What Happens When People Become Indifferent?
When people are indifferent nothing matters and no problem is significant enough to take action.
This Tuesday an event will take place at Miller auditorium titled “Why We want to Kill You.” It features two ex-terrorists who turned peace activists. At least this is what the flier claims. I do not wish to get into the presentation or my opinion about the speakers. What I do wish to talk about is the actual flyer. On the multiple, and I do mean MULTIPLE flyers all over campus the title reads “WHY WE WANT TO KILL YOU” followed by a photograph of two veiled Muslim individuals. When the Muslim Student Association (MSA) approached Student Activities and Leadership Program (SALP) and requested the fliers to be removed because of a concern of a potential lash out against Muslim students on campus, the SALP office refused to do so because of freedom of speech. Now I am all for freedom of speech and as far as I know the MSA did not even remotely suggest for the event to be cancelled or banned, all they asked for was to remove the suggestive flyer that could potentially lead to violence against our own students. However, the SALP office, followed by the multiple officials in WMU Administration, could care less.
How do we get to a point when potential harm could be caused to our students and people remain indifferent? A day before the event took place, a flyer with these images was placed on every other table of the Waldo library. Every other table! And this is only in the library. Obviously someone cares enough to go around campus spreading these disturbing images. But who cares enough to stand on the side of our Muslim students?
—Marina Shafran
WMU student
Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=4636
Posted by HeraldAdmin
on Mar 9 2009. Filed under Letters to the Editor, Opinion.
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I could not agree more, the posters were clearly made to be offensive and bring back the fear mongering that sadly, people have towards Muslims in the stereotype that people have been fed in America. SALP should be ashamed for letting this go past them, if someone submitted posters with KKK or Nazi propaganda on it, they would turn it down in a half second, and they know it.
I agree as well. When I saw the stacks of fliers, I was immediately curious. Then the title seemed so strange to me. The whole ad felt like outright propaganda to me. It was clearly preying on people’s fears and biases. I feel terrible that there wasn’t as much verbal opposition towards this. I don’t believe two people (who convert to Christianity of all things) can honestly be the voice of all people practicing the Muslim faith.
Though I can appreciate the concern, the fact is that these images simply portrayed the “face of terrorism” in our current society. Terrorism is a big deal and the largest terrorist groups today are from the Middle East and Muslim. If most current terrorists were fat white people then the poster would have had an image of two fat white people instead.
People here at WMU are smart enough to realize that every veiled Muslim is not out to kill them, thinking otherwise would be stupid. The fact of the matter is that the large, significant international terrorist groups are Muslim and look like the images on the poster looked.
Instead of focusing your efforts on getting rid of silly posters that nobody cares about, why not try to make a difference to your ethnicity and religion by trying to stomp out terrorism?
Dear Eric
I believe we are all trying to do exactly what you are calling us to do when you say “Instead of focusing your efforts on getting rid of silly posters that nobody cares about, why not try to make a difference to your ethnicity and religion by trying to stomp out terrorism?”
We are in this region now, in the US, and we are doing the best we can. I think it is a bit unrealistic to ask us to try stopping terrorism in “our are because it is so big now. I am from Israel as the best I can do is offer awareness and removing flyers is one way to do so.
Stopping terrorism is up to all of us and not the people who live in the region. Just because we are from that specific area does not mean we know these people or can make them stop. Terrorism is a global problem, therefore everyone needs to work on it in different capacities.
I agree with Maria, that terrorism is no longer a regional issue or the issue of one religious group of people putting the world at an inconvenience. We tend to forget way to ofter that terrorism doesn’t differentiate religion, gender, color or race. I affects everybody. In a terrorist attack on anybody whether it be Hindus, Muslims, Christians or for that fact any other group we all get effected, in the same way. I come from India and possibly I can proudly say the most diverse country in the world, and I bet you that you can trust me when I say we all are effected when a heinous crime is enacted on humanity, no matter which part of world it occurs in. Therefore branding a group of people verbally or pictorially with a stereotype is rather uneducated.