Also this issue: War in Black and White How racial attitudes towards the war are playing out in Philly. -Deborah Bolling

April 10-16, 2003

cover story

The War On Campus

School of Thought: The campus is a battleground for the hearts and minds of students. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

More and more, pro-war groups are paying attention to colleges and universities.

by Daniel Brook

These are strange days indeed when a symposium hosted by the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict is standing-room only. Students, alumni and community members packed a University of Pennsylvania lecture hall to hear faculty weigh in on the war in Iraq.

Only one of the five professors at the podium vigorously defended the war and when one speaker suggested that Bush would not be around in two years to sort out the mess his war created, the audience burst out in spontaneous applause.

Area college students are well represented among the antiwar protesters who have been marching through the streets of Center City. They were also among those camping out along Delaware Avenue to harass the presidential motorcade last week.

Penn Students Against War on Iraq has established a permanent presence in the university student union building where passersby can get antiwar fliers, make peace sign armbands or, as some College Republicans have done, argue about the war.

According to Shafiq El-Amin of the Philadelphia Regional Anti-War Network (PRAWN), area college students have been heavily involved in their protests. El-Amin says activists from Penn, Temple, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, La Salle and the Community College of Philadelphia have all shown up for rallies. "The most enthusiastic group is the Radical Education Collective at Temple. They handcuffed themselves to the army recruiting station at Broad and Cherry," he says.

Jennifer Waldron, a Temple student and member of the Radical Education Collective, says that in addition to protests the group has hosted speakers and organized teach-ins.

Waqar Rehman, president of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at Temple, says his group, which has about 50 members, is "participating in those rallies and demonstrations that are aiming to stop the war in Iraq." In addition, his group recently brought an antiwar speaker to campus.

The Temple MSA position squares with the position taken by other Muslim student groups around the country, according to Ibrahim Hooper, spokesperson for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "The Muslim Student Associations on campus are almost universally opposed to the war and that just reflects the position of the larger Muslim community," he says.

Despite the seeming unity of Muslim public opinion, indications are that locally, at least, student opinion on campus is mixed. A poll of Penn students conducted by The Daily Pennsylvanian, the undergraduate newspaper, found 44 percent of students opposing the war and 40 percent in favor. This may reflect a concerted push by conservative groups to make their case on campus. After having ceded the universities to the left after the antiwar protests of the Vietnam era, right-wing groups have recently been mobilizing to change public opinion on campus.

According to Daniel Pipes, who runs the conservative Middle East Forum, a think tank in Philadelphia, "There's more attention, more money, more organizations [devoted to affecting public opinion on college campuses]. You have the traditional conservative organizations like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Young America Foundation. You have new organizations like FDD [the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies] so there is definitely a greater effort, a greater ambition to provide alternate voices. And in a small way my own organization has something called the Campus Speakers Bureau and we're speaking a lot on the campuses." For years, Pipes has criticized the dearth of pro-American scholars in university Middle East studies departments.

"What we did essentially was a year and half ago, after Sept. 11, we started a thing called Operation Campus Rally," explains Chad Kifer, the campus education director for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a Wilmington, Del.-based group that supports conservative students and their publications on campuses nationwide. According to Kifer, ISI organized a series of university lectures to address the question, "Why does Islam hate us?" Well-known conservative journalist and author Dinesh D'Souza gave a number of ISI lectures.

Despite being headquartered nearby, Kifer said ISI has not sponsored any local events specifically on the Iraq situation. One group that has taken its speakers to local campuses is the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). On March 26 the D.C.-based group, which was formed after 9/11 by out-of-government Republicans Jack Kemp, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Steve Forbes, brought two pro-war Iraqi refugees to the University of Pennsylvania to speak to students about the horrors of Saddam Hussein's regime.

In their speeches, Zainab al-Suwaij, a Shi'ite who left the country in 1991 and Tanya Gilly, a Kurd whose family fled in the 1970s, detailed the brutality of the Iraqi government. Al-Suwaij said she was barred from higher education because she was not a member of the ruling Ba'ath party. She said her aunt had been imprisoned by the regime because her grandfather refused to hang a portrait of Saddam in his home. A few days after her Philadelphia visit, al-Suwaij appeared in a video released by the Pentagon detailing Iraqi human rights abuses.

Despite the wrenching testimony, antiwar activists in the audience engaged al-Suwaij and Gilly. Farah Mokhtareizadeh, a University of Pennsylvania student, spent two months in Iraq in 2002 with Voices in the Wilderness, a group opposed to the economic sanctions then in place. Mokhtareizadeh said, from what she saw, the sanctions hurt innocent Iraqis while leaving the regime in place. Al-Suwaij and Gilly countered that it was the regime's selling of humanitarian aid in surrounding countries that caused the starvation and lack of medical care that Mokhtareizadeh saw. Mokhtareizadeh was not convinced. "I believe in liberation [for Iraq] but I do not believe we are using the right means," she said. After years of propping up Saddam and then refusing to back the 1991 revolt against him, she said, "the U.S. has no credibility."

For Al-Suwaij and Gilly, the fact that the U.S. is in part responsible for Saddam Hussein's remaining in power for so long is even more reason the U.S. has a responsibility to depose the regime.

While Mokhtareizadeh, with her on-the-ground experience in Iraq, is unlikely to change her mind, many college students are more open. Travis Clark, assistant director of FDD, acknowledges his group wants to change students' minds about the war. "Indirectly we're interested in promoting campus debate but primarily we want the world to realize what's happening in Iraq," he says. "These women have something very important to say that isn't being heard on many college campuses."