Wednesday, March 30, 2005
'Suspicious suitcase' causes street closures
Daniel Borunda
El Paso Times
A "suspicious suitcase" left on a sidewalk near El Paso Community College's Rio Grande Campus on Tuesday night led to several nearby blocks being cordoned off, police said.
The suitcase was reported at 6:20 p.m. in the 1100 block of North Oregon.
The police bomb squad remotely opened the case at 9 p.m. and learned there was no bomb. Police did not disclose what was in the luggage.
http://www.borderlandnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050330/NEWS/503300336/1001
U Penn’s Terror Apologists
By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 30, 2005
At first blush, the University of Pennsylvania appears immune from the recent spate of “Peace Studies” programs that have found a home at campuses nationwide. Administered at no fewer than 40 universities across America, these programs’ sole purpose is to anathematize American foreign policy and any institution or ally associated with it, under cover of dispassionate scholarship. However, as a closer look at U Penn’s course syllabus reveals, the “Peace Studies” program exists at the Ivy League school in everything but name.
A case in point: A U Penn course called “National and Ethnic Conflict-Regulation.”
A leftwing amalgam of political science, comparative politics, international relations and public policy, U Penn’s National and Ethnic Conflict-Regulation course purports to examine the ways in which governments respond to ethnic conflict. In keeping with this aim, it surveys those corners of the earth, past and present, where national and ethnic conflicts have flared with the greatest intensity: Northern Ireland, South Africa, Nazi Germany, and, curiously, the United States. Students with an interest in the troubled Middle East, however, will be in for a disappointment, in that there appears to be only one conflict in the tumultuous region meriting serious scholarly study: Israel/Palestine.
Though course descriptions do not disclose a syllabus, UPenn’s choice of professor reveals much about the direction of the course. This spring, it will be taught by Brendan O’Leary, a political science professor at UPenn. To gain some insight into O’Leary’s approach to conflict studies, one need look no further than the remarks he made just two days following the terrorist attacks of 9-11. Counseling against easy condemnations of the attackers, O’Leary instead urged his audience to ponder how the attackers “might have seen their actions.” O’Leary then offered his own, interpretation of the attacks’ root causes:
“The people who organized these atrocities were probably motivated by the world-religion that is most secularization-resistant, and from the peoples who feel most humiliated and outraged by western power, and its leading state, the United States of America.”
Excerpted
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17538