More than 300 people gathered at Wells Hall on Friday at a teach-in about the United States’ potential war in Iraq, organized by a coalition of faculty members and students protesting the war.
From the start, English professor and speaker Ken Harrow said the teach-in was “not purely an educational function, but a political function as well.”
Speakers later urged the audience to join Friday’s rally against war on Iraq in downtown East Lansing.
Harrow, along with four other staff members and a representative from the Students for Peace and Justice, spoke during the two-hour seminar, sponsored by the Faculty, Staff, and Student Coalition Against the War in Iraq.
Assistant English professor Salah Hassan said after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, most of the Middle East was split up and colonized by Great Britain and France.
Hassan said Iraq is unstable because it has been bombed regularly by Britain and the United States since the first George Bush’s presidency.
“The periodic bombing of Iraq is not making the Iraqi people like us more,” Chenai Muzamhindo said, adding that a full-out war on Iraq could be on a larger scale than the Bush administration expects.
“The Arab world won’t stand and watch the United States bomb Iraq,” the Lyman Briggs freshman said.
Faculty member and anthropologist Rose Hassoun said the United States has wrongly demonized all Islamic Arabs and that “Arab” and “terrorist” are not synonymous. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Arab Americans were made victims of hate crimes, she said.
“Their sentiments are with America,” Hassoun said. “But they feel for the Iraqi people.”
English associate Professor Jyotsna Singh suggested someone should send President Bush a map of the Middle East and ask him to fill in the names of the countries.
“Or maybe we could just send him crayons,” she laughed.
MSU College Republicans Chairman Jason Miller said the best forum for educating the public about Iraq would be a debate, where both sides on the issue could present their arguments.
While protesters are accusing Bush of being a unilateralist and acting too hastily, Miller said Bush hasn’t used force yet.
“The Iraqis are willing to talk and Bush is giving them a chance,” he said. “We all know they’re going to lie, but Bush is courageous enough to give them a chance.”
