Ragging on AU's rag

Having edited two sections of a student newspaper, I understand that such a publication can be difficult to put together. But AU's student newspaper, The Eagle, is surprisingly disappointing. It does have a nice tabloid format, as well as a decent variety of stories, but overall, I have to say that it's quite mediocre. Pretty much every week there are corrections for the previous issue.

This last week, they failed to notice that a study abroad student in London who contributed an article mistakenly wrote that her economics professor recently received the Nobel Peace Prize. Consider the fact that the Nobel Prize in Economics is not even given by the same organization as the Peace Prize, which went to an imprisoned Chinese dissident, and I think you can grasp how incompetent their editors and copy-editors are.

There has, however, been an entertaining debate between the AU STAND Coalition and AU Students for Life over whether abortion in the U.S. is genocide. It started when AU Students for Life displayed signs listing abortion as a genocide along with Rwanda, Darfur, and the Holocaust. STAND took umbrage to this, and wrote a letter to the editor pointing out that abortion does not meet the actual definition of genocide. AU Students for Life responded the next week with their own letter to the editor, which said that abortion can be considered genocide, if you broadly define genocide "as violence resulting from the dehumanization of a class of people in a society." The letter also argued that unborn children are discriminated against "because of their age and development level."

As someone who has actually studied genocide and international law, I'm going to have to say that AU Students for Life is way (read: waaaaay) off base. They are blurring the meaning of genocide. The essential definition of genocide is very clear. Redefining it broadly, like AU Students for Life is trying to do, undermines the concept of the crime. Simply put, genocide is systematic, and its objective is to destroy, in whole or in part, a distinct national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Terminating a pregnancy does not meet either of these criteria. It is an individual choice, not a concerted, systematic campaign. And an abortion is performed not because of who the unborn child is, but because a woman has decided that she does not want to give birth for some personal reason.

Anyway, one thing that I do like about The Eagle are the Eagle Rants, which are short statements from readers about a variety of topics. One last week complained about The Eagle mistakenly using a quotation mark for an abbreviated year instead of an apostrophe, as is correct. I am not alone....