Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904

The GW Hatchet

Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

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Staff editorial: Professing peace

People are dying in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, and the ripples from those events wash up on the shores of GW. For students with family besieged by the conflict, the violence in the Middle East strikes close to home. Everyone must be cognizant of that fact and work to ease the fears and anxieties these students harbor while their cousins, parents or siblings are exposed to a very real danger. Incitement of conflict on our own campus through insensitivity and anger should be avoided at all costs.

A student-organized peace vigil Thursday night sought to accomplish just that, to bring students from both sides of this volatile issue to Kogan Plaza to pray and demonstrate for peace. The good intentions of the organizers were challenged by individual agendas to make the vigil a forum for politics and partisan sniping. A small number of participants used slanted language and barely veiled assaults to disparage each other. Rather than allow a worthwhile experience to become a petty exchange of inflammatory comments as happened among a minority of the vigil’s participants, Muslims and Jews must follow the example of the organizers of the event and endeavor to maintain peace at GW even while the Middle East is engulfed in violence.

As a University with a large population of both Muslim and Jewish students, GW has the potential to become a domestic flashpoint, a collateral casualty in the battle over the future of the land once called Palestine and now named Israel. But students should not allow passions to overflow into violence amid heated debate and objectionable flyers covered with slogans denouncing Palestinian motivations or Israeli reactions.

Across campus, buzzwords like “ethnic cleansing,” “guerilla war” and “terrorism” make their way into conversation and placards, but students must realize the consequences and connotations those words carry. Words are very powerful in shaping perceptions. They must not be used to drive the community apart when what is so sorely needed is for students to come together.

Tensions are high; nerves are frayed. Now is the time to reinforce the idea that colleges and universities are safe havens from conflict – places where ideas and discussion carry the day, where violence and hatred have no audience.

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