Monthly Archives: September 2015

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28
Sep 15

Islam in America

As some of you know, I’ve been studying Arabic for the past year or so. Right now my teacher is a woman from Egypt, and this past week she invited my class to attend a service for Eid al-Adha in the HUB this past Thursday.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Islamic holidays, Eid al-Adha literally means “Festival of Sacrifice.” The holiday centers around the story of Ibrahim, who was told by Allah to sacrifice his son, Ishmael, to prove his devotion to the almighty. Rather than listen to the devil, who tries to tempt him into disobeying God by suggesting he spare Ishmael, Ibrahim goes about preparing to sacrifice his son. However, just as he was about to kill Ishmael, God appeared and gave Ibrahim a lamb to slaughter instead. The story is meant to demonstrate how Ibrahim’s devotion to Allah past the hardest test, and was rewarded. The tale is told in a similar fashion in both Christianity and Judaism (Telegraph).

Traditionally, a lamb or goat is slaughtered on this holiday to recreate the scene, and Muslims stay home from work and school. Here in State College, over 650 Muslims from around and off campus gathered inside Alumni Hall and had a service, the likes of which most would only be able to witness on the inside of a Mosque (at least in America). Observing this event was a fantastic spiritual experience for me. I’m not a religious person, but you could feel the unity and sense of community in that room, even with many of the people having only met each other for the first time that day. People of all ages, dressed in all kinds of clothes walked inside as one group when the prayer call sounded. Women came up to each other smiling, kissing each other four times in greeting. Children worked to imitate their parents’ form while praying, and some passed around candy. I felt so welcome–much more than I’ve ever felt at a Christian service. It was a peaceful, comforting feeling.

So it made the experience I had the very next day that much more jarring.

I was doing some Arabic homework around a few of my friends. Arabic looks a lot different from English, so it often catches the eye of the people I’m working close to. This time it was a friend of mine who asked what I was writing. I told him and he immediately made a face. He then went to ask why I’d want to study such “barbaric,” “evil-sounding” language. I was somewhat shocked and feeling a bit defensive, but I still told him the truth: that I wanted to work in Arabic-speaking countries so I could help them create more functional governments and education systems, and to improve their issues surrounding human rights. At this my friend essentially told me that I was wasting my time; that it’d be easier for America to just use their military to scoop out every corrupt or weak government in the area and replace it with a democracy we put together for it. He “couldn’t understand” why America hadn’t done this yet. By the end of his spiel he had explained how he was worried that if the U.S. didn’t intervene with force, that the region might be beyond any help at all. He then implied that the only thing to do would be to nuke entire trouble-making countries.

I feel like I need to say that this boy is not a bad person. He’s one of the most kind-hearted, generous people I’ve ever met, and spends several hours each week volunteering around the community. So I was shaken to hear these opinions, because they are, quite bluntly, extremely uninformed and quite prejudiced. He suggested wiping out an entire country, but when I suggested we help in a nonviolent way by working to alleviate something like the refugee crisis in Europe, he claimed that America “didn’t have the means.” So we have the means to overthrow and create multiple governments in our image, but we don’t have the means to help people who risked their lives trying to get their families away from war, violence, and oppression (Note: we actually do have the means (Taub))C? Are our options as the most powerful and 7th richest country in the world (Tasch) really so limited that the only way we can make a difference in the war-torn Arabian Peninsula is to kill and displace more Arabs?

My friend is not the only one who feels that it is. The Arab American Institute found that, since 2010, American opinions of Arab-Americans had dropped from 43% to 36%. The favorability of Muslim-Americans has taken an even sharper nosedive, opinions dropping from 36% in 2010 to 27% in 2014 (Arab American Institute). This decline has mostly to do with the recent news about ISIS and the Syrian crisis in the news, among other stories (Siddiqui). However, it is extremely unfair to judge Arabs or Muslims as a whole based on the actions of these extremists. In fact, one of the main tenets of Islam is known as the Way of Peace, placing mercy and kindness above all other virtues (Mission Islam). It’s also good to remember that no one religion is worse than any others. Christians who accuse all Muslims of being evil, immoral, or barbaric would do well to remember how millions upon millions were slaughtered in the name of Christianity, resulting in more deaths than Islam has ever come close to. Many nations under Christianity during this deadly time period were also much younger and had extremely corrupt governments. In essence, they were in a very similar situation as the Arabian Peninsula is now.

