JHU POLITIK
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FEBRUARY 23, 2015
VOLUME XVII, ISSUE V
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JHU POLITIK EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Eliza Schultz MANAGING EDITOR Christine Server
HEAD WRITER Julia Allen
ASSISTANT EDITORS Katie Botto Dylan Etzel Preston Ge Abigail Sia
POLICY DESK EDITOR Mira Haqqani
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Diana Lee
MARYLAND EDITOR David Hamburger
COPY EDITOR Florence Noorinejad WEBMASTER Ben Lu MARKETING & PUBLICITY Chiara Wright FACULTY ADVISOR Steven R. David
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CAMPUS EDITOR Juliana Vigorito
STAFF WRITERS Abigail Annear Olga Baranoff Arpan Ghosh Alexander Grable Rosellen Grant Rebecca Grenham Shrenik Jain Christine Kumar Shannon Libaw Robert Locke Sathvik Namburar Corey Payne Zachary Schlosberg
• February 23, 2015 • Volume XVII, Issue V
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
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Week In Review: Terror Lawanya Singh ’17 Assisted Suicide:
Coming to a Physician Near You?
Shrenik Jain ’18
How Does ISIS Recruit? Evan Harary ’16 The NFL Deeply Regrets the Role It Played on the Night of the Incident Zachary Schlosberg ’16 The Study of the Military Alexander Grable ’15 Serial and Syed:
Exploring America’s Flawed Justice System
Callie Plapinger ’16
Volume XVII, Issue V • February 23, 2015 •
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Week In Review: Terror by Lawanya Singh ’17, Contributing Writer Copenhagen Shooting Fuels Fire over Free Speech and Religion A gunman left two dead and five wounded in a terrorist attack that took place in the capital city of Denmark on February 14. The gunman, Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, killed one civilian and injured three police officers at a free speech event called “Art, Blasphemy, and Freedom of Expression”. Later, he went on to kill one Jewish man and wound another three police officers at a nearby synagogue. El-Hussein has since been killed by Danish police. He was well known by police for his involvement in gangs and weapons violence, and it is believed that El-Hussein had made a Facebook post pledging his allegiance to ISIS’s leader. Some have suggested that it was El-Hussein’s experiences in prison that turned him into a radical Islamist. This tragedy comes a month after Paris’s deadly Charlie Hebdo shooting. These events have only intensified the debates over freedom of speech and respect for religious and ethnic minorities in European countries.
Chapel Hill Murders Add to Religious Division in United States Three Muslim students residing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina were murdered on February 10 by their neighbor Craig Stephen Hicks, who is now in custody. The Chapel Hill Police Department initially investigated the crime as a parking dispute, but federal investigators are also considering the possibility that this was an anti-Muslim crime. Inquiries about Mr. Hicks have revealed that his neighbors knew him as an angry man. His Facebook posts, which are filled with anti-religion sentiments, have led some to suggest that these murders should be considered a hate crime. For the American Muslim community, this shooting is a devestating reminder of the anti-Muslim attitudes they face from Islamophobic groups all around the world. In the wake of this incident, many across the world are showing solidarity with the Muslim community through social media, using the phrase #muslimlivesmatter.
ISIS Beheads 21 Egyptians as Group Expands Operations A new video released by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria shows the beheading of 21 Christian Egyptians in Libya. It is the first video that depicts ISIS killing their hostages in new territory that is outside of their main base of Iraq and Syria. The video intensifies growing concern that the Islamist militia group is expanding its base of operations into new countries. According to NBC News, Libyans worry that ISIS will exploit the existing chaos in the country to establish headquarters, as three Libyan militant groups have already pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. The Libyan government has reached out to the West for aid in halting ISIS’s rise. ■
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• February 23, 2015 • Volume XVII, Issue V
Assisted Suicide:
Coming to a Physician Near You?
