To the Daily:
White supremacist has no place at MSU
Nick Griffin, head of the British National Party, will speak today at Michigan State University, upon invitation from the Young Americans for Freedom. The BNP is a white supremacist party known to be racist against all non-white communities in Britain and to have a homophobic and anti Semitic history. In line with its xenophobia, the BNP has become explicitly anti-Muslim in recent years.
The BNP plays into the fears of white British people, pushing for an end to immigration, incentives for immigrants “to return home,” denial of housing to immigrant families and denial of refuge to asylum seekers, among other racist agendas. The BNP is a succession of the National Front, which was infamous for inciting riots and hatred in the 1970s and ’80s in Great Britain.
As a Muslim woman from Britain who recently spent nine months living and studying in East London (an area that the BNP and National Front have explicitly targeted because of its large Bangladeshi population), I am astonished that the head of the BNP, a leading British hate figure, will be speaking at MSU.
Griffin has a deplorable history of inciting hatred against immigrants in Great Britain. He envisions the country as a racially pure, white country. As history has shown, this is a very dangerous belief.
The British government convicted him in 1998 of inciting racial hatred. He is a well-known Holocaust-denier and a homophobe. He claims to have cleaned up his act, but his words are now just more misleading. The underlying message is the same: Britain is for white Christians. What can he possibly teach MSU students?
Hena Ashraf
LSA senior
It’s up to students to use credit cards wisely
The Daily’s editorial about the problems students have with credit cards (The Perils of Plastic, 10/24/2007) initially showed promise. Easy credit plus college students saying “sign me up!” equals a bad idea. I have a problem, however, with the sentence, “Many college students, like most people, have to rely on credit cards for most of their purchases.”
There is a difference between “have to” and “choose to.” To my knowledge, none of us “have to” use credit cards at all, outside of potentially conducting business with some car rental companies. Even if you are convinced that plastic is the way to go, then debit cards are the obviously superior option. Debit cards force shoppers to only purchase what they can actually afford, saving time, wallet space, paper, ink and other potential resources when compared to writing out the check or carrying around cash.
Credit cards encourage the opposite: Buy now whatever you want, even if you can’t afford it, and pay us back later with interest, if and when you find the money. Interest charges actually pale in comparison to the late payment penalties that are largely responsible for the relatively high stock prices of the recently-consolidated major lenders.
Each day is a new opportunity to play by your own, more intelligent rules. So you say you were born into a credit society, with poor or non-existent parental role models and a consumerist culture that has inculcated within your soul the “need” to accept and use easy credit that is not in your best interest? Give me a break.
I too live in a sick financial culture with shallow values that gives not a damn about my personal happiness and prosperity. I’ve served as a board member on state and national financial literacy task forces. More to the point, I was born with the ability to think for myself, and I never expected my university to protect me from my own poor decision making.
Jim Eddy
University staff member
Why such a focus on silencing certain speakers?
Thank you for running an important viewpoint about the University Press’s decision to temporarily halt distribution of Joel Kovel’s book (Undermining the academic debate, 10/24/2007). People do not understand how far aggressive opponents of academic freedom go to silence any criticism of Israel. Any discussion of the most important foreign policy questions requires real debate.
In the past year alone, people who refuse to tolerate dissenting views have protested in order to silence reputable scholars and world figures, including Prof. John Mearsheimer of Harvard, Prof. Stephen Walt of the University of Chicago, New York University Prof. Tony Judt and even South African Nobel Peace Prize winner, Desmond Tutu.
They have also attacked Middle East experts and pressured universities to deny them tenure or even to fire them. Enemies of academic freedom successfully pressured DePaul University to deny Norman Finkelstein tenure. They are waging a similar war on Nadia Abu El Haj at Barnard College. Now they want the University of Michigan Press to stop carrying controversial books as well.
With all this pressure to silence critics, one must ask what exactly they are trying to hide.
Ryah Aqel
LSA sophomore