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Friday, April 5,2002
Editor in Chief:
Jessica Blanchard
Managing Editor:
Jeremy Lang
Editorial Editor:
Julie Lauderbaugh
Assistant Editorial Editor:
Jacquelyn Lewis
Yesteryear's Editorial
Slaying Ends Life,
But Not Cause
Of Reverend King
You can kill a Black man, but you can’t
kill the cause and the spirit of Black
men.
The Black man of this country has begun to
move. He is discovering a heritage and devel
oping a pride. No bullet will steal from him the
freedom and equality due him as a human be
ing and an American citizen.
The assassination of Martin Luther King is a
tragedy in the deepest sense. A tragedy not just to
Black men, but to men of all colors; not just to
----- Americans, but to men of all
University nations; not just to Chris
of Oregon tians, but to men of all faiths.
1 O^TLi These are words which
I kw I n editorial writers save for
ANNIVERSARY great men, for men who,
Originally |ike the Reverand King,
published on g^ness from day to
April 5,1968 day- Tdese are man wi10
- not only accept their des
tiny but rush forth to embrace it, who refuse to
shrink from the burden of the definition of
their name.
Reverend King was great among great men be
cause he not only suffered the trials of leadership,
but he shared the oppression of the people he led.
Some may say the difference between Mr.
King and a Black man in an urban ghetto was
like the very difference between black and
white. But, the reverend shared the oppression
and frustration of the ghetto dweller for he had
to openly confront the White power structure
which perpetuates that oppression and which
sustains thatirustration.
Reverend King was unique among men also
because had he been given the opportunity to
confront his slayer he would still be dead to
day. Given the chance to kill his assassin,
Martin Luther King would not have saved his
own life by following the path of weaker men.
Mrs. Coretta King once said, “My husband
has no fear of death. He has said it does not mat
ter how long you live, but how well.... If you
have to do this for a great cause ... you are doing
right. I have tried to prepare myself for whatever
comes, because somehow I have felt all along
that what we were doing is right. If you believe
in your convictions, you must stand up for
them. If you really believe in a cause enough,
you are willing to die for that cause.”
Reverend King believed in his cause of
equality. He was willing to die for that cause
because he knew his cause and his spirit
would survive him.
Martin Luther King believed he was
| right, and he was.
This editorial was taken from the April 5,1968, edition of the
Oregon Daily Emerald, the day after Martin Luther King Jr.
was assassinated.
Editorial Policy
This editorial represents the opinion of the Emerald
editorial board. Responses can be sent to
(etter s@daliyemeraid.com. Letters to the editor and
guest commentaries are encouraged, letters are
limited to 250 words and guest commentaries to
550 words. Please include contact information. The
Emerald reserves the right to edit for space,
grammar and style.
CLARIFICATION
In the article “Running on sunshine" (ODE. 4/03). Jocelyn
Eisenberg should have been identified as a landscape
architectorestudent.
Keep Americans
home to take care
of US. business
The Middle East has exploded again. On Passover, a suicide
bomber detonated himself inside a busy hotel in the town
of Netanya and 22 people died. A few days later, in re
sponse, the Israelis launched a major offensive intent on destroy
ing Yasser Arafat’s rule over the Palestinian Authority. This has
exacerbated the violence of the 18-month long Intifada.
There has been some debate about whether we should be sit
ting on the sidelines with General Anthony Zinni performing a
Quixotic task—trying to broker a peace deal — or instead send
troops to the region to either keep die peace and separate the two
sides, or aid the Israelis in rooting out certain terror groups whom
we have a long-standing grudge against, including the PLO itself.
As tempting as it would be to go after these
criminals, this fight is not our fight. If we
were to re-insert ourselves into this war, we
would once again have to be prepared for
numerous casualties for an effort that even
our presence may not be enough to change.
What we are seeing in the Middle East is a
blood feud. The Palestinians complain that
the Israelis are choking them economically,
and the Israelis focus on the latest round of
suicide bombings. However, the fight settles
down to millennia of grudges and recrimina
tions, mostly centering on one issue: land.
The land that the Palestinians and Arabs say
Payne they want is the land they lost in the 1967
war, but in their heart of hearts they would
be ecstatic if they could drive the Israelis into
the ocean and be done with them. They feel that the land is theirs
—after all, it had been part of several Muslim empires since 700
A.D. — and that the Israelis are merely squatters. The Israelis see
the land as their kingdom that was taken from them by the Ro
mans after the revolt of 70 A.D.