What I told my friend after he finished his little tirade, was that while it might be appropriate to respond to a threat with force, there is never any reason to act as if the lives of those creating the threat don’t matter. What does it mean for us to be completely indifferent about wiping out an entire ethnicity? I don’t even want to think about it.

But what I do want to start thinking about are ways to get more people educated about Arab and Muslim culture; information that goes beyond the horror stories we see on the news, that shows the same peace and community I witnessed this past Thursday. We can’t settle to live with this single story of the Middle East and its people. America is better than that.

 

Arab American Institute. Arab American Institute, 29 July, 2014. Web. 28 Sept., 2015.

“Basic Principles of Islam.” Mission Islam. n.p., n.d. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.

Siddiqui, Sabrina. “Americans’ Attitudes Toward Muslims and Arabs Are Getting Worse, Poll Finds.” Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc., 29 July, 2014. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.

Tasch, Barbara. “The 23 Richest Countries in the World.” Business Insider. Business Insider Inc., 13 July, 2015. Web. 29 Sept, 2015.

Taub, Amanda. “Europe’s Refugee Crisis: Explained.” Vox. Vox Media, 5 Sept. 2015. Web. 21 Sept. 2015.

“What is Eid al-Adha?” The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited, 24 Sept. 2015. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.

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21
Sep 15

Nationalist Fear vs. the Refugee Crisis

The refugee crisis is old news by now, although the story develops more every day. Already more than nineteen million people have been been forced to leave their country because of war, persecution, or oppression, and it’s estimated that everyday, 42,500 more join them. While Syria is the largest driver of this crisis (nearly a fifth of the country’s population has already fled), Syrians only make up about 34% of refugees. Older conflicts in Afghanistan and Somalia have displaced 2.59 million and 1.1 million people respectively, and dictatorial regimes in countries like Eritrea and Myanmar continue to contribute, among many others (Taub).

Not all, but a great deal of these refugees chose to take the newly opened route to Europe in order to escape. The journey is incredibly dangerous, particularly during the trip across the Mediterranean sea. Most refugees can only salvage defunct and dangerous boats or rafts, which often capsize or simply break apart during the journey. The danger of this was made worse when the United Kingdom cut funding for the Mare Nostrum search-and-rescue last fall, causing the Italian government to end the operation in November (Taub). It’s been replaced by a highly inferior program funded by the European Union, with no search-and-rescue mission, and it’s been estimated that over 2,500 people have died while crossing the sea this summer alone as a result. And this is not an accident. This is European policy meant to keep out refugees.

The reason we’re just starting to hear about all these refugees now is that for years, the European Union paid Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s government to intercept and redirect migrants who were heading to Europe (Carr). Until 2011 when Gadhafi was ousted, his regime kept refugees out of sight and out of mind, the logic being that as long as they were actually arriving in European countries, those European countries wouldn’t have to deal with them.

However, now these refugees are in Europe, and Europe is not handling it well. Most countries are trying to discourage or outright block refugees from entering. Hungary has recently built an razor-wire fence across its border with Serbia, and announced new laws that will make it a crime to damage or cross it (Henley). Hungary has also shut down train service to Germany in an effort to discourage refugees from using their country as a stepping stone to what is currently the only morally responsible nation in Europe, leaving thousands of refugee families stranded at Hungarian train stations. And now Austria has introduced checks along its borders to search for refugees trying to be smuggled in (Elgot). All of these efforts have been criticized as violating the European Union’s open border policy.

