This week, the Northeastern chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is hosting Israeli Apartheid Week on campus. In recent years, few issues have been as divisive on campus as the Israel-Palestine conflict. On each side of the issue is a very active student group – SJP, and Huskies for Israel. Members of both of these groups should be commended for their civic engagement and for pursuing their sense of justice, but both groups could better further their goals and improve Northeastern’s community by working together instead of against each other.
As a college student (and a journalist in general), the minimum wage is something that I am very familiar with. I have worked many minimum wage jobs, mostly in the restaurant industry, where the minimum wage for waitstaff lingers somewhere around $2.60 per hour. Don’t worry, I don’t spend it all in one place.
For the 2.6 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank, "apartheid" is not just some abstract concept, a word only seen in history books. Apartheid is the way things are, a bitter fact of life they must live through every day. This is why we have Israeli Apartheid Week, to raise awareness of their plight, so that it may someday end.
In early March, students from college campuses all across the country, including Northeastern, will join together as part of “Israeli Apartheid Week.” The alleged purpose of this event is "to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system and to build Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns” against the country. In America, we all have freedom of speech under the First Amendment to the Constitution. However, this freedom should not be used to spread incitement and hate through lies and a demonization campaign. The accusation that Israel is an apartheid state is false.
In my State of the Union Address, I laid out ways Democrats and Republicans can work together to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class.
Northeastern has a tuition problem. This has long been evident to most Northeastern students, but the urgency of the issue was highlighted by the White House’s new College Scorecard, which analyzes the true costs of attending institutions across the nation. To be blunt, Northeastern got an F.
If Congress fails to get it together by tomorrow, the United States faces some pretty significant spending cuts, also known as the sequester – anyone who has turned on CNN in the last two weeks is already probably sick of the word. But what I wasn’t so sure about, and what a lot of the news coverage fails to address, is whether I – a student at a large research university – am screwed.
Last week, President Obama announced that by this time next year, the United States will withdraw half of its troops from Afghanistan. This is encouraging news for those who believe the War in Afghanistan has gone on too long. But will such a significant drawdown result in a reduction of military operations in the country? Intuition says it would, but a highly controversial, often ignored practice leaves this question unresolved. This practice, of course, is that of U.S. drone strikes.
With freezing temperatures, constant snowfall and the T breaking down every five minutes, it is safe to say that many Bostonians are dreaming of a getaway. I am no different. I have been planning a vacation to Jamaica for the past couple months and soon I will be sitting on a beach for a week without a care in the world – hopefully. Not all vacations go as planned, as I and many others have experienced.
