Having been involved in the recent “controversy” over inviting President Yasser Arafat to Ohio State, I would like to clarify a few issues:1. At no point did the Arab Student Association accuse President Kirwan in person of suppressing speech on campus. It is true that Dr. Kirwan was the captain of the ship when the recent controversy unfolded, but OSU has a long anti-Arab history and Dr. Kirwan has only been here for a short duration.2. What’s the story with the money? We did not ask the university to sponsor inviting Yasser Arafat; we simply asked for Dr. Kirwan to issue the invitation in our name. The university voluntarily adopted the event, but still asked us to raise funds for it. As a matter of fact, I was able to get the PLO to agree to pay for Mr. Arafat’s transportation into and out of Columbus before we even approached the university on the invitation. But what if we had requested the university to sponsor the event (which we didn’t)? The university had previously sponsored Shimon Peres’ 1995 commencement speech in which he claimed that the biggest challenge to the 21st century in the aftermath of the Cold War is the 1.4 billion Muslims around the world. The university had then disregarded the students’ request to invite Arafat as well. Please keep in mind that OSU did not bar Arafat from speaking on campus due to scarcity of funds or security reasons; instead it placed the condition on our invitation simply on the basis of the content of Mr. Arafat’s speech. 3. All legal implications brushed aside for a moment, we had appointments with members of the Columbus Arab community to ask them to help sponsor the event. Ethically speaking, don’t donors deserve to know the true nature of the event to which their contributions are going? Although we had numerous meetings with Mr. Baroway, the university never informed us of its condition on inviting Arafat until the last minute which coerced us into rescinding our invitation in the absence of a viable, logistical alternative. What were we to do? We let the community and the world know of the unprofessional and discriminatory manner in which OSU treated us.The recent controversy received much attention because it involved Yasser Arafat, but students have to understand that it is only one example of how OSU has been treating Arab and Arab American students. We eventually managed to have a meeting with Dr. Kirwan, and he seems like a very nice person. The Arab and Arab American students wish him well and are looking forward to building a constructive relationship with his office. We look for the day when all OSU students, regardless of race, ethnicity, sex, political or sexual orientation, would only read about discrimination in textbooks and would not have to go through similar experiences like ours (plurality stressed).
Majeed George Makhloud, freshman, law student