Second, we could find ourselves thrust into a general Mideast
war, which would be detrimental for us and our own mission. We
found ourselves in a nightmare situation when we intervened in
the civil war in Lebanon in the early 1980s (fomented by the PLO),
culminating in a 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut that
killed 241 soldiers. We need all the troops we can find if we are
going to continue on our planned campaign against Saddam Hus
sein. With our troops so far-flung as they are already, we risk
spreading ourselves too thin to focus on our own problems.
Finally, we don’t exist to clean up other nations’ messes. The
fighting over the West Bank has been exacerbated by the fact that
unless it’s in their own national interests, the other Arab nations
haven’t lifted so much as a finger to help the Palestinians, less it be
to help the Palestinians kill Israelis. The refugees living in what
now are cities over the sites of the original UN camps, were re
fused entry to Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Jordan even controlled
the West Bank until it lost it in the last great gamble—there was a
golden opportunity for a Palestinian state, yet Jordan did nothing.
We once thought of ourselves as the world’s policeman. We
can’t be the world’s parent, not when we have our own job to do.
Columnist
E-mail columnist Pat Payne at patpayne@dailyemerald.com. His opinions do not
necessarily reflect those of the Emerald.
Use US. military,
money to settle
Middle East mess
The blades have been spinning and the colon filling in the Mid
dle East since before I was bom, but now the crap has really hit
the fan. Palestinians have been detonating themselves in Israel
at a rate of about one a day, and now their ranks are being refilled not
by crazy zealots, but by young men and women of relatively sound
mind and body, men and women a lot like you and me.
Israel’s dim-witted response to these suicide bombers is to
blow up Palestine — literally. With American tanks and heli
copters, they’re demolishing the entire infrastructure of the
PLO, as well as anything or anyone unfortunate enough to be
within a stone’s throw of one of its targets.
The suicide attacks are a direct result of years of oppression by Is
, rael (whether or not this oppression is justi
fied is another topic altogether), so it stands
to reason that harsher oppression will only
yield more college-aged kids with more C4
stuffed down their drawers sneaking
through Israeli checkpoints. This, in turn,
will yield more angry tanks and helicopters
and explosions, which will yield more
bombers, and so on and so forth. They are
caught in a violent, vicious cycle, and neither
side is willing to do what is necessary to
break it. They’ve given up. So they fight.
Maybe the real problem here, in the
eyes of the rest of the world, is the uneven
ness of the fight. With our help, Israel has
Columnist become almost a world military power
- (they’ve got nukes, for Christ’s sake).
Palestine is a giant refugee camp. When one side of a conflict
has a standing army and heavy artillery and the other splits a
half-dozen AK-47s and a pile of rocks, eyebrows will be raised.
Most of those eyebrows are big, bushy black ones in Egypt,
Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, Israel’s Arab neighbors. The citi
zens of each of these countries are pressuring their leaders to
take action against the bullies next door. This “war” will spill
over if left alone. It’s only a matter of time.
If stopping a bloody, senseless conflict isn’t incentive enough to
get us more involved, maybe salvaging our foreign policy goals is. Be
fore this thing flared up, we had a nice ‘‘coalition’ ’ against terror. Sad
dam Hussein has promised to give financial assistance to the families
of suicide bombers in Palestine, essentially encouraging parents to
allow or even persuade their children to strap on explosives, run into
a crowd of Israelis and turn them into ground beef. He has publicly
promoted terrorism of the nastiest order, and we can’t do a damn
thing to stop him. He knows the rest of the Arab world told Dick Ch
eney to piss offwhen he sought support for action against Iraq. He
knows they have his back—now he’s rubbing our face in it.
Israel and Palestine are acting with all the civility, wisdom and re
straint of four-year-olds fighting over the last grape lollipop. Someone
has to separate them, stick their noses in opposite comers of the room
while their mess is cleaned up. We have the money, the leverage, the
troops and, unlike some other closer industrialized nations, the back
bone to do the job. If we don’t, someone a little less objective might.
E-maii columnist Aaron Rorickataaronrorick@dailyemerald.com. His opinions do not
necessarily reflectthose of the Emerald.