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by Shrenik Jain ’18, Staff Writer
uicide is not illegal in the United States. What is illegal, however, is a physician assisting, encouraging, or enabling a patient to commit suicide. But this may be about to change in Maryland, as the topic of physicianassisted suicide has entered the state spotlight this current session. Championing the practice is Richard “Dick” Israel, a wellrespected civil servant who lobbies for death with dignity from his hospital bed as he suffers from terminal Parkinson’s disease. Israel’s efforts can and should pave the way for the legalization of physician-assisted death (PAD) in Maryland. Most states criminalized physician-assisted suicide after the now-infamous Dr. Jack Kervorkian sent 60 Minutes a video himself assisting in the death of a patient with advanced Lou Gehrigs disease, resulting in his imprisonment under second degree murder charges. In 1997, Oregon passed the Death With Dignity Act, under which terminally ill patients could self-administer a dose of lethal medicine with the approval of two physicians. Oregon’s law inspired similar legislation in Vermont and Washington, which were passed by all three states through referenda. As it prepares to grapple with this issue, Maryland should recognize the voting behaviors of its diverse population. Opinions on assisted suicide strongly correlate with race and education level, and African Americans, for example, are more likely than whites to oppose PAD and euthanasia. This consideration should be at the forefront of state lawmakers’ minds when considering voters in locations such as Baltimore, which encompasses a world-renowned hospital and a majority black city with many residents still struggling to get adequate medical care.
his or her life in the face of terminal illness. While initial backlash is likely, hopefully this understanding of PAD as a method of transferring power to the patient can help allay some of the concerns of opponent parties in Maryland. On an ethical level, the argument for PAD is well-established. As Dick Israel frames it, “Modern science has prolonged life without giving us insight into the meaning or purpose of life. The purpose of this legislation is to restore the role of science as a servant of humanity, not the master.” In other words, healthcare professionals may do their jobs and offer the best possible healthcare to their patients, but the process requires oversight on multiple levels. Medicine is a complex and multifaceted field, and care must be taken so that end-of-life care does not devolve into a costly train of salvage operations. Ultimately, patients have the fundamental right to refuse any treatment, and doctors therefore have an obligation to assist patients on the patient’s terms. The political prognosis for Israel’s bill seems good. Major players in Maryland politics, including Catholic groups, appear to be assuaged by the strict regulations on PAD included in the bill. While these opponent groups do not approve of it wholesale, vigorous resistance has not materialized. The legalization of physician-assisted suicide could serve as an ethical and social victory for Maryland – and a fitting legacy for Dick Israel. ■
The state government should take steps to bridge the existing distrust of PAD by various stakeholders to ease the way toward legalization. While many individuals hold religious beliefs that prohibit PAD, it is likely that this practice is still preferable to euthanasia, in which a doctor “mercykills” a patient. Euthanasia invokes fears of megalomaniac physicians smothering patients, while PAD simply represents a shift in authority, in which the patient has the power to end
Volume XVII, Issue V • February 23, 2015 •
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How Does ISIS Recruit? by Evan Harary ’16, Contributing Writer
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or every video documenting the atrocities that the Islamic State commits, ten foreign-born recruits renounce their former citizenship and pledge themselves, likely until their deaths, to serve the terrorist organization. The CIA’s most recent estimates place the ISIS fighting force at 20,000 members. Many more civilians live within the Islamic State’s declared caliphate, which covers a territory roughly the size of the United Kingdom. ISIS’s offensive has made it the enemy of virtually every state power in the region and beyond. So how has it managed a continual stream of recruits that includes everything from foreign-born, converted Muslims to entire families? The answer lies partially in the organization’s prodigious and well-crafted social media presence, the disaffected state of many Muslim communities abroad, and ISIS’s vivid, if wrong-headed, invocation of Islamic scripture. To alienated (often male) youth in the Middle East and beyond, the Islamic State projects a simple, but effective appeal: join and you become one of the manly, the brave, and the ideologically pure. Imam Shahib, a Muslim community leader, summed up the ISIS recruitment tag in an article in The New York Times: “Come here. We’ve got ripped warriors.” The organization underscores this message with a deft and persistent social media presence. Recruiters, in much the same manner as online predators, network through Twitter, Facebook, and other relevant forums and chatrooms. “They will try to be your friend,” Humera Khan, an anti-extremist activist, recently told The New York Times, “They will be nice to you, spend lots of time with you. Some of them will be sending you gifts.” To some young, disaffected Muslims, living in nations in which the mainstream is often nakedly hostile toward the Muslim community, these tactics are all ISIS needs. But how has ISIS, an organization that practices slavery and uses rape as a weapon, managed to recruit women and families? The answer is partly due to factors that make investigating ISIS second-hand so difficult: a widespread distrust of Western media. A Google search for ISIS recruiting tactics turns up a CNN segment claiming that ISIS attracts women with kittens and Nutella, a notion at once belittling to women, mind-numbingly simplistic, and surely false. Potential recruits in the Middle East and North
