Greetings, my dearest readers! I hope you survived Parade Day with the majority of your brain cells intact. Well, at least for my fellow science majors. Those of you studying sociology or political science should be okay regardless.
It’s been a quarter of a year since you’ve picked up your last Review issue, and I know that during that time you missed us desperately. It’s okay, we’ve missed you too! We know that you want nothing more than to take a break from the mediocrity surrounding you, and that’s why we’re here to supply you with a higher standard of writing and thinking.
As I’m writing this, Putin has ordered Russian troops to seize the Crimea region of Ukraine. Ironically, the woman who predicted this, Sarah Palin, was universally (by me included) derided for her lack of knowledge and competence. In 2008, she said that Obama’s reaction to the Russian war with Georgia when he was a Senator would “encourage” Putin to invade Ukraine. Who knew that this would actually come to pass!
On one hand, the Crimea (the part of Ukraine that Russia has occupied) has a majority ethnic Russian population that probably supports the occupation. On the other hand, you don’t just get to annex part of another country without any sort of warning. Russia’s action is obviously aggressive, but there’s not much the West, led by the United States, can do about it. Hopefully this does not come to bloody violence, although that may well be the case by the time this issue is printed and distributed.
As for campus events, it seems that the anti-Israel movement has come to Binghamton. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign isn’t explicitly anti-Semitic, but it is by implication. China oppresses Tibet and forces its own citizens to get abortions against their will; Saudi Arabia executes people for converting to a different religion; Venezuela jails reporters for criticizing the government. Despite all this, it seems to be Israel that gets all the attention from activists. Is the fact that it is the world’s only Jewish-majority state really irrelevant to this? I doubt it. Yes, there are Jews involved in the anti-Israel movement (the president of the anti-Israel group here on campus, Students for Justice in Palestine, is half-Jewish and I interviewed him for this issue), and not all anti-Israel activists are anti-Semitic. However, the movement itself, the effort to delegitimize and ultimately destroy Israel, is anti-Semitic ultimately.
To change topics to something not quite so depressing (but still depressing nonetheless), this is the harshest winter I’ve experienced in Binghamton. It’s so cold my skin is starting to crack, something I didn’t think would happen for at least another 50 years. When the temperature reaches 30 degrees and there is a tiny patch of blue sky amidst all the clouds, my friends tell me that it’s a beautiful day. Only in Binghamton (or every other school with awful weather).
Anyhow, most of you have probably stopped reading this editorial by now since you’re probably an ADD addled millennial who is just sporadically flipping through this magazine and doesn’t actually have the patience to read it carefully. That’s alright though, if I spent less time playing video games and more time putting this publication together, we probably could have released this a week or two ago, so I guess we’re even. BR
Dan Milyavsky