So where are all of these refugees going? As right now, many are ending up in so-called “camps” throughout Greece and Italy. The results have been disastrous. As Stathis Kyroussis from Doctors without Borders describes: “I have worked in many refugee camps before, in Yemen, Malawi, and Angola. But here on the island of Kos, this is the first time in my life that I have seen people so totally abandoned” (Medecin Sans Frontieres). The United States and the European Union have each donated a fair amount of money toward containing this crisis, but it still only comes to about half of what the United Nations estimates will be needed (Taub). This means that people continue to live in appalling conditions within these camps (Medecin Sans Frontieres).

The thing is, the way the European Union is supposed to work, is for the burden of refugees to be distributed equally. If a huge amount of refugees suddenly showed up in, say, Arizona, the United States wouldn’t leave that one state to fend for itself in trying to provide for them. Similarly, the EU should be working together to handle this crisis. Instead, they’re trying to push it off on each other. The United Kingdom wants France to stop sending it its refugees, just like France wants to stop receiving refugees from Italy. Italy, like Greece, wants the rest of Europe to take its refugees (Taub).

These rich Western countries (the U.S. included, because we’ve stayed way to silent, honestly) are trying to pretend that they don’t need to act, but that can’t last. The crisis is already upon us. We have the money and the means, all we have to do is get over this upswing of right-wing, nationalist fear, and realize that these are fellow human beings in need, with so much to contribute to our society. Let them in, and let them prosper and help our countries prosper. If we don’t, their blood is on our hands.

 

Carr, Matthew. “How Libya Kept Migrants Our of EU–At Any Cost.” The Week. The Week Ltd., 5 April, 2011. Web. 21 Sept. 2015.  

Elgot, Jessica. “Austria Defends Border Checks Amid Migration Crisis.” The Guardian. Guardian New and Media Limited, 31 Aug., 2015. Web. 21 Sept. 2015.

“Greece: No Welcome for Migrants and refugees landing in Greek Dodecanese Islands.” Medecins Sans Frontieres. Medecins Sans Frontieres, 18 June, 2015. Web. 21 Sept. 2015.

Henley, Jon. “Hungary Closes Serbian Border Crossing as Refugees Make for Austria on Foot.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited. 4 Sept. 2015. Web. 21 Sept. 2015.

UNHCR. “Global Trends Forced Displacement in 2014.” The UN Refugee Academy, 2014. Web. 21 Sept. 2015.

Taub, Amanda. “Europe’s Refugee Crisis: Explained.” Vox. Vox Media, 5 Sept. 2015. Web. 21 Sept. 2015.

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13
Sep 15

Courage is the Key to Great Leadership

What does it mean to be a great leader? As a new member of the Presidential Leadership Academy, this question has been rattling around in my brain for a few months now. Is it honesty? Intelligence? The ability to mediate a situation, or organizational skills? If you google “qualities of a great leader,” you’ll come across a virtual heap of different traits, a never ending parade of virtues which each seem to outweigh the last. It’s overwhelming, to be honest. Out of this mess, one clear question arises: Where do I start?

Aristotle had an idea about 2,300 years ago. “Courage,” he said, “is the first of human qualities, because it is the quality that guarantees the others.” In other words, any great trait or skill a person has will always remain hidden unless they have the courage to use it (Aristotle). You can’t be honest if you don’t have the courage to tell the truth. You can’t be innovative if you don’t have the courage to try new things. And these aren’t the only leadership qualities that would be affected. Confidence, decisiveness, and trust are just a few of the traits that suffer in the absence of courage.

Most of the theory going into this entry comes from a remarkable article by Bill Treasurer, whose title is the eponym of my own post’s. In it, Treasurer asserts that “all courageous acts represent one or more of three main types of courage.” We can look at them now to better understand how courage plays an innate role in practically every aspect of leadership.

