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Women and the continuous struggle to reclaim what is theirs
February 20, 2015

The term feminism is somewhat new to me; I grew up in a small town in northern Egypt where the concept did not really exist. Even when I moved to Cairo, at the age of 10, the term only represented a negative phenomenon that I detest: a group of organizations composed of social elites who have long lost their touch with the reality of women in their country. However, when I moved to the United States to study at Hamilton, I slowly realized that I am a feminist—a feminist who had never perceived himself as one. More ...

Letter to the Editor: Decrease the hate, don’t decrease the speech
February 13, 2015

“You can shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird,” said Atticus Finch of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. A kid like Jem or Scout listening to Atticus’s words in Alabama during the Great Depression would have discovered the impossibility of hitting a blue jay with a BB gun despite the large population of blue jays and the white people they represent. Jem and Scout watched Atticus nobly defend the innocence of Tom Robinson, the primary figurative mockingbird of Lee’s novel, in a futile court case. More ...

Letter to the Editor: Mom Baby God
February 13, 2015

Last Wednesday, I went to see Madeline Burrows in “Mom Baby God,” a one-woman show focused on portraying the various real faces and voices of the pro-life movement. I am a liberal, pro-choice theater major, who spent 6 months in Chicago studying how to write and perform political satire. For all intents and purposes, this show was right up my alley. However, I found it to be one of the most misinformed, poorly executed performances I’ve ever seen. More ...

Understanding the terrorist threat and its complexity
February 13, 2015

With the recent buzz over terrorist attacks flying around the news, the concept of the modern terrorist is becoming more and more caricatured. Americans, and the general global public, have continued to imagine the terrorist as a religion-crazed gun-waving fanatical psychopath whose only goal is to mow down as many of the western infidel as he can before he gets sent to paradise. On the surface, this may seem to be quite accurate due to recent media, most notably American Sniper, portraying terrorists as single-minded, bloodthirsty savages. This method of thinking is narrow-minded, shortsighted and simplistic. Ultimately this way of thinking is more dangerous to us than any single terrorist act. To most effectively destroy the enemy you must understand him. The killing of a terrorist squad is like pulling a single leaf off of a tree; it will come back after a short while. If you want to destroy a tree, you have to eliminate it from the roots. More ...

America’s dire state of economic inequality
February 10, 2015

Income inequality and the sharing of power, privilege and opportunity in the United States should be at the center of almost every debate about the state of the country in 2015. America is at its greatest level of economic inequality since the Great Depression. Wages for the average American and domestic GDP growth have historically been linked. If the economy grew and the American worker became more productive, they would be compensated to reflect that improvement, but that is no longer true. Despite rising levels of productivity and GDP growth since 1980, the American worker’s wage has stagnated. In terms of purchasing power (which accounts for inflation and the cost of goods and services), the American worker has barely seen a pay raise in nearly forty years. More ...

Why the United States’ Left needs a “new vision”
February 10, 2015

Since the birth of the New Right in the 80s, the left and liberal political spectrum has generated more reactionary dialogue. Instead of developing new strategies demanding a shift in how we talk about income inequality, race, gender or sexuality, the liberal and left have only fought to defend the gains we won in the thirty years between the New Deal and the 1960s. We need to end reactionary discussion and stop being defensive about our politics. We need to take a unified, intersectional and multi-issue political position. We can do this when liberals and leftists begin to work with one another, both nationally and here at Hamilton. Otherwise, the Republicans and right-wing libertarians will continue to control how we define contemporary issues. More ...

Re: Enquiry
February 10, 2015

The February 2 issue of Enquiry featured an article titled “Response to the Spec” which lambasts The Spectator for advising a journalistic stance that leans in the direction of political correctness instead of offensiveness. The article, ranting at times, accuses The Spectator of everything from cozying up to the school administration to being “milquetoast charlatans” to ultimately endorsing extremism and threats to free speech. First, let me affirm that I am in no way affiliated with The Spectator, and that this is a personal response to that article. The Enquiry article, if it can be called that, strays indefensibly into hypocrisy, all while underscored by a puzzling air of self-victimization which attempts to garner sympathy from its readers. More ...

Re: Charlie Hebdo
February 10, 2015

Cesar Renero’s piece on the causes of terrorism rightly argues that it is a complex phenomenon and that there are actions taken by Western nations that have contributed to this problem.  However, in understanding terrorism and religious extremism more generally, one should be careful about assigning too much blame to the policies of the U.S. or other Western nations—in fact, the title of the piece oversimplifies in this way.  I am not a scholar of religion (and I would invite my colleagues in Religious Studies to weigh in) but I would suggest that what at least partly motivates terrorism and religious extremism—whether Muslim or Christian or other—is a reaction against modernity and secularism.  We have examples of such a reaction—though admittedly less violent—here at home in certain forms of Christian fundamentalism. More ...

Letters to the Editor Re: "Hamilton men should stand up for their rights"
December 8, 2011

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Letters to the Editor Re: "Hamilton men should stand up for their rights"
December 8, 2011

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