Students for Clarity

Students for Clarity make the following demands:

All campus groups claiming to oppose genocide, oppression, and colonialism must immediately:

• Devote proportional attention and outrage to the actual genocide of the Tibetan people or explain why those people do not matter.
• Devote proportionate attention and outrage to the religious, cultural, and political persecution of the Uighur people and their use as slaves in work camps, or else explain why those people do not matter.
• Devote proportionate attention and outrage to the fate of Christian minorities all across the Muslim world whose numbers have shrunk due to persecution, forced expulsion, enslavement, and mass murder, or explain why those people do not matter.
• Devote proportionate attention and outrage to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslim civilians from Pakistan to the Maghreb. This ongoing indiscriminate slaughter (especially in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, and Sudan) at the hands of other Muslims allied with repressive regimes and/or Iran must end.

Despite unfolding horror shows around the globe, many of our fellow students in an embarrassingly anti-intellectual, bumper sticker level of analysis have arbitrarily applied the “oppressor/oppressed” label or its functional equivalent to the situation in Gaza (a conflict that would not make the top ten or twenty of current mass killing locations perpetrated by Muslims) and stopped thinking in any substantive detail about these events.

Our misguided campus colleagues have refused to treat Palestinians as fully human beings accountable for their actions regardless of political or ideological contexts. This defective posture is a dereliction of a duty of reason and, even worse, a condescending, tacitly racist treatment of a narrative-designated victim group.

Many of our fellow students have crawled inside a narrative so tiny-brained and deformative that it requires excusing or endorsing rape. On Oct 7, rapists boasted on social media as they decided which captive women would be used as hostages and which would be raped and murdered. This was done with the unambiguous approval of their fellows. But the tiny-brained narrative forbids any adverse judgment of those men or the depressing fact that their outlook was not aberrant or exceptional.

Given the scale of casualties, the highly discriminate use of force by the armed forces of an internationally recognized nation responding to mass murder and inhumane atrocities by an invading terrorist force, the mischaracterization of the Israeli campaign in Gaza as “genocide” while ignoring actual genocides makes our student body appear poorly educated, morally obtuse, and easily led. There can be no useful, substantive discussion of any important issues unless and until we dispense with bumper-sticker levels of thought (or non-thought) and dispense with ideological habits that devolve into that state of mind.

We need clarity now.