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Africa hear from within ISIS that things aren’t so bad, and that ISIS is the subject of a smear campaign at the hands of Western media. Recently, a captive British journalist spoke, allegedly out of his own free will, on the foolishness and duplicity of Western governments and news sources. John Cantile, a former reporter for The Sun, asserted that ISIS is “stronger than ever” and that the “[publicized] killings are…exactly what our [Western] governments need to bolster public support” and “lure the public into [supporting] the conflict.” Abdul Mujid, an advocate for the Islamic State living in the UK, spoke to The Atlantic on the relative quality of ISIS’s current social welfare system. ISIS advocate Anjem Choudary insisted in The Atlantic in the humanity of terror tactics such as mass rape and broadcasted execution because they supposedly hasten victory and therefore spare lives. In many cases, disillusionment with the mainstream narrative on ISIS in the West has helped the Islamic State recruit members it might otherwise be unable to reach. ISIS practices a narrowly-grounded interpretation of Islam based in certain excerpts of scripture. ISIS scholars say that the organization is destined to found a caliphate and bring about the apocalypse. ISIS soldiers, in terrorizing swathes of the Middle East, claim they are following a “prophetic methodology.” This ideological nexus constitutes a fractional and widely decried interpretation of Islamic scripture, but nonetheless commands a magnetic cult-like appeal. ISIS recruiters offer adrift populations the supposed opportunity to participate in a dramatic process of scriptural fulfillment. ISIS’s expansion is disheartening, but its outsize media presence may soon turn on it. Amir (last name withheld), speaking with The New York Times, once seriously contemplated joining ISIS, citing the incompatibility of secular life in America with his devout faith. But as ISIS continued to broadcast scenes of torture and death, Amir concluded that the organization is no more in keeping with Quranic teaching than any violent movement before it. “The Islamic State once looked like eye candy to me,” Amir says. “But now I think they are deviants.” ■
• February 23, 2015 • Volume XVII, Issue V
The NFL Deeply Regrets the Role It Played on the Night of the Incident
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by Zachary Schlosberg ’16, Staff Writer
n August 28, 2005, police responded to a call in suburban Minnetonka, MN at the home of Kevin Williams, then-Minnesota Vikings defensive tackle, and his wife, Tasha Williams, a college senior. Mrs. Williams was found with two lacerations on her left forearm and blood on her shirt after Mr. Williams pushed her when he saw that she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. When she hit him with her cell phone, he threw her over the bed and into the nightstand. After he pled guilty to disorderly conduct, the court gave Mr. Williams a $1,000 fine and one-year probation, but the NFL did not punish him. Earlier in 2005, Brad Hopkins, left tackle for the Tennessee Titans, pleaded guilty to assaulting his wife, Ellen. He choked her after she refused to end a discussion with an insurance agent about adding another car to their coverage. In 2005, nine NFL players were arrested on domestic violence charges. Hopkins’ one-game suspension was the only punishment doled out by the league. In 2014, in the wake of the Ray Rice case, two more cases surfaced: Greg Hardy and Ray McDonald. The NFL has a problem. But Roger Goodell has a solution. “We can use the NFL to help create change,” he said. “Not only in our league, but in society with respect to domestic violence and sexual assault.” Sure, that sounds great. A league that brings in $10 billion a year and spends about $10 million on its Super Bowl halftime show ought to be able to help make a difference, at the very least by sending some real money to the frontlines of the fight against domestic violence. After all, what else would societal change entail? More than anything, the NFL wants to show that they care about this issue. They have brought on three domestic violence consultants, partnered with No More, and plan to donate $25 million over five years to the National Domestic Violence Hotline and $1 million to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. While any support in the national fight against sexual assault is welcome, efforts by the NFL are disgraceful. As Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal wrote to Goodell, “The NFL’s failure to pledge resources directly to shelters and other local service providers may be seen rightly by many survivor advocates as a mockery
