The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/yemen/)
Representatives at last week’s Student Assembly meeting sponsored resolutions that condemned University ties to the war in Yemen and that would provide students with ‘slip days’, giving them extra breathing room on assignment deadlines.
Joseph Mullen ’24 gave a presentation to the Student Assembly about why the Cornell Progressives want Cornell to cut ties with Saudi Arabia, citing human rights violations.
On Feb. 5, President Joe Biden announced that the United States would finally withdraw American support for the war in Yemen, effectively ending American support for the Saudi-led coalition that has been committing genocide upon the Yemeni people. In addition, Biden announced that he would suspend arms trades to the Saudis as punishment for the 100,000 civilian deaths (as well as 85,000 children), caused by the coalition’s blockade of the country, the intense bombing of civilian locations such as hospitals and a man-made famine. The civil war in Yemen has been ongoing for close to seven years, starting between the government of Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi and the Houthi rebel movement. Tensions were precipitated by the 2011 Yemeni Revolution, part of the Arab Spring, where rebels led by Abdul-Malik Badreddin al-Houthi boycotted a single-candidate election orchestrated by Hadi.
To the Editor:
As an Iranian American graduate student at Cornell and the son of Iranian immigrants, I have bitten my tongue as I watch the likes of Michael Johns ’20 be given a platform for their anti-Iran hysteria. But I can no longer contain my annoyance over the gross inaccuracies, historical revisionism and American exceptionalism emanating from The Sun because of him. Johns loves to criticize the Iranian government. And in fact, there is nothing wrong with good faith criticism of any government or political system. I would know this.
Yesterday, Jacob Brown grad, a columnist at The Sun, published a polemical piece bearing the puzzling title “Terrorism: Propaganda Versus Reality.” It took direct aim at a column of mine from some eight months ago, “Reining In Iran’s Brutal Regime,” an attempt to review the nation’s horrific human rights violations and offer policies to challenge its immoral leadership as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. In his column, Brown holds the extraordinary premise that the United States is the real leading state sponsor of terrorism — a declaration so extreme, almost no one but the Iranian Foreign Ministry itself has found the audacity to make it. Anti-Americanism, unfortunately, often traffics in this kind of rhetoric, feebly attempting to flip the script on foreign policy experts by intentionally conflating difficult policy choices or historical policy mistakes with the sinister efforts by Tehran and others to commit deliberate acts of extreme violence against civilians. Criticizing bad choices can be important — but Brown was wrong to make the indefensible claim that the U.S. lacks “any sense of moral high ground” over the brutal Iranian regime. Brown begins by discussing the Yemeni Civil War, an ongoing proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia that is having undeniably catastrophic effects on civilians and regional security.
ISIS ideology does not go away once their territorial strongholds are broken, the former ambassador said.
Few words are needed to express the heavy realities found within our global refugee crisis. Ai Weiwei’s documentary Human Flow captivates an awareness of this crisis chronicling the unimaginable narratives of refugees around the globe. Weiwei follows a series of stories, capturing the lives of refugees in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, France, Greece, Germany, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Mexico and Turkey.
Moderated by Prof. Aziz Rana, law, the forum allowed five professors from Cornell’s government, law and history departments to discuss whether some actions constitute war crimes and outline what — if anything — the international community can do to punish those responsible.