Letters to the Editor
La Voz De Aztlan is a propaganda rag
Wednesday’s “La Voz De Aztlan” was filled with interesting, articulate articles and some touching memorials.
Then came the cartoons. The insert included a cartoon depicting Governor Schwarzenegger as a puppet.
That’s not so bad, we can all appreciate some playful satire. I expected the hand controlling the governor to read “special interest” or “big-business.”
Apparently, I was completely wrong. Instead, the artist had emblazoned “grand wizard” on the hand’s coat sleeve, as well as a swastika on the governor’s ring.
Now, for those of you who didn’t know (I didn’t either; I had to Google it), the Grand Wizard is the accepted leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The swastika, as most of us know, was the sign of the Nazi party.
Now I suppose the argument for the swastika could be justified in that the governor hails from Austria. But with that logic, I guess a good portion of Americans with ancestors from Germany and Austria are guilty as well.
Linking the governor with the KKK is just a shoddy attempt at attacking his character.
I am proud to attend a school where the importance of cultural diversity is recognized by both the students and the newspaper, but I wish these periodic inserts could be more than four pages littered with anti-conservative propaganda.
In the future I would hope that those who contribute to “La Voz De Aztlan” stick to informed articles and avoid sad, desperate attempts at satire.
—Tal Eslick
Junior, political science
U.S. fiddles with Iraq, ignores Sudan
“[A] woman told the team that she had been raped repeatedly in front of her father by members of the Sudanese military and Jingaweit. Afterwards, her father was dismembered in front of her.”
This comes from a report by the Atrocities Documentation Team assembled by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy and Human Rights and Labor. The team conducted 1,136 interviews of Sudanese refugees on the Sudan-Chad border. Government-backed militias, known collectively as the Jingaweit, are systematically eliminating entire communities of African tribal farmers in Darfur, Sudan.
According to the findings of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry, January 25, 2005, “Government forces and militias conducted indiscriminate attacks, including killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement, throughout Darfur. These acts were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis…”
For the first time in its history, the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has declared a “genocide emergency” in Sudan. Most reports by the Atrocities Documentation Team exhibit a similar pattern.
Well then, may I ask for what purpose is the Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.) being conducted? My apologies, it’s now Operation Iraqi Freedom (O.I.F.). Don’t ask me why.
—Hyder M. Alamgir
Freshman, electrical engineering
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