A week after the terrorist attacks, students of the Peace and Justice Action Group organized a noon rally attended by many members of the campus community. The audience heard from students and faculty members on the history of the region, philosophy of waging a just war and appeals for caution and concerns about curtailing civil liberties in the United States.
Faculty members and students wearing green arm bands distributed flyers and encouraged passersby to sign petitions urging President Bush to find a solution that prevented the killing of more innocent people.
Lisa Trivedi, assistant professor of history, gave a brief overview of the history of the region and U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. She explained that in 1978, the communists took over with Soviet assistance.
"Starting with President Carter in 1980, U.S. tax dollars were used to fund and train the freedom fighters or 'mujahaddin' ," Trivdei said. "Among those freedom fighters were Osama bin Laden and Sheikh Ahmed Abdel Rahman, who is currently in a U.S. prison for planning the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center."
Trivedi pointed out that after the Soviet Union withdrew and the United States lost interest, the fighters left behind had no productive civilian life to return to because of the years of devastation to the region.
Rick Werner, the John Stewart Kennedy Professor of Philosophy, who has an ongoing interest in issues relating to nonviolence, took the podium and outlined arguments against supporting a war on terrorism.
"A global war on terrorism is itself terrorism or vigilantism," said Werner, who also pointed out there was little left in Afghanistan to bomb and reminded listeners that "terrorists live in neighborhoods just like ours." He pleaded for a more lasting memorial to those who died September 11 — "vow 'Never Again'." Werner asked Americans to pledge themselves to relieve suffering and pain thoughout the world and concluded his talk with an Aristotle quote, "We become what we choose to be."
A student from Pakistan, Myra Hamid '02, gave a personal account of what war with Afghanistan would mean for her. "Pakistan faces threats from either neighboring Afghanistan or the United States whatever course of action leaders there choose to take," she said. "I don't see my family and friends as 'political collateral'."
Jim Ring, professor of physics, and Shelley Haley, professor of classics, urged the group to "cherish our democracy and protect our civil liberties." Ring spoke of the war in Vietnam, while Haley had a personal message about what Americans might be agreeing to when they think of curtailing civil liberties. She told the audience that just two years earlier, she had addressed a rally against racial profiling saying, "How quickly we forget." She recounted stories of her son being stopped for questioning because he looks like he might be foreign and Arab Americans being told to turn themselves into the FBI.
The rally ended with Kat Hughes '04 singing, Where Have All the Flowers Gone.