Type 1: Try Courage. This, Treasurer says, is “the courage of initiation and action.” This is the type of courage you use by stepping up to the plate in a challenging situation; it’s even used when you decide to become a leader in the first place. It’s what’s invoked when you’re trying something new–perhaps pioneering new projects no one else has tried before either. Try courage involves being innovative, and not being dissuaded by the difficulties of fielding problems you aren’t used to having. This is the quality that drives all modernization and departure, and it’s a crucial for leaders in a world that’s developing as fast as ours.

Type 2: Trust Courage, or “the courage of confidence in others,” is the courage that allows a leader to delegate responsibilities to others without being paranoid that they will somehow muck it up (Treasurer). It’s the lack of fear needed to let go of control in certain situations. Perhaps most importantly, it means being open to new ideas and directions suggested by others. As Winston Churchill put it, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” The best leaders are good listeners. But to really be able to consider new ideas, leaders must have the courage to let go of control and trust that another person’s way of doing things may be better for the group (Churchill).

Type 3: Tell Courage. This type of courage is all about using your words, harking back to the first half of the aforementioned quote by Churchill. The courage of voice is essential when it becomes necessary to bring attention to an issue that is uncomfortable, but must be addressed. It’s also often useful when providing tough feedback, and especially when sharing an opinion you know will be unpopular (Treasurer). Most of the time it’s easier to stay silent about a problem, because making people dislike you is a very real fear which I think we can all relate to. However, every leader will come across situations where critical, uncomfortable discussion is essential to progress, and whether this happens can often be the difference between success and failure. In these cases, tell courage is of vital importance.

From these categories, we can derive even more qualities of a great leader. Not only do all superb leaders possess a great deal of courage, they also try more, trust more, and tell more than others.

Being brave is not easy or pleasant. Most of the time, it involves dealing with something distressing, frightful, or overwhelming. The good news is that everyone has the ability to be courageous. Fear, by all rights, is simply an invitation to courage, and as future leaders, we all have already accepted this invitation. Now it’s our turn to put that courage inside of people, helping them to develop as we try, trust, and tell our way to becoming a better leader.

Aristotle. “Aristotle Quotes.” Brainy Quote. Brainy Quote, 2015. Web. 13 Sept., 2015.

Churchill, Winston. “Winston Churchill Quotes.” Brainy Quote. Brainy Quote, 2015. Web. 13 Sept., 2015.

Treasurer, Bill. “Courage is the Key to Great Leadership.” Octane Magazine. Entrepreneurs’ Organization, 2015. Web. 13 Sept., 2015.

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08
Sep 15

The Ethics of Environmental Justice

This week in class we had some lengthy discussion about the many aspects of ethics, morals, and fairness. Today I’d like to apply what we deliberated on to an often overlooked subject pertaining to all three of these concepts: Environmental Justice.

Environmental Justice, as defined by the Environmental Protection Agency, is “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies” (United States Environmental Protection Agency). In other words, it involves making sure that everyone is able to partake equally from the boons their environment provides.

To be clear, a person’s local environment is a resource, in this sense. A clean, healthy environment, in fact, is what’s called a public good–something everyone is able to use and benefit from, since no one owns it (If it was owned, it would be called a “private” good)(EconPort). This is why my post today is titled “The Ethics of Environmental Justice,” rather than the “Morals” or “Fairness.” Ethics are basically morals held up at the cultural/societal level, and the value of shared public goods is clearly institutionalized–it’s even supported by law, in many cases. As with fire departments and paved roads, the environment is something we don’t need any qualifications to use. It belongs, in part, to everyone, so everyone should have their fair share of the benefits… right?

It’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s ever travelled between rich and poor communities that, regardless of how the environment should be treated as a public good, it certainly is not. For example: Ever notice how wealthier communities not only have nicer houses, but also cleaner air, more public parks and gardens, and stores that sell healthier food? Or how poorer communities (especially ones highly populated by racial minorities) are often very polluted, with trash in their streets, smog in their air, with hardly any food options in their vicinity besides some drug stores or a fast food restaurant (Mohanty)? It’s because the richer population has turned a clean environment into a private good.

