunning success” followed by “300 years of crushing failure.” This failure—caused by things like political repression, lack of economic development, and human rights abuses—is what led some of “the Muslims” to become extremists and regress back to the Islam of the seventh century. Accordingly, extremist reactions such as terrorism have nothing to do with United States foreign policies or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And these issues also couldn’t possibly have to do with the 65 years of history that Dr. Marshall chose to completely skip over—from World War I to the first Iraq War—when the Ottoman Empire disintegrated, and Europe and the United States decided they could randomly draw national boundaries and choose Middle Eastern leaders based on their own interests. Even though I am only a junior AMES major, I am pretty sure this was an integral period in the formation of the current Middle East and its present problems.

Its not like I wasn’t expecting this kind of hidden-agenda fact twisting in order to reinforce the extremist/terrorist stereotype of Muslims. A blitz in my inbox from the former Review Editor-in-Chief entitled “Islamism and the West” could only mean as much. One of Dr. Marshall’s first statements was that Muslims exposed to American higher education are more likely to become terrorists. Thankfully, I think the three Muslim friends sitting around me were able to laugh this off as ridiculous fear-mongering rhetoric. Before coming to the lecture, I had hoped that Dartmouth College students, supposedly smart Ivy Leaguers that they are, would have the sense to be critical of Dr. Marshall. I was pleasantly surprised to find an audience that I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about—mainly AMES and Arabic majors, or at least familiar faces from my classes. I didn’t, however, have as much hope for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who received a free copy of Obsession in their daily papers.

Unfortunately, watching Obsession without criticism will make you walk away fearing all Muslims. The producers thankfully made it easy to suspect the integrity of their collaborators. The first “expert” to enlighten the audience was Walid Shoebat—a former PLO terrorist. This incited comment from everyone in the group watching the film with me. Former PLO terrorist?! Why is he not in jail? How in the world has he now become a staunch right-wing, Israel-supporting, Islamophobic, evangelical Christian?! After minimal research we found that Walid Shoebat claims to have bombed an Israeli bank, except the bank insists that no such bombing occurred. Sounds a little suspicious, no? Why would you claim to be a former terrorist? I can only suggest insanity. Obsession “expert” number one is sufficiently disredited.

Then there are the rest of the “expert” contributors. Nonie Darwish, daughter of a Shahid (martyr), is pro-Israel Arab whose Egyptian army officer father was assassinated by the Israeli military. Then we meet Kaled Abu Toameh—a Palestinian journalist, although Israeli-Arab working for the Jerusalem Post would be much more accurate description. Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, organized Campus Watch to check anti-Israeli or pro-Palestinian rhetoric by professors at U.S. Universities. Lastly, Steve Emerson, investigative journalist, suggested that there was a “Middle-Eastern” element to the Oklahoma City bombing.

The heavy criticism of Dr. Paul Marshall and the spurious cast of Obsession is not intended to make light of terrorism. My aim is to dispel its current entanglement with Islam. Yes, terrorists may use Islamic religious rhetoric, but Christians could easily make use of the Bible to support unnecessary killing of innocents—and they have. Terrorism will never be eradicated if we don’t address the real historical reasons for its support. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its offspring organizations across the world, like Hamas, gained their support by distributing food and other supplies to needy people. Perhaps we should focus on this fact, rather then simply believing that 95 percent of Muslims hate America (as an interviewee in Obsession states). Of course, Terrorism is inexcusable. Killing of any innocent human beings is unacceptable. But it is also unacceptable, to a lesser degree, for media undertakings like Obsession (and pretty much any FOX News Programming) and neo-conservative think-tanks like the one Dr. Paul Marshall is part of, to propagate the all “Muslims as terrorists” stereotype that has led to so much harassment, hate and discrimination.