of any real commitment … If the NFL is serious about its commitment to combating domestic violence, it could contribute many times more…” That is the problem: the only thing the NFL is serious about is its reputation. One of the consultants brought on by Goodell is Jane Randel, an expert in reputation, crisis management, and corporate rebranding. Coincidentally, she is a co-founder of No More, which itself is little more than a brand. As Diana Moskovitz wrote for Deadspin, “[No More is] an awareness campaign, overseen mostly by brands, intent on making us aware of a problem we already know about. They don’t provide services. They don’t accept donations. They don’t know how much money they’ve generated for local groups that actually work directly with victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. But they do make some snazzy wife beaters and coasters with their logo on them!” As Virginia Witt, a co-founder of No More, writes, “The idea was to give domestic violence and sexual assault something these issues had never had: a unifying brand.” This is merely the NFL doing what it has always done best: trying its damnedest to show that it cares while not really caring very much at all. We’ve heard this before: the NFL’s claim of 100 percent proceeds from retail and auction during their prominent Pink October has translated to an average of just over $1 million donated to the American Cancer Society each year over the past five years. Only the NFL’s royalty fee from this pink merchandise actually ends up in the hands of the ACS, making it unknowable what percentage of each price tag eventually makes it to the charity. But look at all that pink on TV! Under the guise of creating awareness for issues we are already aware of, the NFL frees itself from tangible support. The NFL has a problem, sure, and its problem is that it cares deeply about nothing. It cares only about reproducing its own ugliness and turning its evils into more profit. ■
Volume XVII, Issue V • February 23, 2015 •
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The Study of the Military by Alexander Grable ’15, Staff Writer
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n university political science and history courses, there exists a general lack of interest in the military. Battles are mentioned but their details are not, and the military becomes a peripheral player in security studies. And when it is mentioned in political science and history articles, the military tends to be a passive player or a rude intrusion into the study. It is almost never studied as an institution. Academic frustration with the military was captured by one senior Johns Hopkins professor who told me that the military in general was not interesting due to a lack of intellectual sophistication among its members and its worldview. Though this is a somewhat simplistic depiction, until we study the military more closely, we will never understand why this is. The lack of study is neglectful, both because lack of understanding leads to uninformed policy decisions and because it neglects the people in the military.
Many soldiers find themselves at liberty to criticize the military after leaving it and, in doing so, point to the processes and divisions at work beneath the surface. In Pakistan, General Tikka Khan became more critical of the military after he retired. In America, General Smedley Butler questioned how the military was employed and, in his famed speech about the military-industrial complex, President Eisenhower criticized the military and called on the American people to study it. More recently, Boston University professor and retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich admits that he began to study the military more carefully once he retired. All of these men asked a question rarely asked in political science or considered in writing history: to what end is the military used and how is it evolving as an institution? If soldiers don’t study their own institution in an objective manner, civilians must.
Georgetown professor Christine Fair has shown in her new book, Fighting to the End, that neglecting the military produces policy decisions that backfire. Fair says that the Pakistan Army is perceived to be an army like the U.S. Army, the British Army, or even the Indian Army. However, the Pakistan Army sees itself as a guardian of an Islamic ideology as well as of the physical borders of Pakistan. This in part explains the support the army lends to the Taliban. It hopes that jihad can be used to wrest Kashmir from India and thinks that if it gives up, it will fail. By this logic, the Pakistan Army tells itself that defeat in battle or war is not defeat so long as it does not lead to Pakistan’s inability to theoretically challenge India. Fair argues that giving more aid to Pakistan, or even trying to resolve the Kashmir dispute in the nation’s favor, would not stop this behavior; instead, it might even encourage it.
It is also right to study the military for the simple reason that soldiers are people too and deserve to have their voices recorded for posterity like any other group, perhaps even more so. The military, like any institution, is a place where many men and increasing numbers of women spend part or much of their lives. It is an institution where many people have lived their last moments, and those moments should be studied, recorded and disseminated. One cannot understand war unless one properly studies the battles and what it was like for those caught in the maelstrom. This inattention also leads to ignorance regarding the human rights abuses soldiers are often subjected to, and instead focuses on crimes perpetrated by soldiers, as if they somehow cannot be victims to the same degree as others.
We can see, therefore, that the Pakistan Army must be studied as an institution. We should compare it with our own military, as millenarian Christians, little different from Islamic radicals, are highly represented in the U.S. military.