When wealthy people are unhappy about something, they have the resources (i.e. money, stocks) to make it worth a company’s while to make it go away. So if a rich community doesn’t want a factory pumping grime into their air and water, for example, the company that owns that factory will relocate it to a place where those wealthy people won’t complain: a poorer community. Granted, the residents of that poor community may very well complain, but unlike the wealthy, they have no financial standing to influence a company which is only interested in money (Mohanty). Similarly, if a rich community wants a public park, or a store that sells lots of organic produce, they have the money to build and/or entice businesses to come install these things. Poor communities do not, and are left with their littered streets and greasy food. Since the companies that often dictate how clean an environment is are almost always driven by money, richer communities have the ability to literally buy a better environment, while poor communities continue to live in squalor (Mohanty)(Shiva). Remember, buying something can easily be equated with owning it, and once it’s owned, a good is no longer a public resource (EconPort).

To help put this in perspective, we can observe a fairly recent occurrance. California’s been going through a very bad drought this year. So bad, in fact, that the state’s governor Jerry Brown had to issue an executive order that all cities and municipalities cut water consumptions by 25-36%. This might seem like a fair way of balancing the shortage, but some of the more affluent Californians were quick to disagree. Steve Yuhas fumed on social media, “[People] should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful” (Durden). Yuhas lives in the ultra-wealthy estate of Rancho Santa Fe, a practical Versailles of Southern California ranches, gated communities, and country clubs which easily consume five times more water per capita than the statewide average. In an interview, Yuhas defended his first statement with the argument that he paid “significant” property taxes in order to live where he did. “And, no,” he added for good measure, “we’re not all equal when it comes to water.” When Governor Brown called for a reduction in water consumption by 25%, Rancho Santa Fe’s consumption rose by 9% (Durden).

I wonder, Yuhas, who do you consider unequal to you when it comes to the consumption of the most basic, organic, life-giving substance? The people who aren’t as wealthy as you? Or the racial minorities associated with that lack of wealth?

A strikingly similar example of this exploitation of the poor communities occurred in India when a Coca-cola plant was discovered to have been siphoning water out of a reserve poor Indians had been using to feed and water their families. Eventually the plant was coaxed into finding water elsewhere, but by then those who had been relying on the water source–who were already suffering in extreme poverty–had been forced to live in drought-like conditions for months (Shiva). This is an instance where, rather than have a large factory destroying their own landscape, American investors outsourced the environmental repercussions to a much poorer region, while simultaneously managing to pay its workers there significantly less than anything they’d make in the United States (Shiva).

There are many more examples of this sort of outsourcing, exploitation, and assumed ownership of the environment on the part of rich individuals and corporations, but I think by now you’ve got the idea. The environment, which should be the most implicite of all public goods, is being bought and sold exclusively by the wealthy elite. And hardly anything is being done to stop it. I didn’t come to you today with a solution, but I do hope this has brought this important issue of Fairness (with the capital “F”) to your attention. Rancho Santa Fe and Coca-Cola got away with what they did with barely a slap on the wrist, and they aren’t the only ones. My question to you is, what more can we do in order to stop environmental injustice?

Durden, Tyler. “‘We’re Not All Equal When It Comes to Water’ –Rich Californians Blast Conservation Efforts.” ZeroHedge. ZeroHedge.com/ABC Media, LTD, 16 June, 2015. Web. 8 Sept., 2015.

“Environmental Justice.” United States Environmental Protection Agency. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 10 June, 2015. Web. 8 Sept., 2015.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. Duke University Press, 10 Jan. 2013. Print.

“Private Goods v. Public Goods.” EconPort. Experimental Economics Center, 2006. Web. 8 Sept., 2015.

Shiva, Vandana. “Vandana Shiva: Our Violent Economy is Hurting Women.” Yes Magazine. n.p., 18 Jan, 2013. Web. 12 Dec., 2013.

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