Rachel Canning

Maria Haymandou’s latest blog post!

Rachel Canning, portrayed here, has been compared to Ja’mie King, a fictional character portrayed by Australian comedian Chris Lilley, who parodies wealthy private school girls.

I’ve been hearing quite a bit about Rachel Canning, the New Jersey high school senior who tried to sue her parents for allegedly kicking her out of their home.  Despite Rachel’s claims that they were perfectly capable of supporting her while she finishes her education, and that they were verbally abusive and caused her eating disorder before she was kicked out of the house, a judge ruled against Rachel and denied her lawsuit request.

According to Rachel’s parents, Sean and Elizabeth Canning, Rachel had been acting out, drinking heavily, ignoring her curfew and cutting school to be with her boyfriend.  They delivered an ultimatum to her: stop drinking and dump her boyfriend, otherwise they would kick her out of the house and stop paying her private school tuition.  When Rachel refused, she went to live with her boyfriend and her family.  After a couple more days of that, Rachel left and moved in with another friend of hers, whose father gave her $12,000 to hire a lawyer and sue her parents.

After being ridiculed across the media for trying to sue her parents, Rachel has been using Facebook to attack her parents and other parents that refuse to support their children.  She wrote a lengthy, angry post on Facebook.  While the post has a fair amount of typos, it seems that Rachel is trying to drill a point home.  It’s not entirely clear what went down between Rachel and her parents, but there must undoubtedly be parents out there who refuse to support their children.

Even though the judge ruled against her, it doesn’t seem that Rachel has stopped fighting for support from her parents.  When her Facebook page received a lot of hateful comments, Rachel explained that her parents, according to New Jersey state law, are legally obliged to support her education.

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Stokely Carmichael Book Released

Maria Haymandou’s newest blog post!

Stokely Carmichael speaking at Berkeley, while a “Black Power” banner waves proudly and defiantly behind him.

Back in the 60s, Stokely Carmichael popularized the term “black power” and led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), yet surprisingly, not too many people know about him.  Historian Peniel E. Joseph, whose book “Stokely: A Life” just came out, is on a mission to “recover” the name of Stokely Carmichael, who later changed his name to Kwame Ture.  Joseph, a professor of history at Tufts and the founding director of its Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, had access to interviews, exhaustive research and 20,000 previously unreleased pages of FBI files on the 1960s militant.

Stokely, a Trinidadian-American who grew up in the Bronx before he fled to Guinea, West Africa to try and promote a revolutionary Pan-African movement.  He died in 1998, at the age of 57, in Guinea.  Over the course of his political life, Stokely worked with civil rights activists like Dr. King, and also helped to start the Black Panther Party.  He became more and more radicalized as time passed, and finally declared that the highest political expression of black power was the Pan-African movement.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, described Stokely as the “link” between the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the radical black movement that emerged amongst the younger generations.  Many scholars and activists think that the book will invite debate about Stokely’s actions and legacy.  A good amount of that debate will probably focus on Stokely’s decision to leave the country in 1969, when the Black Panthers were in a violent struggle, Dr. King had just been assassinated and Stokely was being harassed by the FBI.

Many people will probably ask questions about Stokely’s increased radicalism and obsession with Pan-African ideology in the later part of his political life.  Scholars are still debating Stokely’s Pan-African ideology, and whether it betrayed a deep understanding or excessive idealism of his thinking.  Joseph, however, insists that his plan was to create an unbiased, even-handed picture of Stokely.  He portrays the revolutionary as a complex, charismatic figure.  He pushed his friend Dr. King to denounce the Vietnam War, worked with voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and hung out with activist Tom Hayen.  He also had a tendency towards womanizing, which led to his divorce to South African singer Miriam Makeba.  But more than anything else, Stokely was an excellent organizer who participated in and helped put together every major civil rights demonstration and development in America during the early 60s.

Joseph has suggested that one of the reasons Stokely isn’t as well-known as his contemporaries Malcolm X and Dr. King might have to do with the fact that he wasn’t martyred.  But that should in no way trivialize the massive impact that Stokely had on the black power movement.  In the words of Joseph, Stokely pushed the envelope in racial discourse.  By talking about antiwar activism and anti-imperialism, he was looking at both racial and economic injustice.  Many of Stokely’s contemporaries are still alive, and have only good things to say about their now deceased comrade.

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Bin Laden’s Son In-Law Faces Trial

Maria Haymandou’s latest blog post

Abu Ghaith, shown here speaking.

According to a federal prosecutor speaking to jurors last Wednesday, Osama Bin Laden ordered his son in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, to deliver al Qaeda’s decree to the world in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.  According to a recent article, Abu Ghaith served as the mouthpiece for Bin Laden, and is accused of recruiting and inciting terrorists to launch attacks on Americans.

About a year ago, Abu Ghaith was flown to the United States from Jordan and was charged with conspiring to kill Americans.  In a video filmed just hours after the September 11 Attacks, Abu Ghaith sits next to Bin Laden and another high-ranking al Qaeda figure, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urging Muslims around the world to fight Jews, Christians and America.  Abu Ghaith was known to be a fiery speaker, and had a reputation across Afghanistan as respected religious scholar.

While Abu Ghaith is extremely high-ranking in al Qaeda, analysts claim that he is a small-time figure in international terrorism.  Put simply, he just isn’t Osama Bin Laden.  On Wednesday afternoon, FBI agent and terrorism expert James Fitzgerald spoke with jurors, claiming that there was no evidence linking Abu Ghaith to the 9/11 attacks or, for that matter, any other terrorist attacks against Americans.

According to the federal indictment, however, Abu Ghaith spent most of his time since 9/11 in Iran.  Before joining al Qaeda back in 2001, he taught high school and preached in Kuwait before he was banned from his mosque after using his sermons to attack the government.  He also spent some time fighting in both Afghanistan and Bosnia.  He spent the months before 9/11 recruiting candidates for training in Bin Laden’s “terror camps”.  He then served as the official spokesman of al Qaeda.

This decision to handle Abu Ghaith’s case in civilian court made some Republicans angry, who feel that the Obama administration missed a great opportunity to get valuable information from somebody who was so close to Bin Laden.

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