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To construct informed policy concerning the military, whether the U.S. Military or a foreign military, the attention of academic historians and political scientists is necessary. Furthermore, the people who have lived and died while in service deserve recognition. Historians and political scientists must examine the military to lift the mask away and reveal the human face beneath. ■
• February 23, 2015 • Volume XVII, Issue V
Serial and Syed:
Exploring America’s Flawed Justice System by Callie Plapinger ’16, Contributing Writer
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rguably the sensation of the year, the “Serial” podcast has captivated its listeners and gained massive amounts of popularity since it first aired in October 2014. As of two weeks ago, an appeal has been granted regarding the conviction of Adnan Syed. Syed, a Baltimore local, stands accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend in 1999. By exposing potential inconsistencies in the evidence against Syed, the podcast has spurred a reexamination of the facts surrounding Syed’s murder charge. While the case has proved incredibly popular among the podcast’s listeners, Syed’s story moves far past an anecdotal anomaly. That Syed may have been wrongfully convicted – and spent 15 years in prison as a result – reflects but one of the many frailties of the American justice system. The current justice system places profit over justice, and too often uses convictions as means by which to make money. JPay – a prison bank company that made more than $50 million last year in revenue by charging a commission on inmate transactions – exemplifies the profit system that defines American prisons. With its purview extending to 70 percent of America’s prisoners, JPay monopolizes the prison banking system, making the options for transactions few and high in price. In most states, to send $50 dollars to an inmate, the sender must pay a fee of $6.95 through JPay; in others, fees are even higher. Corrections agencies, too, profit from this streamlined transaction. While JPay makes millions, the majority of inmates’ families paying these skyhigh rates and fees continue to live in poverty. Compounding the injustices of the prison banking system, many states agree to steadily supply private prisons with a certain number of inmates in exchange for payments. This profit-based quota relationship means that taxpayers’ dollars consistently continue to be allocated to prisons at a very high rate and regardless of crime rates. Sadly, this prisoner quota often also means that minorities are unfairly and disproportionately targeted in order to make money.
One cannot discuss the American prison system without discussing the mass incarceration of black males. Black males are convicted at nearly six times the rate of white male incarceration, and 1 out of every 5 black males will spend time in prison (NAACP). However, these discriminatory practices do not end once these citizens leave prison. In a study conducted in the early 2000s, a white male who had served jail time for a felony was still more likely to find employment than a black male who had served no jail time. Thus, even if a black male is wrongly convicted, his chances of finding a job after an overturned conviction are still extremely slim. Therefore, to ensure that equitable and just practices are employed, this issue must be addressed – both in policing and in convictions – by eradicating racial profiling and the prison quota system. What can be done to rectify this broken justice system? The United States comprises approximately 5 percent of the world’s population, yet accounts for nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. There are clear steps that the U.S. must take to fix its justice system, particularly by lowering the number of wrongful convictions. Police reform is imperative to eradicate the corrupt practice of racial profiling.The mass incarceration of black males that is symptomatic of the larger quota system that many states utilize needs to be addressed and reversed. And the exploitative system that revolves around profit must be restructured so that families of inmates and the inmates themselves are charged more equitably for goods and services. Finally, as the Adnan Syed case has demonstrated, the relationship between attorney and client must be one of mutual respect and communication in order to that ensure all evidence and testimony can be properly presented and evaluated. While “Serial” scratches just the surface of a more systemic problem, it has thrust the corruption of the justice system into the spotlight, and will hopefully be a catalyst for some much-needed change. ■
Volume XVII, Issue V • February 23, 2015 •
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JHU Politik, founded in 2008, is a weekly publication of political opinion pieces. We proudly seek to provide the Johns Hopkins community with student voices and perspectives about important issues of our time. Rather than hide within a cloistered academic bubble, we know we must critically engage with the world that surrounds us. That, we believe, is at the heart of what it means to be learning. We are lucky to be situated in the city of Baltimore, a city with a rich history and an ever-changing politics. We aim to look at the politics of the Homewood campus, the city of Baltimore, the domestic landscape of the United States, and the international community . While we publish the Politik weekly, we work simultaneously on our special issues which come out once per semester. These magazines confront a single topic from multiple angles. We have run issues covering topics like the political nature of research, the Arab Spring, and our city Baltimore.
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• February 23, 2015 • Volume XVII, Issue V